As some advocates of leave claimed, leave can mean many things. No one has an interest in exaggerating the harm. Britain will have to reach a deal, on trade and other things, that will be novel and peculiar whatever the cost. It is Cameron’s parting duty to negotiate it. No one can have the slightest interest in his past threats of closed borders, collapsing trade and punishment budgets. The slate is wiped clean.
The biggest threat from this referendum is, in truth, not to Britain but to the rest of Europe, which is why the EU should think carefully about how to respond. It has been judged by this referendum and found wanting. Britain will not be the last to tell it so. Polls have shown between a quarter and third of people across Europe are now deeply hostile to the European project. The economies of southern Europe are in a Germany-induced lock-down. Brussels, and its German paymasters, are in trouble.
Britain should have been party to helping Europe out of this trouble. It should now take the initiative and be party to helping from the outside. The visionary outcome of a leave vote ought to be a grand debate across the continent, a search for a new confederacy of nation states. What is needed is a new Europe for the 21st century, to replace the ramshackle corporatism erected in response to the 1945 settlement, a confederacy in which Britain should be proud to participate. That vision may yet be far off, but so once was the EU.
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