Who do I blame? Eight reasons we ended up in this Brexit mess | Ian Jack
Who’s to blame? There’s no need to ask for what. The problem is where to start. In history lessons at my Scottish high school, the teacher would first divide the causes of a war or other catastrophe by numbers: 1 for long term and 2 for immediate; and then subdivide those broad categories by capital letters, A and B, and so forth; and further subdivide those categories by Roman numerals, (i) and (ii) and so on; and then subdivide again by small letters, (a) and (b) etc. All of which we would copy into our jotters with our Platignum fountain pens. So that the German gunboat sent to Agadir in 1911 found its place as 1C (ix) (d) under nationalism, colonialism and Franco-German rivalry in the list of underlying reasons for the first world war.
It would be good to crystallise the causes of Brexit in a similar tabulation – to have them pinned down and ranked in order of importance so we could understand how it happened, like a soldier in the Flanders mud at last establishing the chain of events, beginning with the award of Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria in 1878, that had led to his present awful position.
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