thanks, fareed. from the start you ve been opposed to brexit. let am ask you just at the fundamental level, your case for it because it does seem to subvert the democratic process, doesn t it? the electorate had a chance to vote on brexit and there wasn t meant to be a do-over. no, that s absolutely correct. but i think what s happened is we ve had 30 months of negotiation. the deal the government s presented has been voted down heavily, parliament is gridlocked. it s not clear there s any version of brexit that s going to command a majority. there s many different of brexit, and frankly our knowledge of what brexit really means has been vastly at large in the last 30 months. i don t think there s an unreasonable circumstance to take this back for final resolution to the british people. i peen, we re not asking anyone else what their view is. we re asking the british people.
america as the nation prepares to celebrate martin luther king, jr. s birthday. aaron sorkin has turned the last three years changing to kill a mockingbird into a broadway sensation. what that can teach us about race intolerance. but first here s my take. as we watch britain go through brexit, it s easy to view the decision to depart the european union as an act of foolishness, a self-inflicted wound that will impoverish britons for years to come. europe is after all britain s largest market, taking in half of the country s exports. losing special access to it is a high price to pay for some symbolic gains in sovereignty. the brexit debacle sheds a light on europe itself and one that sees it as stop working, for many of the people at its
and i think given everything that s happened, given the circumstances we re in, that is not unreasonable. so that s the case if you like for a second referendum. and right now probably there isn t the support there in parliament for that either. on the other hand, there s no support for a proper brexit proposition, and there s no support for exiting without a deal. so i think as this goes on, it s more likely finally that people come around to the fact that in the end of this gridlock in parliament you ve got to put it back to the people. and you ve argued that there really isn t a kind of a soft brexit, or you can t fudge the issue. that either you are in europe or you are out. yeah, so here s the essential problem. in one sense this negotiation has never been a negotiation of the conventional sense. it s really a choice. and the choice is between a brexit that keeps you tied to europe s trading system because
we ve spent 4 1/2 decades in europe. we ve been part of the single market, trading relationships have grown up on the basis of we re part of that unique european system. you either stay close to that in which case you re going to keep to europe s rules, in which case people are going to say why are you doing this brexit? or you say we re going to make our own rules, we re going to break free from europe altogether but in which case it s going to costuts short-term and economically long-term painful damage. so that s the problem with brexit. and the negotiation by the way over these last 30 months has been an attempt by the prime minister and the government of finding a way of having our cake and eating it, of being part of the european trading system without keeping to its rules. that was never going to become possible. that s finally become apparent.
the tony blair institute for global change in london. you ve said, tony, you think the europeans should almost help britain not brexit. they should speak out. what do you think about the americans? it has been historically american policy to support a unified europe because there was a feeling this was the other great center of, you know, the rule of law and values like human rights and open trade and open politics. but the trump administration, certainly donald trump has openly cheered brexit. the debate i often have with people in the united states, if you think the big challenges we re going to face are how we deal with the fact that by the middle of the century you re going to live in a multi polar world for the power of china is