How can the UK polity pick up the pieces after Brexit?

A thoughtful point was raised by Pat Leahy in the IT this last week where he considered the options facing the UK at this point including:

…the UK sliding chaotically towards a hard Brexit in March, unable to reach a consensus in government or parliament on how to stop it.
No sensible polity would do that to itself, you might say. But we can no longer rely on the UK to act according to the logic that seems apparent to everyone else. One example: there appears to be no end to the list of British institutions – the Foreign Office, the Treasury, the Bank of England – that hard Brexiteers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and his comrades are willing to trash to attain their objective of “out and out now”. You could call this several things, but you couldn’t call it conservative.

True. But it raises a different issue entirely. Where does this leave the UK polity six, twelve, twenty four, seventy two months down the line? Because fundamental institutions, none of which by the way is beyond critique and criticism, have been fairly comprehensively trashed by a segment of the political elite there. And while that’s no doubt compelling tactical political warfare it does leave them deeply exposed further down the line. And those who might gain a measure of state power. Granted the ERG seems much less influential today than it did even a few months ago. Those with the initials JR-M and even BJ appear much further from power, though who can tell where the chips will fall.

But they have played with fire throughout. It’s not even that they are radical, it is that they are foolish and ignorant and unthinking. And their approach is one that one suspects can and will be turned against them.

As to the UK? Well Leahy notes:

The prospect of a full-on political and constitutional crisis in the UK is now very real. I never thought I would see anything like it.

It is bizarre to see a polity set itself on a course that even at its best is clearly going to impoverish and diminish itself.

All that said much of what we see is due to dynamics already long in play – a disinclination and disdain for the working class, centrifugal forces in relation to Scotland (and NI) that not even devolution could contain, an England unable to define Englishness in the context of Britain (not to mention the UK), a media that was deceitful to put it at its mildest, a political class all too ready to blame others including Brussels for its own inaction and neglect and so on. Without question Brexit has acted as an accelerating agent, but all the above existed prior to it. Would they have manifested in quite the same way absent Brexit. That’s a discussion for another day.