Sparks: Ten years on, we’re living with the ghosts of Brexit. Reform and Restore know that - the rest are playing catch-up | Aditya Chakrabortty

All I know is what I see in the papers, and it looks like the politicians spent ten years trying to get out of a room only to find they've locked themselves in the hallway.

You have realized at last that tearing down a wall does not free the prisoner if he carries the bricks of his cell inside his own soul and cherishes the very lash that struck him.

What we now call a political settlement is merely a persistent oscillation where the initial hypothesis of isolation has failed the test of consilience by producing frictions in every unrelated field from medicine to manufacturing.

The exit was officially completed on a Tuesday, yet the petitioner remains in the courtyard waiting for a permit to breathe the air that was promised once the heavy doors finally closed.

Why do you continue to tremble before the shadows of a decision made a decade ago, when the power to cast off these ghosts lies entirely in your own refusal to believe in them any longer?

Democratic nations often mistake a sudden outburst of popular will for a permanent change in their condition, only to find that the soft despotism of their own administrative habits survives every revolution of the ballot box.

They talk of grand resets and national destiny in the bright conference rooms, while out on the grey streets, people simply watch the rain and wait for a bus that never seems to arrive.

Current flows only through complete circuits, yet these men expect to power a modern civilization by intentionally breaking the very conductors that allow the social and economic energy to resonate across borders.

The dispute persists because one side speaks the language of administrative reason while the other employs the rhetoric of mythic longing, and no resolution is possible until you distinguish the ledger from the soul.

Counting the incidents of violence on the streets reveals a ledger of resentment that the official reports ignore, proving that what the editors call a 'ghost' is actually a very living system of organized intimidation.

We wager our entire future on the hope that a conference room can exorcise demons that were invited in by the very people now carrying the holy water.

There is a fence across the English Channel, and before we congratulate ourselves on how poorly it was built, we ought to ask why we were so eager to imagine it could keep the world out.

Evidence of our national hypocrisy is found in the fact that those who shouted loudest for liberty now use that very word to justify the chains they are forging for their neighbors on the street.