LONDON: Rejoining the European Union is again a live topic of UK debate, a decade after Britain voted to leave. 

Reversing Brexit would be a mistake. That’s not because the decision to leave was correct; at this point, it’s indisputable that withdrawal damaged the economy, as well as doing obvious harm to the UK’s diplomatic relationships and global influence. Neither is it because of the practical objections to going back in, though these are substantial. The real reason is because Brexit was, at its heart, an identity crisis that remains unresolved.

Cards on the table. I wouldn’t have voted for Brexit, had I been in the UK at the time. Watching from afar in Hong Kong, where I lived during the referendum and through the UK’s formal departure, it seemed like a delusional project driven by magical thinking and a curious animus toward the EU’s rulemaking and (apparently lavishly remunerated) bureaucrats.

Regulations governing the shape of cucumbers and the definition of jam may be irritating and intrusive but they are also trivial. This seemed a little like leaving the biggest and best-equipped club in the neighborhood because you don’t like the way management repainted the lobby.

But Brexit was evidently about much more than economics. It was about sovereignty, culture and - above all, perhaps - immigration. At root, it was a crisis over what kind of country Britain is, what it wants to be and where it sees its place in the world. Leave and Remain became markers of tribal identity rather than a policy choice to be determined by a rational weighing of likely positives and negatives.

The 2016 campaign exposed deep fissures, and the decision and its aftermath haven’t healed any of them. This can be seen in the way these issues continue to play out, in the fracturing of the political landscape and the rise of the far right, the 2024 anti-asylum seeker protests and now the reactions to the murder of teenager Henry Nowak i...