'We're in the last hour': Democracy itself on trial in Brexit, Britons say

Over the past weeks, as factions within the British government have grappled for control over the country's exit from the bloc, the mood among voters has become dark

This week, as two members of Parliament interrupted a debate on Brexit to rib each other about the elite boarding schools they attended four decades ago, 23-year-old Eve Alcock looked on with deep disgust.

The whole world of Britain’s Parliament — its effete codes of conduct, its arcane and stilted language, its reunions of Oxbridge school chums — seemed impossibly remote from the real, unfolding national crisis of Brexit, the process of extricating the country from the European Union.

“We’re in the middle of a national emergency, and you have schoolboys squabbling about who went to the best school in the House