Opinion｜Brexit: Goodbye to All That

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On January 31, the UK left the European Union, stumbling off just shy of a half century as a member and tripping over its laces on the way out. Rather than affecting a conciliatory tone, Brexit supporters waved goodbye to all that with two fingers up at Johnny Foreigner; good riddance, so long, and thanks, we’re taking all our fish.

It would be funny, if it were not so tragic, that Brexit past and future can be boiled down to fish. Those slippery customers were where it all began, and, according to a number of sources, will also be the first stumbling block as Britain attempts to negotiate it’s new trading relationship with the EU, during the transition period which lasts until the end of 2020. All this to take back control of an industry which accounts for a whopping 0.1% of Britain’s national income. Smart.

Fine, I’m being a tad facetious—we were told there were other benefits to Brexit too. It was an opportunity, Johnson, Farage and co. lied, for Britain to sidestep European red tape. The solution? Put up a brick wall of a trade barrier that will necessarily require a fleet of jobsworths and bureaucrats to administrate it. Wicked smart.

It was a chance, Dominic Cummings fabricated, to wrench back a made-up number of millions from the EU each week to fund the NHS. Something which could be done, they said, alongside taking away the freedom of movement that allows some 10% of Britain’s health care workers to be employed. Megamind logic.

It was the moment, the grunting brunt of middle England roared, to return the UK to a land of pastures green, where you could freely shout abuse at Pakistanis on the streets and smoke inside pubs and call Germans krauts, before the pesky EU came in with their horrible subsidies and free movement and Erasmus and courts of justice and human rights and tariff-free trade. “What did the EU ever do for us?”, as the old Monty Python sketch goes: now Britain is starting again from scratch, it’s going to become painfully clear.

How Did We Get Here?

You might be wondering how on earth Britain got itself into this mess? Here’s a not-so-quick precis:

So, basically, there was this massive war like a million years ago, yeah, which meant Britain lost its empire and self-perceived number one standing in the world, but a load of people never really came to terms with it. Then some London types thought it would be a good idea if we made up with the people we were fighting so we could rebuild our continent together—I know, pathetic! And then, I think, in the 1980s or 1990s (don’t remember, wasn’t born) there was this speech in Bruges and then some treaty in Maastricht, before a great big argument about mad cows, or something, which got a bunch of people who didn’t like Europeans very cross.

In those heady days of late 1990s optimism, the Eurosceptic cranks were firmly on the fringes of British politics, but their cabal had decided that the European Union was bad, very bad indeed, and so made it their life’s mission to get Britain out of it and back to the halcyon days of colonial looting and slaughter. Closer trade ties with European neighbors, utilizing a huge open market on Britain’s doorstep and promoting increased business competition and therefore innovation: these were all going to be frightfully dreadful for Blighty (“we only just finished fighting those uncivilized brutes in THE WAR—don't you remember!?”)

The early 2000s rolled on by, with all their promise and regression. Britain didn’t join the Euro or Schengen, and instead carved out a quite remarkably good position for itself as a dominant EU member but with perks and opt outs not enjoyed by any other of the major players—both a piece of the continent and a clod happily washed away across a thin channel of water.

But then, more and more countries started joining the European Union to share in the benefits of free trade and a common market with zero tariffs. People in countries once ravaged by the yoke of Soviet oppression, who saw the West as the shining light of democracy and freedom they had been denied by the pure chance that they happened to be born somewhere else, got the chance to pull themselves out of poverty with the help of their now friendly neighbors. Some of them even started moving to the UK, bringing their skills, spending their money, paying their taxes and propping up many of Britain’s national institutions—the foreign bastards.

European Klaxon Grows Louder

Then 2008 happened, pickings became slim and certain plates began to shift. The fate of Greece at the hands of the European Union cemented in some a perception of the EU as callous, uncaring bureaucrats (here, the Eurosceptics had a point), and so an uneasy fog began to weigh on Europe’s unsteady Union.

Following the financial crash, the UK waved goodbye to Blair, Brown and progressive New Labour, and with them the last government with a proudly pro-European outlook. The “teenies” (a decade so grim that we really are going to have to come up with a less saccharine name) began with the shining, fleshy-pink face of David Cameron slashing council budgets and anything else he could get his hands on to try and balance the books (which is, however dreadfully it was enacted, what austerity was for, rather than the evil Machiavellian plan to crush the poor that many now claim.)

In the coming years, the European klaxon grew louder as the Eurosceptics in the Tory party grew bolder (most of the country didn’t give a hoot about Europe at this point, and still probably don’t, deep down). The growth of foreign communities in the UK got some people really wound up, and the media’s relentless hounding of them as cheats and scroungers got certain types positively foaming at the mouth. There is a grievance in there somewhere—the reaction to the loss, perceived or otherwise, of local community and culture to globalization is not something you can dismiss purely as jingoism—but there were also ways to address these issues in a progressive, sensible manner. This did not and has not happened, and certain British newspapers pandering to people’s fears only made things worse.

The UK media’s growing obsession with a right-wing nationalist party called UKIP over this period did something similar. They had been doing bits since the OG days of Euroscepticism in the 1990s—Nigel Farage is to English politics what Roots Manuva is to grime, in that respect—but they only started doing really “big tings” after the rot of English nationalism had set in by the mid-2010s. Indeed, they did spectacularly well in the European elections of 2014, latching onto fears of immigrant enemies at the gate that the refugee crisis in Europe so effectively exacerbated.

