This is from an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal written by a British ex pat who is now an American citizen.
Brexit Is No Marx Brothers Farce (For the Most Part) Trying to reconcile the popular will with elite opinion was bound to produce chaos.
Because you will likely hit the WSJ's paywall (as I did for the FT link just above), here's the last half of the piece.
So when the country is divided over the issue, it’s very messy. This mess is particularly ugly because, while a narrow but clear majority of the people voted to leave the EU, the leadership of the country—from the prime minister to most of the cabinet to a large majority of members of parliament of all parties—did not want to leave the EU (many still don’t).
They have therefore sought to enact the most minimal form of Brexit they could manage. The chaos has resulted from the constant attempts to square the various circles among the popular will, the lèse-majesté of the elites and the interests of the EU. Herding cats is a breeze by comparison.
But, you’ll say, aren’t the elites right to try to negate or at least minimize Brexit? Isn’t it the most psychopathological act of self-harm any country has ever committed? That’s the part that most people in America have flat wrong.
Of course there are good arguments against Brexit. The EU is an integrated economic area that confers great economic benefits on its members. But the problem for the independent-minded UK is that the EU’s aspirations reach way beyond that. For the last 25 years, in fact, it has acquired the characteristics, laws and institutions of a political union.
Britain is struggling to reconcile the popular wish for more national sovereignty with the realities of an integrated global economy.
The way I put it to my American friends is this: How would you like it if Nafta were not a free-trade agreement but instead a self-avowed political union? How would you like it if there were a North American Court of Justice, in Ottawa perhaps, to which U.S. laws were ultimately subordinate? How about if there were complete freedom of movement, so that a Mexican or Canadian could legally move to the U.S., live, work and enjoy public benefits here?
And what if, for the privilege of all this, the U.S. had to pay about $100 billion a year—proportionate to the annual net contribution the UK makes to the EU?
Now you might think that all of those things are worthwhile. But is it really lunacy to think otherwise? Britain is struggling to reconcile the popular wish for more national sovereignty with the realities of an integrated global economy. If it fails, tragedy, not farce, will come next.