That the British political and media establishment is engrossed by this week’s edition of that long-running psychodrama called Brexit is forgivable; it is their country, and the episode promises to be an action-packed one. But for many Europeans, the meaningful vote is just more of the same: the Brits still don’t know what they want, so the politicians go round and round and round, and then round some more.

It is clear that, for political British journalists and commentators around Westminster, each of these circles is immensely exciting – witness their breathless buildup to this week.

But from the distance that being in the EU affords, none of this is new. For beyond all the noise, precious little has moved in Britain politically for the past two and a half years. This is not chaos. This is paralysis. The country still refuses to face the consequences of its decision to leave, again and again deferring a choice from the post-Brexit options available to it.

And the reason is simple: each of these options involve economic or electoral pain that would rip apart either party, comprised as they are with both remainers, soft-Brexiteers and hard ones.

This refusal to live in the real world made the victory for the leave camp possible in the first place, and it has continued to be the state of affairs in Britain in September 2016, or in July 2017 or indeed in January 2019. So forgive Europeans for suppressing a yawn when they are asked once again to take an interest in a vote that will not bring any further clarity in the only question that matters: have the Brits made up their minds?

Anti-Brexit campaigners protest outside the Houses of Parliament on 15 January. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

Yes, this week’s events may lead to the fall of Theresa May’s pathetically inept and casually mendacious government. So what? The alternative is a Labour party whose leader stopped talking straight the moment he got to power. Neither he nor May have ever levelled with their voters, and the British people generally about all the pain and trade-offs that any form of Brexit is going to bring. Meanwhile the billionaire-owned and -controlled Brexit press continues to spread its lies, distortions and fantasies, building up the politicians who echo them.

So another circle is drawn, and another, and then another. It looks increasingly as if Britain needs the mayhem of a no-deal exit to wake up from its delusions – in much the same way that the increasing death toll in Iraq after the 2003 invasion forced an earlier generation of British politicians to own up to the mess they had made.

As for the EU and the governments of its 27 member states, they have played their side of the Brexit drama very well so far, combining the German talent for Gründlichkeit (thoroughness) with the kind of Cartesian precision that embodies the best of France. All through Brexit, the European side has been radically transparent and admirably disciplined while staying unfailingly polite.

As the European council president, Donald Tusk, put it right after the referendum result: “We miss you already.” Back then, he meant that Europeans would miss Britain as a member state. Two and a half years later, what Europeans miss even more is something much deeper that they had always taken for granted: British common sense.

• Joris Luyendijk is an author, and wrote the Guardian’s banking blog