Six months out from Brexit, many fearing ‘it’s looking very grisly’
LONDON — When Theresa May appears on stage at the Conservative Party’s annual meeting this week, it will take all her determination to drown out the ticking of an invisible clock.
One hundred and eighty days stand between Britain and an uncontrolled exit from the European Union.
After two years of negotiation, Britain has reached a moment of consequence for the process known as Brexit. The insulating layer of time that had protected the country from a potentially failed divorce from the bloc is thinning. Soon, it will be gone, with the threat of major new trade restrictions closing in.
What this could mean for ordinary Britons has been seeping into the newspapers, sometimes in leaks from secret government reports: Northern Ireland has only one energy link to the mainland, so a no-deal Brexit could lead to rolling blackouts and steep price rises; and the energy system could collapse, forcing the military to redeploy generators from Afghanistan to the Irish Sea.
With an eye toward the March 29 deadline, the government has appointed a minister to guarantee food supplies. Pharmaceutical companies are planning a six-week stockpile of lifesaving medications like insulin and considering flying planeloads of medicine into the country until imports resume. That is if planes can still land in Britain — something thrown into doubt after the government admitted that aircraft could, in theory, be grounded by a sudden exit.
In many ways, the country is in the same position it was on the morning after the 2016 referendum: without a clear plan.
British leaders remain mired in infighting, presenting competing visions as the Brexit countdown enters its final stage. On Friday, Boris Johnson, the former foreign minister and standard-bearer for the hard-Brexit faction, proposed starting over with a tougher negotiating approach, hinting that he might try to topple May in the coming weeks. Supporters of a so-called softBrexit would keep Britain closely tied to European economic rules and standards so as to minimize disruption to trade. The hard-Brexit camp backs the opposite approach: quitting Europe’s customs union and single market and freeing Britain to draw up its own trade rules.
Jeremy Corbyn, the opposition Labour leader, rallied his own troops in Liverpool last week and all but promised Parliament would vote down any deal May could strike.
In the meantime, there is a strange calm, as if the country is waiting to see if a storm will make landfall. On Twitter, novelist Robert Harris recently compared the atmosphere to the months before Britain entered World War I, when authorities watched helplessly as they were dragged toward war by the momentum of events.
“We’re just rolling toward the cliff, and nobody out there is going to stop it,” said Bill Wolsey, who owns a chain of hotels, pubs and restaurants based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
An abrupt Brexit, he said, would increase the cost of supplies and electricity in Northern Ireland by 20 percent and could curtail the flow of tourists from Europe, who are the backbone of his business.
“It’s a strange time,” he said. “How many times have we heard this attitude through history — that it will all be sorted — and then nothing’s sorted? I personally think nothing will be sorted.”
In the two years since the 2016 vote, Britons have been replaying arguments for and against leaving the European Union.
Was Brexit, as Johnson would argue, an act of emancipation that would breathe life into a onceproud imperial power? Or was it, as his opponents would contend, a gesture of rage by communities that feel left behind by global capitalism, egged on by politicians’ false promises and tabloidfueled xenophobia?
So deep were the fissures in her Cabinet that it took May two years to produce a proposal — known as Chequers, after her country residence where it was forged — that would keep some of Britain’s close economic ties to the bloc.
May has said her ideas would remove the need for checks on the border between Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and Ireland, which will remain in the EU. But that plan was blown apart at a summit in Salzburg, Austria, where other European leaders decided it was too much like Johnson’s boast that, with Brexit, Britain could have its cake and eat it, too.
“Those who explain that we can easily live without Europe, that everything is going to be all right, and that it’s going to bring a lot of money home are liars,” declared President Emmanuel Macron of France. “It’s even more true since they left the day after so as not to have to deal with it.”
With six months until Britain’s scheduled departure, a void remains, leaving Britain stuck — unable to move forward or to rethink Brexit without risking a backlash from those who voted for withdrawal.
May’s supporters say privately that delaying is a good negotiating tactic, and that her leverage will increase as the cliff edge looms closer. There is some truth to this. Other EU nations would be damaged economically by a disorderly Brexit. And her critics in Parliament, where she has no real majority, may agree to any deal she can bring back if the alternative is imminent chaos.
Her team plays down the dangers, at least for now.
“There are certainly risks of short-term disruption,” Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, said in a recent interview with the international media.
“We can manage down some of those risks, and we can avoid some of them,” he said, though he conceded that was not completely in his power and that avoiding disruption “will require goodwill on both sides.”