Extract
Commentators should be indebted to The Times (of London) ace columnist Clare Foges for transposing the medical affliction achromatopsia, or colour blindness, and applying it to the bewildering world of (non) Brexit Britain.
In her Monday offering, Foges noted that the Conservative Party – hitherto the most successful and enduring party in the Western world, the “natural party of government” – was suffering this degeneration in extremis.
The inability to perceive the world in terms of nuance, without the shades of grey and the full spectrum of choices, in her view, could cause the party convulsed in a new leadership election to go into freefall. To be fair, the comment was written before the results of the European election were known. But the peculiar poll — for Britain at least, which should have left the EU on March 29 and thus not have participated — yielded a triumph for the parties offering a binary choice: get out now or have another referendum. The huge gains for the single-issue Brexit Party, which topped the poll, and the Liberal Democrats and Greens (who finished second and third) suggests more than 70% of British voters last week chose parties whose position was clear-cut and whose message was very simple. The biggest losers were the two traditionally largest parties in Britain, which separately have governed the UK for the past century. For most of the post-World War 1 period, either the Conservative Pa...
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