Get over it

I can’t bring myself to get over-excited about what happens between Boris Johnson’s dinner date in Brussels tonight with EU supremo Ursula von der Leyen. Ostensibly, he’s there to try to bring about a breakthrough in talks about a trade deal with the EU when the Brexit transition ends in a couple of weeks. Only a fool would believe that explanation. It’s far more likely that Johnson has arrived with a pre-ordained conclusion to the meeting, one by which he will either show his genius as a negotiator to conclude a dramatic deal or to flounce away telling Johnny Foreigner to sod off. Either way, we end up with a damaging hard Brexit or a potentially disastrous no deal Brexit. What’s to get excited about?

It’s not as if any so-called trade deal will matter much to this country. We’re leaving the single market, we’re leaving the customs union and free movement is ending. None of that stuff is going to change, deal or no deal.

Always the saddest part of Brexit for me was the end of free movement. We are throwing away the right to live, love, study, work and retire abroad for what exactly? My guess is because many of us thought the end of free movement only applied to foreigners. Indeed, the BBC’s laughably titled fact-checking department described free movement on its website as “the right of EU citizens to live and work in the UK.”

Judging from the hysteria on the pages of the Daily Mail and other assorted scandal sheets, that was what they thought, hence their filthy lies in recent days about how these new EU laws would bugger up the lives of plucky Brits who merely wanted to continue to – here we go again – live, love, study, work and retire elsewhere in the EU27.  But free movement is going by the end of the year. And if we didn’t realise the end of free movement actually affected us, too, then don’t blame us remoaners. You won, we lost. Get over it.