The world has changed enormously since 2016, yet the pro-Brexiters believe remainers like me have no chance of achieving a closer relationship with the EU. I’m choosing to ignore them However sunny your disposition, it wears you down, 10 straight years of being asked to accept facts about Brexit that aren’t true: 52% as an “overwhelming majority”; a flaky, half-baked referendum as the endpoint of purest democracy; the severance of a complicated trading and geopolitical relationship that took decades to build as the dawn of a new prosperity. All such nonsense, all delivered with such conviction, by such a wide variety of sources, many of them self-describing as impartial, that in the end you just surrender to it. None of it magically becomes true, don’t be silly. It’s more that you come to accept that everyone else talks nonsense now. Nobody get too excited – just because Andy Burnham has
A decade of magical thinking since Brexit has taught me that it’s always OK to hope for better | Zoe Williams
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Labour’s recently departed grandees are keen to defend their legacies. Is Andy Burnham really offering Britain something new? Rachel Reeves wants you to know she thinks Britain’s future belongs in Europe. She would also like to mention that she “absolutely” got all the big calls right as chancellor, even if there were a few things she would have done differently, and that John Healey’s budget last week would have been far harder for him if she hadn’t put in so much of the groundwork. The gist of her argument in last weekend’s Sunday papers – previewing a lecture at Harvard University today, reflecting on her time in power – was essentially that if anyone imagines Andy Burnham somehow invented pro-Europeanism and putting more money in people’s pockets, they can think again. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like