Brexit increasingly looks like the Beeching Cuts taken to Britain’s entire economic infrastructure. In the 1960s, government treated the railway network as an obsolete collection of unprofitable lines. It closed them, severed communities and manufactured dependence on cars and roads. Brexit dismantled another shared network: frictionless trade, common standards, labour mobility and collective European power. Britain is now begging to recover fragments of it, sector by sector, fee by fee. This comes as automation threatens employment and demand, while climate shocks, conflict and scarcity threaten the mass provision of cheap food, energy and travel. Whether or not Brexit has cleared the ground for the upcoming AI revolution wrecking ball: weakened public resilience, fragmented collective power and left global capital far better protected than ordinary people. 🚗 Beeching made Britain dependent on the car. 🔐 Brexit is making Britain dependent on whatever corporations choose to sell it.