The hand-wringing within Britain’s elites over Brexit adds up to a weeping and wailing much amplified as it passes through the media filters on its way to New Zealand.

It only serves to remind us of the irreversible nature of the decision to quit Europe. Let us look at some of the arguments advanced by this latter-day sack cloth and ashes coterie of the non-productive, writes our European correspondent.

• That the UK will become a trade outcast from the EU. Reality: It is that in the event it is the EU that needs the UK. The reason is that the UK has a trade balance with the rest of the EU running 10 times in the favour of the rest of the EU.
• That the UK will be defenceless outside the EU. Reality: The UK provides around 40 percent of the total EU defence resource.
• That the UK’s departure will re-antagonise and at every level the French. Reality: 60 percent of the French want out of the EU themselves.
• That with Britain’s departure the Commonwealth will be without a voice at Brussels. Reality: Individual Commonwealth members, notably New Zealand, are already negotiating their own trade agreements with the EU.

Along with this type of reasoning there is the curious drum beat to the effect that the UK no longer has the ability to conduct trade negotiations at a serious level because this chore has long been handed over to the Eurocrats.

There was some high comedy attached to this last one because it resonated in the New Zealand political class which undertook to fill this vacuum with its own seasoned in-house version.

It has been a measure of the focus of the professional political classes on Europe that there has been allowed to be built up this notion that there is no trade worth doing that exists outside it.

The dog that still fails to bark in the still semi-hysterical aftermath of Brexit is that of the EU itself, notably along the sound band of its central Franco-German axis.

Britain’s unspoken role as the voice-cum-enforcer of the United States in the EU had long been a serious irritant. Britain was quickly off the mark for example in maneuvering the EU into its current and extremely self-damaging blockade of Russia.

Britain was to the fore in pressing the US case for introducing Turkey into membership of the EU.

Britain was similarly keen on the introduction to the EU and with full euro currency status of Greece, a nation whose finances had been suitably doctored by US debt technicians to hide anything approaching its full invalidity for membership.

To follow this up the UK and the US went into partnership to engineer Greece’s hosting of the Olympic Games, a silliness that further diverted the hapless Balkan EU inductee from attending to the more serious matter of its national accounts.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk Friday 19 August 2016