Now that Brexit is here, Brits are getting heated

Brexit is happening. That’s a fact. My rush of pity comes solely from the bewildered reaction of many Brits to the perfectly predictable painful things that are now happening to them personally. Every day brings a new revelation. They are either irate or have already fainted.

This would be called wishful thinking if it were thinking but it isn’t. It’s feeling. In the battle between thinking and feeling, Americans went with their feelings when they voted for Trump in 2016. “How do you feel about that?” is an American question. “What do you think about that?” is always a better one and has served Canadians well.

It may be that Prime Minister Boris Johnson didn’t warn voters because he wanted Brexit to look easy-peasy and then life would be so miserable that the nation would gather around him, Churchill reborn. But he knew. And Brits knew.

But they made the mistake of thinking the grim day would never come when life would became more difficult and more … poor.

For instance, it is no longer cheap and easy for Brits to order goods from the EU, the golden continent next to which their ship was berthed. Online orders now incur VAT (their version of HST) charged by exporters, many of whom can’t be bothered with the paperwork so will no longer sell to the U.K.

Larger orders will attract import duty (up to 25 per cent) plus 20 per cent VAT plus the courier’s fee, which means that a French sweater will now cost 40 per cent more than it did on Dec. 31, 2020.

The Conservative thinking is that Brits will hyperventilate at this and begin to buy British sweaters, which are not cashmere but an itchy (and possibly Scottish) wool specially woven to torment the wearer and remind him that wool is too good for the likes of you so wear it and shut up. Or wear a shirt underneath. Which means you’re too hot.

When your dad grew up after the war, he’d have paid money he didn’t have for the chance to be too hot inside a room that didn’t even have a fire in it or a metered heater you had to put coins into but was broken anyway so you slept in the same bed as your gran.

Anyway it’s moot because Scotland wants to leave the U.K. and when it does its sweaters will cost you 40 per cent more anyway, like those fancy French sweaters you used to buy back when you were too daft to understand that Britain was going retro and not in a good way.

Homeowners in Whitfield, a tiny village near Dover in Kent, are terribly upset because they woke up one recent morning to discover that the huge hedgerowed fields that backed onto their property were being paved for a giant Brexit customs clearance site (a “White Cliffs inland border facility”) that would accommodate 1,200 trucks at any given time.

At least 10 of these border sites will be built near the coast and a massive transport truck parking lot is being built 35 kilometres away, so pretty Whitfield and neighbouring Guston are becoming something of a truck sandwich. Make that a Cronut; they are surrounded.

Those fields contain Roman roads that are nice to walk on. No more.

The residents, many of them elderly and in dearly loved forever homes, say they feel “trapped,” “betrayed,” and “devastated,” despite the fact that living near white cliffs in Dover on the coast nearest France made certain Brexit adjustments (also the Normandy invasion) very likely indeed, especially if they wanted sweaters of every nation.

Kent, and in particular the ferry port of Dover, overwhelmingly voted Yes in former PM David Cameron’s Brexit referendum. This is what they wanted. This is what they are getting. They are not happy.

Strangely, Johnson’s Conservative government itself isn’t adjusting any better. In an act of extraordinary and pointless hauteur, it is refusing to give full diplomatic status to the EU’s ambassador to the U.K., saying it only gives such status to nation states, not conglomerations of nations.

As the Guardian points out, this is absurd, given that everybody, including the U.K., gives ambassador status to pretty much anyone who wants it, including officials from economic groups like the World Trade Organization.

The British government is now saying, more or less, that the EU does not exist, which it does, and it does not speak with one voice, even though doing that is the whole point of the EU.

You can call these growing pains, but they are something worse: a refusal to accept that Brexit was a terrible mistake.

Now Brits can’t get in the short lineups at Calais or ParisCharles De Gaulle airport, can’t send off their disaffected offspring to Europe to get jobs.

They’re all stuck at home complaining, like everyone else on what now looks like a dreary tattered island, and worse, no one’s listening. The world no longer cares.