Brexit Has Brought Britain to a Standstill

An enormous amount of activity attends every episode in Britain’s painful quest to leave the European Union. The drama is unrelenting: from Brexiteer-in-Chief Boris Johnson’s political antics to the latest rupture in the cabinet, from the Bank of England’s warnings about the dire consequences of a hard Brexit to major financial institutions in the City of London plotting exit strategies for Frankfurt, Paris, or Luxembourg. Prime Minister Theresa May’s job seems to be always in the balance—except for the fact that no one else really wants the responsibility of seeing the process through. On Sept. 19, she was due in the Austrian city of Salzburg for a key summit with EU leaders to edge the Brexit train further down the track.

But while the ruling circles in London are frenetic over the details of the divorce proceedings, the rest of the U.K. is stuck in political and bureaucratic torpor. The country—as an administrative entity—has virtually stopped working. “Brexit is absolutely sucking energy away from the routine business of government,” says Ruth Alcroft, a councilor in Carlisle, a city in England’s far north, 260 miles from the power brokers in London.