Chronic. It must have been a walk in the park, a path strewn with roses. Once Brexit is voted, the trade agreement with the European Union (EU) will be “One of the easiest [à négocier] of all human history “, Minister Liam Fox predicted. Life outside of Europe will be “Formidable”, had outbid Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, because “Leaving the EU will cost practically nothing while staying there would be very expensive”.
Four and a half years later, and even though an agreement was finally reached on Thursday, December 24, the divorce between the United Kingdom and the European Union will have been a never-ending nightmare.
“We are entering this brief and deceptive interval which separates the moment when we throw ourselves off the cliff from the moment when we crash into the rocks below., summarizes Peter Kellner, former boss of the polling institute YouGov. At the time of the crash, the pain will lay bare the lies we have been told since the Brexit referendum, and highlight the choices we have been dodging for 75 years. ” The opposition on fishing quotas and competition rules have made it forget: if Brexit is a shock for Europe, it is a historic leap into a vacuum for the United Kingdom.
The “Global Britain” promised by Mr Johnson never had any real content, beyond a hard-hitting slogan. As for the project of a “Singapore on the Thames”, a deregulated tax haven at the gates of the EU that the ultraliberals close to the Prime Minister dreamed of, it has been rendered obsolete by the crisis due to Covid-19 which requires powerful interventions from the State.
” Good bye and good luck ! “
For the British, Brexit is equivalent to a “return to the future” … in the 1950s. While Germany and France then embarked on European construction, the British refused to join this project, which was far too limited in terms of their ambitions and initiated by two countries that they consider, unlike them, as the losers of the war.
“Gentlemen, what you are negotiating will not work, asserts the envoy from London to the talks which, in 1955, will lead to the Treaty of Rome, before launching ironically in French: ” Good bye and good luck ! ” From the height of his so-called imperial status, the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, surveys Europe: “Our thoughts carry us beyond the seas, to these populations with whom we play a role in all parts of the world. “
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