泰晤士报精选文章阅读.docx

We’re heading for the biggest crisis since SuezMatthew ParrisIt is horribly apparent that, four months after the referendum, the Brexiteers have no idea where they’re leading usAs in a bad dream, I have the sensation of falling. We British are on our way to making the biggest screw-up since Suez and, somewhere deep down, the new governing class know it. We are heading for national humiliation, nobody’s in charge, and nobody knows what to do. This Brexit thing is out of control.It was really only this week that the scales fell from my eyes. Perhaps it was just the accretion of small observations, mounting in the unconscious mind until the heap broke the surface: but a nascent worry became a conscious horror. For me the horror dawned after a long discussion in a group who follow politics closely. Reading the runes, we were trying to work out — and only in broad outline — what the plan for Brexit might be. Scenarios were conjured, possible game-plans stress-tested.But every guess, followed through, led fast into the nettles. As the dial moved towards the “soft” end of the spectrum of possibilities we repeatedly faced the tiger that the Leave camp so foolishly and cynically rode: immigration. Why ever would our EU partners offer us, post-Brexit, what they would not offer David Cameron before?And what makes anyone think that in the new antagonisms generated across the Channel by our referendum result, the “soft” Brexit that we former Remainers crave will anyway still be on offer?And as the dial moved towards the “hard” end of the spectrum, the massive economic uncertainties attached to the go-it-alone solution came crowding in. None of us knew how realistic the fears of a serious hit to Britain’s economy might prove: but we did know that for many in the Leave camp, and for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, those fears were real.Then we thought about parliament. But when you do, the path of legislative scrutiny crumbles beneath your feet. Before she triggers Article 50 nex