It’s now less than three months to go before the UK is due to leave the EU, and there still is no agreement on the exact terms of the departure. Every day therefore the likelihood of a “Hard Brexit” increases. People are slowly beginning to realise what a Hard Brexit will mean. In particular, the talk is of the lorries, thousands of them, that will wait for days to cross the English Channel. I suddenly realised that some of those lorries will belong to M&S.
Before you Czexit, check out Brexit!
Czechs are apparently among the most Eurosceptic peoples in the EU. While the results in the latest Eurobarometer show an improvement in attitudes towards the EU, Czechs still appear to be far more negative than the Poles, the Slovaks or even the Hungarians. The reasons behind this deserve discussion in a separate blogpost, but the upshot is that certain politicians, particularly the far-right politician Tomio Okamura, have encouraged talk of a referendum on EU membership. So for any Czech citizens reading this who feel persuaded that Czexit might be a good thing, I urge you to consider the following insights from the Brexit referendum :
Part One – why it is (probably) happening
Brexit hasn’t happened yet. 18 months on from the referendum, the British are hardly any clearer about what their country and their lives will be like after it leaves the EU; and this despite the fact that every single day, something to do with Brexit dominates the serious news channels.
At the very least, it has become clearer to many who voted for Brexit that the process of leaving the EU is far more complex than their political leaders had claimed. I doubt that on the day of the referendum more than 5% of the population could correctly state what Euratom is, or that the European Court of Human Rights is not an EU institution. Well, now they are finding these things out. Drip, drip, drip…the truth about Brexit comes out in little drips.
“This is an event like the fall of the Wall.” That’s what my friend Marco wrote to me about Brexit. He and I have been friends since 1994, and would never have found ourselves in Prague had it not been for the fall of the Wall.
The fall of the Wall was a great thing. There is nothing great about Brexit. Those in Britain who believe they are ‘getting their country back’ have believed a fairy tale. They cannot even agree what it means, but when I listen to them describing it, I don’t like the sound of what they describe. It does not sound like the Britain I was proud to grow up in.
