brexit (my last words, promise)…

The UK is no longer a member of the EU… and, although I’ve found the whole process hugely depressing and extremely difficult to come to terms with, I now have to accept this and move on.
As you well know, the outcome of the EU Referendum was 51%: 49% in favour of Leave… but it’s interesting to note that, on 22 June 2016, these were MPs’ declared voting intentions ahead of the imminent Referendum: Tories 185 Remain/138 Leave; Labour 218 Remain/10 Leave; SNP 54 Remain/0 Leave; Liberal Democrats 9 Remain/0 Leave.
Depressingly, we call it Democracy.
(It saddens me to think how little the Labour leadership did in the run-up to the Referendum to positively endorse the Remain cause. If only…).
 
And so began the embarrassing four-and-a-half year process of our government painfully trying to work out what an exit ‘deal’ might be. Throughout the process, the EU negotiators seemed to be organised and knowledgeable, while their UK counterparts appeared to struggle to understand their ‘brief’ or their specific objectives.
I found the whole process both embarrassing and depressing… BUT (clutching at straws), I’m hugely relieved that the UK and the EU have at least (and at last) ‘agreed a deal’ (the alternative would have been unthinkable)… or, as Michael Heseltine puts it: “We must welcome the news that Brexit does not end in the chaos of no deal, but only with the sense of relief of a condemned man informed that his execution has been commuted to a life sentence”. 

To my mind, Brexit has been the biggest UK political disaster of my lifetime.
How many of the 51% who voted to leave, still think it was a really wonderful idea?
How many of them had any clue as to how much the process would cost the UK financially (and that’s just up to the end of 2020)?
How many of them have any clue of how the rest of the world now regards the UK?
How many of them knew what on earth they were voting for?
It seems to me to have been all about ‘immigration’… what a narrow-minded, bigoted nation we’ve become.

So, more than 40 years of cooperation for peace and prosperity has been reversed and Britain’s destiny has been re-shaped for a generation. It will be much harder for Britain to sell services to EU countries, where we were once advantaged (Britain will now be outside the world’s largest single market). We will lose the right to freely travel, work and settle in other European countries. Britain will be throwing up new barriers to trade with our closest neighbours. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons it will reduce the economy by 2% and add 3.5% inflation.
 
To my mind, AA Gill got it absolutely right in an article he wrote for ‘The Sunday Times’ (12 June 2016) just prior to the Referendum… and his own death:
“We all know what ‘getting our country back’ means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective ‘yesterday’ with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty…
“Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of creators, producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive lovers. You can’t dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a place that encourages it and you can truncate it.
You can make it harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can build walls, but why on earth would you?
This collective culture, this golden civilisation grown on this continent over thousands of years, has made everything we have and everything we are, why would you not want to be part of it”.
Amen to that.