It is no surprise that the quagmire in British political circles has its roots in academic empirical circles where so much is explained with so little or nothing. It happened with global warming/climate change where droughts are explained by global warming, floods are explained by climate change, heatwaves by global warming and cold snaps by climate change or indeed any opposite weather event can be explained by one or the other.

It wasn't the first nor last time a dire situation developed out of next to nothing yet the empirical roots are allowed to run on by the very vagueness that replaced genuine intricate arguments found in astronomy -

" To explain: The Newtonian Gravity -- a law of Nature -- a law whose existence as such no one out of Bedlam questions -- a law whose admission as such enables us to account for nine-tenths of the Universal phaenomena -- a law which, merely because it does so enable us to account for these phaenomena, we are perfectly willing, without reference to any other considerations, to admit, and cannot help admitting, as a law -- a law, nevertheless, of which neither the principle nor the modus operandi of the principle, has ever yet been traced by the human analysis -- a law, in short, which, neither in its detail nor in its generality, has been found susceptible of explanation at all -- is at length seen to be at every point thoroughly explicable, provided we only yield our assent to -- what?" Edgar Allan Poe

Anyone can come here are spout an opinion without the slightest discipline or the need to maintain integrity surrounding physical considerations but such is a brexit/empirical mentality that is disruptive as it is limiting.