Fine piece by Zoe Williams in today’s Guardian. Here’s the peroration.

‘I didn’t realise how patriotic I was until after the referendum: I knew I cared about my compatriots, and therefore jobs, freedom of movement, food prices. But I didn’t realise how much I cared about the United Kingdom, about the Union, about peace within it and the historical scars that built that peace, about our international standing, about our universities, constitution, landscape, rule of law. I just didn’t realise how precious it all was. Brexit is a process of disintegration, and opposing it was, it transpires, meaningless and unreal. Those abstracted arguments had a nihilistic fervour that it simply wasn’t possible to match, and we drained the life out of ourselves in the attempt.’

And the full article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/07/realities-brexit-respect-for-the-system?