Bryan Gould: British Prime Minister Theresa May's deal, perhaps rejigged, still best outcome for Brexit

British Prime Minister Theresa May, right, laughs during a meeting with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at Number 10 Downing Street. Photo / Getty

For most New Zealanders (to say nothing of the British), Brexit remains an impenetrable mystery.

Let me try - as one who, as both diplomat and politician in Britain, was closely involved with these issues over a period of decades - to explain why they are so difficult to resolve.

What is called "Brexit" in fact covers three separate issues. First, the decision in the 2016 referendum that the UK should leave the European Union. Secondly, the exit (or divorce) agreement that has to be negotiated with the EU. And thirdly, the "political declaration" - an agreed statement by the UK and the EU as to how they see their future post-exit relationship developing.

These issues are confused because various parties opposed to Brexit see advantage in lumping them together, in the hope that, by focusing on the problems of exiting, they can call into question the wisdom of leaving.

To take first the referendum decision. That decision must be accepted, whether one agrees with it or not, as the definitive judgment by the British people on their more than 40 years' experience (not a snap judgment, therefore) of being part, not of "Europe", but of a particular organisation that evolved to become the European Union.

That judgment was one that only the people could legitimately make. They may be told by "experts" that they got it wrong and that they "don't understand" - but they alone had the day-to-day experience over decades of seeing their jobs disappear, of feeling that they were no longer running their own country because all the decisions that mattered were made in Brussels, of seeing their streets and neighbourhoods, schools and health clinics taken over by immigrants from Eastern Europe.

It is not as though the facts do not support their concerns. Over the period of EU membership, Britain's manufacturing industry was decimated and Britain's trade was in perennial deficit - so much for the supposed economic benefits of EU membership - and that is to say nothing of the large taxpayer-funded annual subscription paid into EU coffers.

These outcomes came as no surprise to commentators such as myself who warned when Britain joined what was then the Common Market in 1973 that membership would require Britain to give up access to efficiently produced food and raw materials from the Commonwealth, and that the preferential treatment of British manufactures in the markets of those same countries would be lost; instead, Britain would have to face up to direct competition from German manufacturing in their own home market - with consequent damage to British living standards, trade and manufacturing.

Remainers choose to ignore these realities. Both they and the EU, having seen the referendum decision go against them, prefer to focus on the quite separate issue of the difficulties posed in the way of withdrawal; they both have an interest in making those difficulties as intractable as possible.

The EU has been determined to show other members who are unhappy (such as Greece, Spain and even Italy) with the way that the European Union has operated under German leadership that withdrawal is not an easy option.

And the EU has been encouraged to take a hardline by Remainers who believe that the Brexit decision can be reversed if the exit process is made difficult enough. Neither seem to understand that the more that difficulties are placed in the way of withdrawal, the more the British people will see the need to get out of an entanglement that threatens to throttle them.

A second referendum - favoured by many Remainers in the hope of getting a different result - would treat the first referendum as a kind of examination which the British people had failed, and must therefore take again, reinforcing the Leavers' sense that, from the outset, their voices were not being heard. Little wonder that they see a second referendum as elitist and destroying faith in democracy.

The dilemma now facing the British Parliament is that a new prime minister or government would leave the Brexit situation exactly where it is now - that is, unresolved.

Theresa May's deal, perhaps somewhat re-jigged, still looks the best available outcome; she is to be congratulated on sticking to the referendum decision. But whatever the outcome, Jacinda Ardern seems to have obtained from Theresa May an assurance that a post-Brexit Britain will be open for business - and trade.