Brexit’s aura of inevitability is vanishing, by Anatole Kaletsky. He is a reliably PC mainstream commentator, so this might be describing the hopes of the Remainers.

Next month … Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to lose the decisive parliamentary vote on her Brexit deal.

If and when this defeat happens, May will face two unpalatable options. She could preside over a “No Deal” rupture with Europe — tantamount to a declaration of economic war against the EU — and risk a 2008-level economic crisis accompanied by a border upheaval in Ireland that could reignite the “Troubles.” Or she could break her extravagant promises to honor the “people’s instruction” from the 2016 referendum and allow a new popular vote that might cancel Brexit. …

With the options thus narrowed, the risks and sacrifices of the “horror,” as Britain’s main business lobbies now publicly describe No Deal, will quickly come into focus, and a bipartisan parliamentary majority will surely converge to block this outcome. …

Soon the sense of inevitability may swing in favor of a new referendum. This shift has already started in the British media. Having spent the past two years denouncing anyone who challenged Brexit as “enemies of the people” and a traitor to democracy, the BBC, The Times and other influential media organs have suddenly remembered that an essential principle of democracy is that voters have the right to change their minds. …

In the first detailed poll of all three Brexit options, conducted by YouGov in early December, a standard first-past-the-post vote would result in Remain winning a huge 54% absolute majority, against 28% support for No Deal and 18% for May’s Deal. In a simple choice against May’s deal, the majority for Remain would be even bigger, at 62%. And in a preferential vote count that redistributed the second preferences of May’s supporters, Remain would still win by a decisive margin of 57% to 43%.

With the mainstream propaganda machine constantly playing up the vague but wildly exaggerated horror of a no-deal exit, presumably the public is being set up to choose anything except that. The power to choose Britain’s course therefore goes to whoever chooses the alternative to a no-deal exit.

A bit like global warming. We have been inundated for two decades with vague but exaggerated horror stories to condition us to accept whatever alternative is offered, no matter how preposterous and expensive (go back to windmills for power) or politically revolutionary (massive transfers of wealth to the third world, world government). Criticism of the carbon dioxide theory of global warming — there is no empirical evidence for it, it is just a theory based on models extrapolated from laboratory physics, observed warming is much less than the warming predicted by the models, the theory is wrong (yes we’ve found the error, book soon) — is suppressed.