Imperial echoes

The farce that is now unfolding before our very eyes in the UK regarding the decision of the government, following a public referendum, to leave the EU clearly shows the decision to leave to be manifestly wrong.

The reason that led the UK to vote leave the EU in the first place amounts to a nostalgic yearning for the imperial past of the UK, couched in anti-immigrant rhetoric and nationalist overtones, and is anything but rational. During the referendum, it was obvious that people – egged on by the sophism and downright false arguments of certain politicians – were not seeing the wood for the trees. They were being given the wrong information by those who should have known better but decided to impart misinformation based on idealistic rather than objective criteria.

Now, a couple of years down the line, the impracticality of leaving has started to become evident to several UK citizens and politicians because they have now started to identify with tangible concrete issues that are appearing as they decide to leave, such as employment, the economy, transport and hard issues like the Irish border. So much so that it is now being reported that there is a tangible swing in the voting population towards not leaving.

The options facing the UK government are rather clear cut now. First, call another referendum to see whether people still want to leave when it is so manifestly obvious that leaving is going to fry the economy. Second, they can try for an agreement that will give them access to a customs union, which will give them the advantage of preventing high duties on their products when entering the EU but over which rules they will have no control politically.

They also have an option of working out an agreement to re- main in the EEA or European Economic Area where they can pay to access market rights as they wish. Norway has chosen this option. This will also ensure that there will be no hard Irish border, between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland with all the political ramifications that this gives rise to, in effect reversing the Good Friday agreement with all the fall-out that will come with that!

Finally, the fourth option is that the UK can opt to crash out of the EU without any agreement, so that only World Trade Organisation rules will regulate trade with the 450 million EU block. The UK has nothing to achieve from this, as its exports would become impractically expensive and hopelessly non-competitive.

The really funny bit is that, after crashing out, the UK is hoping to survive on bilateral agreements between it and members of the Commonwealth countries – countries which have been there for a long time already and there has been nothing to stop the UK from having reached these bilateral agreements before. The UK alone would not be able to cope with the large trading countries such as China and the US when it itself has decided to leave a large trading block of 500 million inhabitants which is the EU. The small fish never eat the big fish and the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts! There are economic and political realities that cannot be ignored.

The fact remains that all this is already history and should have served as an eye-opener! In the 1950s, when the Treaty of Rome was being set up, the EU precur-