12-14-2016, 12:10 AM
What happens when 17 million people get the feeling they’ve been cheated? That will be the most profound question in British politics, not just in 2017 but for many years to come. As the broken promises of Brexit pile up one on top of the other, so that they are visible from Sunderland, from Great Yarmouth, from Newport, what will the leave voters do then? The pledges I mean aren’t the ones about how £350m will flood each week into the NHS, or those others that came out waving a Pinnochio-sized proboscis. I’m thinking of the promises that went far deeper. The vow to “take back control”. To stop being the human punchline to someone else’s macroeconomic joke. To – as our north of England editor Helen Pidd wrote last week – no longer live on crumbs, while others in London enjoy entire loaves. The Brexiteers were explicitly offering voters a once-in-a-lifetime shot at changing the status quo. And before embarking on what has otherwise been a stiff-backed, fixed-grin, try-hard few months at No 10, Theresa May got it, promising “people voted for change. And a change is going to come.””