THIS IS
London
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Brexit: Britain’s Nightmare Divorce
T
here is a well-known saying in the context of relationships and divorce: “Breaking up is hard to do.” And so it has proved with the United Kingdom’s divorce from the European Union. The British exit from the EU (“Brexit”) has turned into nothing short of a national nightmare, an epic mess, and an existential crisis for the world’s fifth largest economy. It appears impossible for the UK to fully extricate itself from the EU’s embrace. How did the UK arrive at this unforeseen, disastrous impasse? Battling with the EU was to be expected, but Parliament also connived with the Civil Service to undermine Brexit and subvert the democratic will of the people. By early April, the UK had not left the EU and showed few signs of being able to do so. The fact is, the EU does not want any of its constituent parts to leave. What it wants is “ever closer union” in a journey destined in its eyes to end in a federal super-state—a United States of Europe. Until December 2009 and the Lisbon Treaty, there was no provision for a member state to leave the EU, so Article 50 was added. However, no one ever imagined that a major player like the UK would want to “up sticks” and leave. Britain joined the European Common Market in 1973, but the relationship was strained from the beginning. The UK electorate was assured that joining with the other nations was an economic matter, not political, but the truth went unspoken. European and successive UK leaders knew full well that the entire project was political to its core, involving considerable loss of sovereignty. As time went on, the question of Europe became Britain’s “forever” political problem.
16 Tomorrow’s World | May-June 2019
The Majority Want Out In May 2015, after David Cameron was re-elected Prime Minister, he responded decisively to the electorate’s growing concerns about the EU. Over the following months, his efforts to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership failed. Then, on 23 June 2016, he held a national referendum on whether the country wanted to leave the EU or stay in it. Never did he think the country would opt to leave, but this was the shock result. Fiftytwo per cent of the UK electorate said they wanted out (17.4 million people). Cameron immediately resigned and Theresa May was appointed Prime Minister. On 29 March 2017, she invoked Article 50, formally announcing the UK’s intention to leave the EU. The country embarked on a two-year countdown to leave at the end of March 2019. But in the meantime, Mrs May had lost her slim majority altogether in a “hung” parliament, which severely weakened her capacity to achieve a successful Brexit. The EU insisted on producing a “divorce” document that would essentially give the EU everything it wanted. Only after the UK had signed up to this document would its desires be even considered. At every stage in the Brexit process, “negotiation” actually meant capitulating to EU demands. The UK ended up being corralled into a “blind alley” that made Brexit all but impossible. Can Britain escape this fate? It is hard to see how. Parliament rejected the Withdrawal Agreement on several occasions, and it rejected a “no-deal” or “hard” exit—the legal default option if the divorce deal failed. Mrs May repeatedly asked the EU for more time to
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