Posts From Nick

Brexit, Finally

January 1, 2021 The Brexit vote happened while we were living in Shoreditch in 2016. It has always seemed like a misguided idea to me, based mostly on hatred of immigrants and an unrealistic nostalgia for the days of the British Empire, which the Conservatives called “sovereignty”. If you want, you can read my endless thoughts on the subject in nickinshoreditch.com. I really ought to collect them all under one heading sometime.

Once it happened, it turned out to be impossible to overturn, even though the Leave side lied through their teeth and may have been helped by Russian hackers in an election that was far from a landslide and featured many voters using the opportunity to simply snub the London elite by voting for something that everyone though would lose. But once Brexit won, regardless of how, it was like an unstoppable lava flow and the issue was how bad it was going to be.

So, how bad is it? Well, it isn’t as bad as it might have been if the UK had simply crashed out of the EU with no agreement at all, a disaster which seemed possible or even likely at some points, but maybe was just a negotiating lever the whole time. But you would think that, given four and a half years to figure this all out, they might have come up with something better than what they did.

To cite one example, while the British negotiators spent endless negotiating capital protecting the fishing rights of a fairly small fishing industry, they did nothing to deal with the services industries, especially financial services, which was as much as 80% of the British economy. London became an economic behemoth because the various licenses that you need to operate, once obtained in London, were good all over Europe. No more. I’m sure that this was a difficult thing to negotiate, since the EU countries and major cities were and are all anxious to grab pieces of this business. But it still the biggest piece of the British economy, so you would have though that they would have done anything to protect it. Now Boris Johnson is hinting that they will deal with the service industry in future negotiations (when Britain’s negotiating leverage will be even more tenuous than it was over the past four years.)

And just on the issue of how to deal with EU expats living in the UK and Brits living and working in the EU, one would have though that this should have been low hanging fruit in the deal. But, as far as I can tell, the deal is unsatisfactory in this area. I suspect that hated of foreigners which was the basis of some of the Brexit support had something to do with this. But it seems like a disaster for students, businessmen and holiday travelers.

The structure of the deal makes it incredibly likely that Northern Ireland will leave the UK, probably to merge with Ireland, not that this is a terrible thing. The need to avoid a hard border in Ireland led Britain essentially to agree to a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK in the Irish Sea. The Conservatives stabbed their Northern Ireland supporters (whose Parliamentary representatives kept Teresa May and the Toris in power) in the back, demonstrating how little Northern Ireland meant to them. I’d say the only question is whether Northern Ireland beats Scotland out the door. And in five or ten years, when the “United Kingdom” consists of just England and Wales, will the Welsh want to suffer on as the poor cousins of the group?