(...) “If I go, there will be trouble/And if I stay it will be double/So come on and let me know/This indecision’s bugging me.”

Those lyrics from the British band The Clash were written in the early eighties but, more than ever, they do apply to today’s Brexit debate, albeit we should not really be talking about romance between Mrs.Theresa May and Mr. Jeremy Corbyn.

In Mauritius, our parents were mostly brought up considering «Rule Britannia» as a gold standard of discipline, order and stability. This was true then and might still, to a large extent, be the case (especially when one reads our consecutive National Audit Reports). But when we see how Brexit has turned into a political horror movie we can better understand why India’s economy is set to overtake UK’s later this year.

“The sight of a country deliberately throwing away a close, mutually beneficial partnership, wilfully damaging its economy and influence on a point of cultural principle is an immediate interest to readers hailing from ancient British colonies,” noted, this week, an Australian columnist. In Singapore, AFP reports that an economics student advised us to look at the silver linings of Brexit: “Feels like the perfect time for a holiday in the UK. The pound is probably going into freefall.” And in New Delhi, it was reported that Sadhguru remarked that “it’s no surprise that Brexit is taking such a long time. The British took ages to leave India too”.

The world has changed, and the rise of the East is no more a projection. Former UN under-secretary-general Shashi Tharoor’s latest book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India is a great read. In a review of Shashi Tharoor’s book, the Times columnist Matt Ridley posits that Brexit can present an opportunity to renew UK-Indian relations: “More than almost any other country, India will matter to Britain in the coming years: as a market, an ally, an innovator, a source of talent and – despite everything – a friend.”

***

This week in London, the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader have resorted to working with each other in a bid to move forward with Brexit. Meanwhile British MPs took control of the whole process from the government. For many in London, this move is the latest battle in a bout of constitutional warfare between Parliament and the Executive – «the likes of which we haven’t seen since the English Civil War in 1642.»

Right from the get-go, Mr. Corbyn has been trying to bridge the gap between the Remainers and Leavers in the Labour party while, in the Conservative party, Mrs. May was bequeathed with the blame for the bumbling effort to steer Britain’s departure. Mrs. May’s cross-party initiative can potentially tear apart the Labour Party, which, like the Conservatives, is quite divided on the stay/leave issue.

Matter-of-factly, in both camps, the handling of Brexit reveals internal party rifts, and that terrible perception that both main parties are bowing to their extremes. As a result, a new pole of attraction, that did not exist until last week, seems to be emerging in British politics amidst popular disenchantment. Since Corbyn has shifted his party leftward while hard-liners have pulled Mrs. May’s Conservatives to the right, there now exists a vacuum in the centre, so much so that political pundits are claiming that “politics is possibly as fluid as it has been since the 1920s”. During those years, the Labour Party and the Liberal Party were vying to become the main opponent to the Conservatives.

Another clear indication that Brexit is transforming everything on its troubled journey, burning down the London bridges: Britons are now defining themselves politically more in relation to their views on Brexit than to an affiliation with a political party. But as we all know, since the Beatles, Britain is a very outgoing country, which loves the rest of the world. Well probably not Europe, but the rest of the globe. This is why 52% of the British public chose to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. They say political decisions are regularly informed by cultural preferences...