In the years since 2016, when voters in the United Kingdom voted for Brexit, against the campaign to Remain led by the government of that day, Europeans have been bragging about how silly and stupid the United Kingdom must be, because of course being a part of a larger trade bloc meant more leverage in negotiations. (Whatever people profess about free trade, in the real world, large nations know access to their markets is valuable and their trade negotiators usually treat it that way.) The struggles of the United Kingdom’s economy in recent years, and the political whiplash of going from humongous Tory and Labour victories that turn into rickety, unpopular governments almost instantly, seemed to give some credibility to the Remainer argument that Brexit hadn’t been worth it.

And yet, at first blush, the EU seems to have done no better than Japan with Trump, and considerably less well than the United Kingdom itself, which suffers only a 10 percent tariff rate on trade to the United States, rather than 15 percent. Just perhaps, Keir Starmer, representing one sovereign democratic Parliament has an advantage over a European Commission which has little democratic legitimacy, and which must not only balance the interests of 27 elected governments — nearly half of which they despise — but also arrange things in such a way as to tamp down populist and anti-EU sentiment. Form matters.