While Keir Starmer fiddles in India, Rome burns. The British steel industry now faces a calamity so severe, insiders say it could be “terminal”. The vast majority – 80% – of its output is exported to the EU, which this week revealed plans to cut tariff-free steel import quotas by almost half. The remainder will be subject to a 50% tariff. The UK steel industry will be butchered. Thank you, EU. Thank you, Brexit.

Whenever I meet politicians who championed Brexit nowadays, I ask them a simple question: do you still think you were right? A few fools mutter, “Yes, on balance” and “In the long term, perhaps.” The honest ones shrug and look uncomfortable. We can all accept that some day a new generation of British politicians will resume open trade across the Channel. It is normal for an island, and makes sense. So I ask the honest ones: why not go public? Make a headline, stand up, apologise and get the ball rolling? None has done so.

In May, Starmer timidly negotiated a “Brexit reset” with Brussels. This injected pockets of sanity into increasingly chaotic border controls, especially on food. A few more EU students whom Brexit had crassly restricted may be admitted, along with a new e-gate for passport entry. There must still be checks – they start rolling out from this Sunday – to enforce the rule limiting Britons to no more than a quarter of any 12-month period inside the Schengen area. Further resets are mooted in coming years.

According to the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, most industries just cannot wait. They are struggling to keep open markets, and if necessary realign themselves with the EU by the back door. The chemicals industry exports more than 60% of its output to the EU. Brexiteers boasted it would be liberated from EU regulation, but setting up the UK’s own regulator cost £2bn and has not worked. According to the Chemical Industries Association, output has fallen by 35-40% since 2021. Between 2021 and 2023, British exports to the EU fell by a serious 27%. Brexiteers boasted that leaving the EU would be worth hundreds of billions a year. Cambridge Econometrics estimates that over the next decade Britain’s economy will be £300bn smaller than if we had not left the EU. This is self-harm on a heroic scale.

What matters is how to scramble out of the pit. For most politicians, Brexit was never a policy priority. It was a leadership stunt, conducted with the grain of Britain’s shambolic political climate in the mid-to-late 2010s. Parliament enacted what a majority of members on all sides of the Commons knew was wrong. Worse still, when a soft Brexit was a feasible least-bad option, the Labour party failed to unite with anti-Brexit Tories to retain trading links with Europe. A hugely critical national issue sank into a swamp of parliamentary infighting, on a level approaching that now being repeated in Paris.

The excuse was that the public wanted it. There is no such excuse now. Voters have had the courage to look at the facts and admit the mistake. According to YouGov, 61% have concluded that Brexit is a failure. Just 13% now regard it as more of a success. Almost half want another referendum within five years, and 63% oppose loosening ties with the EU any further. That figure should daub every public meeting staged by Nigel Farage.

The need is urgent for some coalition of politicians to take the lead and state baldly that Brexit was an error. Of the many failings of parliament, its inability to rise to the occasion above party politics is the most glaring. Britain’s re-entry into some trading relationship with Europe should now be the subject of a crossparty forum or select committee. They should press Starmer towards an urgent and concerted bid to reassociate with the EU. It will not be cheap, but it will be worth it.

The leadership of the Tory party may find it hard to get its head round the necessary U-turn. That is tough. Its failure to explain or justify other aspects of its performance in government is already not serving it well. To accuse Starmer last May of “betrayal” and “surrender” over his EU deal was idiotic. There must be Tories who know the truth: honest politicians who follow Keynes’ purported advice and allow circumstances to alter their views. At present, as with anti-Trump Republicans in the US, the question is, when do they have the guts to surface?

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The public is clearly ready to see Brexit reversed. There cannot be a single industry that would oppose it. The need is for leadership. This should not be a partisan matter, except insofar as it might isolate Farage’s Reform party – and perhaps be his undoing. It should become a consensus. Of course it will not be easy. But it will be right.