Brexit left Britain weak and alone - closer EU ties seem inevitable

THANKS to Ryanair, retirement and a wife who should have been a travel agent we have been able to avail of some really cheap flights out of Belfast International airport in recent years.

If, in the off-season, you are prepared to go flying at some godforsaken hour it’s amazing the bargains to be had.

And, believe me, my wife is an expert at finding those middle of the night flights, the ones where you’d need matchsticks to keep your eyelids open.

Anyway, we were in Spain last week and again it was great craic having conversations with our English friends.

Hand on heart I can now state with 100% honesty I have yet to meet a single English/ British person in Spain who thinks Brexit has been a good idea.

In fact the opposite is the case, the longer out from the 2016 vote the more they are convinced it’s been a disaster. The only way I can explain it is they are so disillusioned that it actually dominates their thinking.

And to quote from the song by Strabane singer, Paul Brady, it was “nothing but the same old story”.

We were picked up at the airport by Stanley – not his real name – and on the drive to our accommodation he didn’t half give it the welly in regard to his thoughts on present day UK.

The British people were conned over Brexit by a crowd of flash-boy Tories who would give the Mafia a run for their money.

There was no respect for authority. Cops were scared to go in tough. Schools were a disgrace. And the NHS was being privatised inch-by-inch for the enrichment of wide-boy Tories and their golden circle friends. And on and on it went.

In fact Stanley had more than a touch of the right-wing about him, telling us that the Spanish had the right idea.

He pointed out police there didn’t think twice about going in tough. They’d get their truncheons out and whack all around them, hit men or women if needs be.

Stanley admired that, even pointing out that unlike the UK it was against the law in Spain to film a policeman/woman in the execution of their duty.

This meant evidence of the use of excessive force is never available in the event of a complaint to the authorities.

Personally, I would have a fairly major issue with that, but Stanley sure didn’t. I could be reading these disparate views all wrong but there does seem to be an increasing consensus that the UK needs to re-set its relationship with the EU.

Last week David Miliband, a foreign secretary in the last Labour government, made this very point. Writing in an opinion piece for a broadsheets, he was critical of what he described as the “delusion” of Brexit which, he said, assumed the UK’S destiny would depend solely on its own decisions. In an increasingly unstable world Britain, Miliband was adamant, could not afford to isolate itself from its allies.

And he pointed to some longignored realities: Miliband wrote “We do not have the finance of Saudi Arabia, the EU anchor of France, the regional activism and risk appetite of Turkey or the demographic strength of India or Indonesia.

“We are one among a number of ‘middle powers’ in the global system. Our wealth, military assets and reputation have all declined relative to others in the last decade.”

So the suspicion lurks that Miliband is saying out loud what others are thinking, possibly preparing the ground for a major Labour U-turn on Brexit in the coming months or years.

I wouldn’t rule it out. Not by a long shot.

Consensus that UK must reset its relationship with the EU