Their wheezing, booze-soaked, snake-oil-dealing leader, Nigel Farage, took full advantage, his forked tongue penetrating the minds of middle England and giving its people an “other” to blame for their wages stagnating, their jobs being lost and their local services being cut, while the “metropolitan elites” in London greedily slaked the cream off the economy’s top. This pernicious sentiment took root in some small towns in England, terrifying those in No. 10, and so neutering UKIP became their most urgent priority.

To counter them, super-slick, shirt-sleeve, big society Dave contorted himself and his party into the most curious position: both pro and anti Europe, seeking to distance himself from the main center-right grouping within the European parliament and demanding a new settlement on the UK’s already favorable position, even if the concept of leaving the bloc was at that point risible. However, the fruits of negotiations with Europe in the teenies were not juicy enough for UKIP and the ruddy-faced, ever-more boisterous Europesceptic mob in Dave’s party—“why wouldn’t those bloody continentals concede? Have they forgotten who won THE WAR!?” So, Dave had a cunning plan to put these cranks in their place. He decided to put this complex problem to the British people, to let them decide their own fate, betting the farm with the deluded arrogance of a problem gambler on a winning streak.

Perhaps, one could argue, that arrogance was not unfounded. He had, after all, just come off the back of a stonking 55%-44% win in a referendum across the border in Scotland, which, as everyone now knows, has closed the Scottish independence question for a whole generation.

The Parable of Boaty McBoatface

So, with this febrile backdrop—nationalists to the north, refugees to the south, the effects of austerity hitting the poorest in the UK hard—Dave thought it a good time to let the British public decide if they wanted to be in the European Union or not. A question of such jeopardy, that would quite clearly open the most preposterously nebulous can of worms, was casually tossed into the ring with all the brash self-confidence that you would expect from someone who enjoyed an Eton-Oxbridge education. However, Dave would soon find out that offering the British people a chance to subvert something and give the establishment a good kicking is a catastrophically stupid idea—did the parable of Boaty McBoatFace teach him nothing?

The run up to the referendum now feels oddly inevitable: one side lied and broke the law to coax that shuddering howl of nationalism from the electorate, while the other stoked fear instead of patriotism and pride that Britain was a leading member of the world’s only successful pan-continental peace project. June 23 came, three-and-a-half years of nonsense ensued—we know the rest (I point all those of a masochistic tendency who want to relive the misery all over again to our previous writing on the subject!)

And now, here we are: out. European citizens in the UK who have lived there for decades are having to justify staying in their homes and Brits on the continent will soon have to do the same. But we’ll have our fish back soon, so that’s good, I guess.

What Happens Now?

Not much, for now. Speak to any Brits on the continent and they’ll tell you it feels like nothing has changed. While the Union Jack has come down in Brussels, Britain remains in the mechanisms of the EU through to December 31, in a transition period to give the Conservative government time to map out our new trading relationship with not only Europe but the rest of the entire world.

If we have learned one thing from the insane few years since 2016, it’s that giving yourself a short deadline for negotiations that you would normally give a decade is the height of irresponsibility. The Canada+-x÷10 style trade deal, or whichever one it is that Brexiters are currently shrieking about, was nearly ten years in the making, and that’s before we’ve even got to the postscript. Britain’s new relationship with the EU, an entirely different and vastly more fraught beast, will have to be sorted by July 1 if there is to be no extension to the transition period, and given the stubborn arrogance of the pound-shop grise Dominic Cummings who is pulling the strings, you suspect there will not be.

The two groups of people who need there to be adults in the room during these negotiations are Brits in the EU and EU citizens in the UK. Quite literally the one thing that both these groups have asked is to not be used as bargaining chips in the process. This has not been granted. Both can hope for reciprocity, they can hope for a voice in the negotiations, but what they will get is forgotten, their lives a footnote on this sorry little tale. 

However, the transition period does mean that British citizens living in the EU at least need not do anything drastic just yet, as immediate changes won't come into being till the end of the year or even later—see the UK gov’s “Living in Europe” website for more details as it develops.

Restless Farewell

When Jeremy Corbyn was defeated by such an extent last December, it was the most agonizingly, miserably unsatisfying “I told you so” I have ever experienced. I can already feel the same weeping sigh of schadenfreude arriving in a couple of years time when Brexit is not the utopia proposed by the clowns in charge of Britain.

You would hope this will mean they will finally have to take ownership of this mess, that no matter how hard they wriggle—and the squirm will be almighty—there will be nowhere to hide for those who have championed Brexit, who have thrust Britain into the abyss. I suspect this hope is in vain.

Those who caused Brexit will blame everyone but themselves for its failure: they will blame disunity; they will come for those of us who oppose it; they will certainly, and with no sense of irony, put the whole thing at the feet of the EU. But when all else fails, history, at the very least, will know—something cheerful for future generations to clutch to as they watch the planet disintegrate in a hot, fiery mess.

So, on that happy note, let’s say a restless farewell to freedom of movement, an adios to Erasmus, an adéu to European subsidies and aufedersein to a project which half of Britain still passionately believes in. We can hope there will be an au revoir in there at some point in the future, but I won’t be holding my breath.

Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.