Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
1 year and counting to Brexit: So much to do, so little time
LONDON — Britain’s exit from the European Union has been likened to putting toothpaste back in the tube. But it’s more like trying to separate the fluoride from the paste — complicated and messy.
Thursday marks 365 days until Britain officially leaves the EU. The March 29, 2019, departure will end a 46-year marriage that has entwined the economies, legal systems and peoples of Britain and 27 other European countries.
British Prime Minister Theresa May was on a whistle-stop tour of the United Kingdom’s four corners — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — to promise a Brexit that unites the country.
“Brexit provides us with opportunities,” May said at a weaving firm in southwest Scotland. “It is in our interests to come together and really seize these opportunities for the future.”
For all her optimism, there are a thousand complex issues to settle..
Britain formally announced its intention to leave the EU a year ago, triggering a two-year countdown. University of Manchester political science professor Rob Ford said that time frame is “ludicrously short.”
“That’s not sufficient time to disentangle 40 years of political, social and economic entanglement,” he said. “Even with the best will in the world — which isn’t the spirit in which these negotiations have been conducted — it couldn’t happen.”
Across the English Channel in Brussels, the chief European Parliament Brexit official, Guy Verhofstadt, listed a few of the many areas where the two sides must strike a deal: fishing, aviation, research and academic exchanges, nuclear cooperation and the handling of radioactive materials. Failure could leave British hospitals unable to offer radiation treatment and British planes stranded on the tarmac.
“In every one of these fields it will be necessary to find a new arrangement,” Verhofstadt said. Britain will turn into a third country “and a third country cannot have the same advantages as a member state.”
The EU has repeated that warning ever since Britain voted in June 2016 to leave: Brexit is going to hurt. That applies especially to future trade and economic ties, which the two sides have barely begun to negotiate.
May has said she wanted “the broadest and deepest possible partnership” through a free-trade deal unlike any other in the world. EU leaders warn Britain that it cannot “cherry-pick” the benefits of membership without the obligations.
The two sides have given themselves until October to agree on the outlines of a deal, so the EU and national parliaments can sign off on it before Brexit day.
Nine months passed between Britain voting to leave the EU and the triggering of the two-year countdown. More delay followed when May called a snap election to strengthen her hand in Brexit talks — only to lose her majority in Parliament and much of her authority as leader.
Her government now relies on support from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, which has further complicated talks on the most intractable of all Brexit issues — maintaining the near-invisible border between the EU’s Ireland and the U.K.’s Northern Ireland.
Negotiations between Britain and the EU finally began in earnest last summer. Their main achievement so far is a transition period that will last until the end of 2020.
During the transition, Britain will continue to pay into EU coffers and follow the bloc’s rules, though it will lose its voice in decision-making.
While Brexit has divided Britain, it has brought out unity in the fractious EU.
“After Brexit, everybody thought there would be a sort of domino effect,” Verhofstadt said. “A Dexit, the Danish going out; Nexit, the Dutch going out; a Frexit even, the French going out. What we have seen is exactly the opposite. Since Brexit, we see that people again have a positive feeling about the EU.
“They are saying, we will not be so stupid as to leave the EU, to destroy the EU.”