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London. Boris Johnson achieved his goal. Your country will finally disassociate itself from the EU. Brexit was his battle cry since the spring of 2016. Even before last December’s elections, he had promised that he would finally “provoke” the exit.
The following month, the UK was seen handing over its membership card in Brussels. Now, on Friday night, the British are also leaving the internal market and the customs union, the Union’s force field. Johnson believes this will complete his mission in the Brexit saga.
The British prime minister regards the deal reached with the EU at Christmas as a personal triumph. He believes that he has given his compatriots “control of their fortunes” without depriving them of commercial access to the great market on the other side of the English Channel. The duty-free movement of goods with the EU zone should now be combined with simultaneous own competitiveness, with new commercial privileges. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is already forecasting good returns for “risk-taking” capital.
The conservative right, which has been in charge in London since the referendum and especially since Johnson’s accession to power, has never been concerned simply with resisting “the Brussels bureaucracy.” His old dream of a “Singapore on the Thames” characterizes the direction that diehards take on the road to the “new shores”, despite the fact that a large number of neutral experts and the central bank of England have proposed a considerable price for this Brexit with the latest cost estimates. are.
They prophesy that Britain’s economic power will collapse by 4 percent a year for a long time, in addition to the huge current losses from the pandemic. It is feared that the UK’s trade volume will shrink, investments will fail and the financial world, so important to London, will get into trouble.
Many jobs in the country threaten to disappear, according to these predictions. New border congestion and bottlenecks are expected, shortages of personnel in important areas, crises in the health system and in universities, cuts in connections with the continent, losses in global influence, complications of all kinds.
Interpretation of Mays
In fact, Boris Johnson himself had to admit at the end of the holidays that his deal “may not go as far as we would have liked.” In the dispute over state subsidies, for example, and on the question of future labor, social and environmental standards, London appears to have relented at the end of the negotiations. The EU arm still extends beyond what Brexit supporters would like. Northern Ireland remains in the area of European jurisdiction. There is no data exchange. Johnson has been unable to obtain guarantees from the City of London. And British fishermen feel “betrayed and sold.”
It’s remarkable that it had to come to that. Not even Brexit supporters, including Johnson, had initially called for an exit from EU markets. By their own claim, they were only concerned with saving membership dues, a greater degree of political self-determination, and, yes, also keeping strangers away. Many voters worried about the better life that they had been promised. That without a total decoupling from Europe, Brexit “would not ultimately be a Brexit” was only Theresa May’s later interpretation of the referendum.
Boris Johnson adopted this idea of the need for a “hard Brexit”, served with much nostalgia and patriotic slogans, from his predecessor. In the end, he headed for an agreement with the EU, which actually means a worsening of the situation in his country, but which has allowed him to present himself as a defender of unrestricted sovereignty. It remains to be seen how much this will cost your country.
In any case, Johnson’s conviction that Britain has solved the virulent “European question” once and for all, which has been virulent for centuries, is probably wrong. In a country that remains deeply divided and whose youth is decidedly pro-European, one cannot speak of “national renewal” through this kind of Brexit.
