Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Britain’s breakup letter
Letter, though conciliatory, triggers two years of negotiations
European Union Council President Donald Tusk, at a news conference Wednesday in Brussels, holds a letter from British Prime Minister Theresa May that triggers a two-year process for the United Kingdom to leave the EU. May vowed to maintain a “deep and special partnership” with the bloc. “We already miss you,” Tusk responded. In a speech later to the House of Commons, May said: “This is an historic moment from which there can be no turning back.”
LONDON — The United Kingdom filed Wednesday for separation from the European Union, with fond words and promises of friendship despite the years of argument and negotiations ahead.
Prime Minister Theresa May triggered the two-year breakup process in a six-page letter to EU Council President Donald Tusk, vowing that the U.K. will maintain a “deep and special partnership” with its neighbors in the bloc. In response, Tusk told the U.K., “We already miss you.”
May’s invocation of Article 50 of the EU’s key treaty sets the clock ticking on two years of negotiations until the U.K. becomes the first full member to leave the union.
“This is an historic moment from which there can be no turning back,” May told lawmakers in the House of Commons, moments after her letter was hand-delivered to Tusk in Brussels by the U.K.’s ambassador to the EU, Tim Barrow.
In the letter, May said the two sides should “engage with one another constructively and respectfully, in a spirit of sincere cooperation.”
May is under pressure from her Conservative Party and the U.K.’s largely euroskeptic media not to concede too much in exchange for a good trade deal with the EU. For their part, the other 27 members of the bloc likely will need to stick together and stand firm as they ride out the biggest threat in the union’s history.
The EU has grown from six founding members six decades ago to a vast, largely borderless span of 28 nations and 500 million people. But nationalist and populist parties are on the march across the continent in revolt against the bloc’s mission of “ever-closer union.”
The British exit has been hailed by populists across Europe — including French farright leader Marine Le Pen — who hope the U.K. is only the first in a series of departures. EU leaders are determined to stop that happening.
“The European Union is a historically unique success story,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in Berlin. “It remains one even after Britain’s withdrawal. We will take care of that.”
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said he wished Britain well.
“The stale-sounding sentence used in private life after a divorce, ‘Let’s remain friends,’ is right in this case,” he said.
The U.K. joined the group that became the European Union in 1973. Nine months ago, Britons voted 52 percent to 48 percent in favor of leaving the bloc in a referendum, and they remain deeply divided over leaving the bloc.
Decades of ties, pacts and arrangements are part of the complex unraveling.
In the pro-“Leave” heartland of Dover on England’s south coast — whose white cliffs face toward France — some were jubilant as May pulled the trigger.
“I’m a local church minister, and I said to my wife, ‘All I want to do before I die is see my country free from the shackles of Europe,’” said 70-year-old Mike Piper, buying a copy of The Sun tabloid with the front-page headline “Dover and Out.”
Former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who campaigned for years to take the British exit from a fringe cause to a reality, said Britain had passed “the point of no return.”
“I can still, to be honest with you, scarcely believe today has come,” he said.
But many young Britons — who have grown up in the EU and voted overwhelmingly for Britain to remain a member — worried about how much they would lose.
“I’m really anxious about it. It was a bad idea,” said Elaine Morrison, an 18-yearold who was traveling to Barcelona with friends. “I like traveling to other countries And it will be a trouble now. The pound is weaker so it will cost more to buy the euros, and the costs of travel will be more expensive. And there will be red tape.”
Of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom, only two — England
and Wales — voted to leave. The other two, Scotland and Northern Ireland, came down against it.
Scotland’s semiautonomous Parliament voted Tuesday to seek another independence referendum. Advocates argue that an EU departure against the will of Scottish voters has sufficiently changed the calculus since the last independence vote, in 2014, that a new one is justified.
Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland also have used the “Leave” vote to renew their decadeslong efforts to break away from the U.K.
May’s six- page letter to Tusk was conciliatory, stressing that Britons want to remain “committed partners and allies to our friends across the continent.”
Tusk said he will respond by Friday with draft negotiating guidelines for the remaining 27 member states to consider. They’ll meet April 29 to finalize their platform. Talks between the EU’s chief negotiator, French diplomat Michel Barnier, and his British counterpart, David Davis, are likely to start in the second half of May. Information for this article was contributed by Jill Lawless, Raf Casert, Danica Kirka, Siobhan Starrs, Jonathan Shenfield, Lorne Cook, Geir Moulson, Jan M. Olsen and Monika Scislowska of The Associated Press and by Griff Witte and Michael Birnbaum of The Washington Post.