Looking at Brexit is picking up the story halfway through.

About 18 years ago now the Tories thought, incorrectly, that budgetary austerity was the prescription for responding to the global financial crisis. Eight years of indulging conspiracist nonsense later, their PM decided to hold the Brexit referendum as a means of jangling some keys in front of their voting base and then, perhaps even more dumbly, the party decided to treat the result of a 52-48 referendum as more than advisory.

This 1-2 punch has locked in two lost decades in which the UK's GDP will have stagnated in real terms. Most of their politics in the last decade has been make-believe that what obviously happened somehow didn't, with various scapegoating and culture-war distraction attempts tossed in. Not helping is that they have first-past-the-post individual districts (and way too many parties to be sustainable in that electoral system) that result in their self-defeating hinterlands being over-represented.

>About 18 years ago now the Tories thought, incorrectly, that budgetary austerity was the prescription for responding to the global financial crisis.

What I don't get about the Tories is their obsession with Thatcherism despite all the evidence suggesting it's not popular.