United Kingdom: What has Brexit delivered?
“After almost half a century of increasingly oppressive, authoritarian rule by the European Union,” Britain is “free at last,” said Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express. The 1,200page trade pact that Prime Minister Boris Johnson secured with Brussels late last month “means the return of genuine sovereignty, without which a nation is emasculated.” By clinching the agreement just a few days before a transition period ended on Dec. 31—Britain left the EU last January, but trade and security relations remained unchanged until New Year’s Day—Johnson averted a potentially disastrous no-deal Brexit. The prime minister “showed iron resolve, never backing down in the face of Brussels’ threats,” and we can now “forge our own path to economic prosperity.” No longer will we rely on imported EU labor; instead, British firms will train and employ British citizens. EU bureaucrats and judges won’t be able to dictate our laws. Our relationship with Europe will be one of “cooperation, not subjugation.”
There’s nothing to celebrate about this deal, said Dominic
Grieve in Independent.co.uk. While no new tariffs will be slapped on the $400 billion worth of goods we export annually to the Continent, our departure from the EU single market means that U.K. firms will now have to complete reams of customs paperwork expected to cost them some $10 billion a year. Our fishermen feel betrayed, because EU boats will have to reduce their catch in British waters by only a quarter. National security will suffer, since we’ve lost access to an EU information system that U.K. police used 600 million times last year alone to get data on serious risks from crime and terrorism. Worst of all, “we are now rule takers, in a weaker position to our much larger partner,” forced to abide by most of its regulations or else lose our few trading privileges. And the economy will suffer a painful blow, said Martin Vander Weyer in The Spectator. The deal doesn’t cover the service sector, which makes up 80 percent of our economy and 50 percent of our exports. Financial services firms’ access to EU markets “now depends on compliance with the different requirements of each member state.”
“Brexit is done—but it is not over,” said The Guardian in an editorial. This rupture was opposed “by majorities in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and London and other cities, as well as by most young people and most graduates,” and they won’t be silent. Scotland is so eager to rejoin the EU that it may opt to leave the U.K. altogether. And who knows what will happen with Northern Ireland, which now enjoys frictionless trade with the Republic of Ireland and other EU nations but has a customs barrier with the rest of Britain? The legacy of Brexit could well be the disintegration of the U.K. Have we restored some small measure of sovereignty at the cost of losing much of our country? That “would be a terrible price to pay.”