Be in no doubt. Theresa May’s watershed Brexit speech on Friday was a sobering defeat for the UK. It was a defeat for the Leavers’ vision of a sovereign country freed from the constraints imposed by European politicians, laws and regulations. It was a defeat for those who voted Remain and hoped against hope that Britain would, at the last moment, draw back from this gross act of national self-harm.

May’s speech, signalling a fundamental parting of the ways, was a defeat for the business people, trade unionists and community leaders who rightly fear for the country’s future prosperity, cohesion and jobs. It was a defeat for young people, British and European, who, more so than older generations, will perforce inhabit an ugly new world of harder borders, work permits, bureaucracy and pervasive state intrusion.

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Looked at in a wider context, May’s speech marked a moment of British retreat from the shared ideals and principles of collaborative internationalism that have guided the western democracies since 1945. It presaged a historic abdication of leadership that many in Europe and beyond will neither understand nor quickly forgive.

The gaunt post-Brexit future towards which May is stubbornly leading us will make Britain a poorer, meaner, lonelier and shabbier place, hostile to immigrants yet badly in need of their skills, struggling to maintain its trade across the barriers we ourselves erected, and exploited by the world’s big economies whose governments and multinationals, imposing unequal trade treaties, will take what they want and leave the rest.

May’s speech was welcomed by hard Tory Brexiters, who imagine that quitting the EU single market and customs union, whatever the consequences, is a sufficient victory for their blinkered, jingoistic cause. It was seen by Tory Remainers as recognition of the need for compromise. And this blurry reconciliation of her party’s schismatic factions, albeit probably temporary, was May’s main achievement. It may be a good deal for the Tories. It is a bad deal for Britain.

Bad because, in overall terms, the proposed settlement is neither one thing nor the other. Britain will not have its cake and eat it, in Boris Johnson’s preposterous parlance. It will simply have less cake. May rejected the single market largely because of its freedom-of-movement provisions. Even though employers have been telling her for months that Britain relies on EU workers, the prime minister remains foolishly frit of Daily Mail spectres of invading foreign hordes.

Yet even as she rejected it, May recognised the benefits of the single market, sought continued, frictionless, access to it, and lamely admitted that we will all be the poorer for being outside it. What kind of leadership is this? Such self-contradictory thinking would give Descartes a headache. The same applies to her Through the Looking Glass “customs partnership” wheeze that, she said, would “mirror EU requirements”. If she means future customs arrangements will be reversed, back to front and inside out, she may well be right. What a nightmare of red tape is now in prospect from those who promised a liberating bonfire on the cliffs of Dover and will create, instead, a giant lorry-park.

Play Video 2:01 'This is a negotiation. Neither of us can have exactly what we want': May on Brexit - video

Bowing to Brussels, May accepted that post-Brexit Britain would be obliged to observe EU-approved regulatory standards. She agreed with Michel Barnier that competition rules must remain unchanged, to ensure a level playing field. She confessed that, thanks to her, the City of London would lose valuable passporting rights. And she offered to pay cash to stay in selected EU agencies while surrendering any overall say in how the EU is run.

May has made previous, reluctant concessions to reality. One is that Britain must pay a large divorce bill fixed by Brussels. Another is that the rights of EU citizens must be upheld during the post-2019 transition. On Friday, her unsustainable position was further exposed to the hard light of day. After all that noisome backbench huffing and puffing about sovereignty and the diktats of foreign judges, May agreed that the European court of justice will continue to have a significant role.

Even this prime minister’s special talent for delusional politics cannot conceal the fact that she still has no real clue how to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland. A few cameras and a trusted trader scheme will simply not hack it when the other 27 EU members come to consider their security, migration and trade rules. Nor is there much reason to believe that they will agree a bespoke, pick-and-mix free-trading arrangement that has never been tried and undermines existing practice. Even if they were willing, there is not enough time left before the guillotine falls next March.

When May said she wanted to be “straight” with people and that Britain had to face the “hard facts” of Brexit, it seems she was talking first and foremost to herself. For her, finally, it was wake-up time. This sudden dawn of pragmatic realism is welcome. But at this point a basic question becomes unavoidable: what on earth is she trying to achieve? Given the emerging shape of this unfavourable, damaging and overly complex “EU lite” deal, is Brexit, as now envisaged, really worth the trouble? Better, perhaps, to admit we made a mistake in 2016 and humbly ask for time to reconsider.