T HE ONLY rule of British politics for the coming weeks is that nobody knows anything. The prime minister doesn’t know who will resign next. The factions don’t know their relative strengths. Nobody knows what is bluff and what is in deadly earnest.

But one thing that is increasingly clear in the fog of Brexit is that this is the most serious domestic crisis Britain has faced in the modern democratic era. In the statement that accompanied his resignation as transport minister earlier this month, Jo Johnson accused his own government of “a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis”. Others have compared the current debacle to the IMF’ s bail-out of Britain in 1976 or the gold-standard crisis of 1931. In fact it is worse than anything else Britain has endured in peacetime. The political system is all but paralysed, the country is divided into warring ideological tribes, the civil service is overwhelmed and, in the event of no deal, Britain would be staring into the abyss.

Suez is a compelling comparison because it resulted from Britain’s failure to adjust to its diminished status in the world. The crisis paralysed the government for months and forced Anthony Eden to resign. But so what? The Tory party quickly replaced Eden with a much better prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and went on to win the next general election with an enhanced majority. The Brexit crisis has taken a far higher toll on the Conservatives than Suez: the head of one prime minister, David Cameron; the loss of the party’s majority in a botched election; and the resignation of a clutch of senior ministers.

A more apt comparison might be the 1976 episode with the IMF . This was a crisis of a political regime rather than merely a crisis of statecraft. The “Butskellite” consensus that had held sway since the second world war was consumed by stagflation and excessive wage demands. In 1976 James Callaghan, the Labour prime minister, decided that there was no alternative but to ask the IMF for a loan. The decision almost tore the government apart, as left-wingers such as Tony Benn pressed the case for a siege economy. But the crisis produced long-term benefits. Margaret Thatcher was waiting in the wings with a radical plan to address Britain’s most pressing problems, such as ossified industrial practices and over-mighty trade unions. Brexit may well do the opposite. The man waiting in the wings is Benn’s disciple, Jeremy Corbyn, who wants to roll back the Thatcher era. Thanks to Brexit, Britain could end up with the siege economy that it managed to avoid in 1976.

And whereas the IMF crisis was limited to economic management, the current one extends to the unity of the British state. The four nations voted differently in the referendum, with England and Wales voting to leave and Northern Ireland and Scotland to stay. The Good Friday Agreement deferred the Irish question, which had plagued British politics for centuries, by establishing mechanisms for shared oversight of the North by Britain and Ireland, “partners in the European Union”. Brexit has put the Irish question back at the centre of British politics.

Another comparison is with the gold-standard crisis. Britain’s return to the gold standard in 1925 at an unrealistic rate led to a succession of political dramas, as the gold straitjacket squeezed the life out of the economy. A “national government” of all the parties, led by a Labour politician, Ramsay MacDonald, but dominated by Conservatives, tried to build consensus for economic orthodoxy. But the turmoil intensified. Unemployment soared, strikes spread, a naval base mutinied, capital fled and, on September 21st 1931, Britain abandoned gold. That shook the establishment to its core. But it nevertheless proved salutary in the long run, restoring businesses’ animal spirits and burnishing the reputation of gold’s most prescient critic, John Maynard Keynes. Leaving the EU is unlikely to have any of these beneficial effects. If Mrs May gets her way, Britain will remain closely tied to Europe, a non-voting member of a trade bloc; if she fails to get her way, and Britain drops out without a deal, the consequences will be catastrophic.

You broke it, you own it

What makes the current mess so deadly is that, whereas many past crises were imposed on the British people by the British state, this one was imposed on the British state by the British people. Some Remainers comfort themselves with the illusion that the referendum’s outcome was the result of Russian machinations or Brexiteers’ lies. There is no doubt that the Russians machinated and the Brexiteers lied. But that does not explain why 17m people voted Leave, despite the unanimous advice of the global establishment. They voted in part because they wanted to take back control from an undemocratic Europe, and in part because they considered the British establishment a collection of self-dealing incompetents.

Profound crises demand profound solutions. It will not be enough to change a misguided policy, as happened when Britain abandoned the gold standard or when it withdrew its troops east of Suez. There may be a case for having another vote on Brexit. But that is only the beginning of any serious attempt to deal with the current predicament. The EU must reconsider its indifference to popular worries, particularly about migration. The British establishment must tackle the profound causes of economic frustration and populist rage.