Most people will, no doubt, were pleased that Brexit finally got done. Having left the EU back in January, we now leave the transition period with a wafer-thin trade deal in which Boris Johnson appears to have caved in on every major issue. But a deal, I suppose, is a deal and 4.5 years has seen us maintain a few things we already had as EU members and lose everything else. The one positive is that the motorway blow out no deal Brexit has been avoided and now we face the future with an endless slow puncture.
The timing is no accident. Drag everything out until the day before Christmas and present Johnson as a Churchillian hero, having fulfilled The Will Of The People. As vast swaths of the country have always bought into Johnson’s lies, doubtless they will buy into this one, too.
If anyone thinks he is Winston Churchill, it’s the nicotine-stained man frog Nigel Farage, the odious establishment English nationalist, who has somehow led the debate, such as it is, on Europe, without once winning a first past the post election in Britain. Indeed, today Farage announced: “The war is over, it has gone on for decades in this country… the fight over whether we should be part of the European structures or not.” Yes, Farage actually described the whole thing as a war when the whole point of the EU is unity. He is the very worst of us, a thoroughly modern Mosley.
I’m a little old fashioned and when I holiday in, say, Greece, I never regard my hosts as somehow being the enemy, never mind being at war with them. Far from it. I always believed in breaking down the barriers between countries, not knocking them down. I love the idea of being free to live, love, study, work and finally retire anywhere in what used to be the EU28. Freedom of movement, I felt, was a wonderful thing. But Farage and Johnson convinced enough of us to vote to end free movement, suggesting it only applied to foreigners. Now, we have torched the prospects of future generations enjoying the same freedoms mine enjoyed. I think it’s very sad, but what’s done is done. We have left the EU and we have now pulled up the drawbridge to Europe.
Everything in future will be slightly worse. People who worked hard to gain qualifications for work will now find they are not recognised in the EU27, even if they could visas to work there. And on and on it goes. Ask a leaver to name the so called benefits of Brexit and they still can’t come up with anything, apart from sovereignty, and even then they can’t explain how it would benefit their lives. That’s because it doesn’t benefit them and it never will. Any future trade deal with anyone will mean ceding some aspect of sovereignty. Negotiations are always give and take, except of course for this final Brexit ‘deal’ which will, from the UK’s point of view, be all give.
Even Johnson buckled in the end when faced with a hard no deal Brexit, the clean break favoured by both the Brexit headbangers of the Tory/UKIP right and the hard of thinking. The cliff edge has been avoided for a long-term decline that will damage the country and its people, slowly but surely, until most of the people who voted for Brexit are six-feet under.
I’ll never stop being pro-European. But my side lost the battles and we lost the wars. To the victor belong the spoils. What the losers must do is make sure the victors own what comes next and when things go wrong, as they surely will, we remind them with these words: “Get over it: you won.”
