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The great challenge of Brexit has always been how to translate the idea of Brexit, a great and ideological idea of the British nation, into the language in which the divorce of the EU always had to take shape.
How do we deal with access to the EU fingerprint database? How many types of fish are there in the English Channel? What parts of the 1998 Northern Ireland Peace Agreement are implicitly based on EU law? Can the UK chemical industry survive without access to the European shared chemical data system?
Brexit was in this sense like any divorce. The marriage may have been concluded on great principles, but when you go to disarm it, you inevitably end up in the details. Who has the code for the bank box? Who should take the lawn mower? How should the nursery work?
One Brexit negotiator described the harsh debate as “one eyelash at a time”. In other words, it wasn’t fun. In London, everything used to take place in an underground conference center under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. In Brussels, at the Albert Borschette Center: a gray colossus in the EU Quarter. During the pandemic, they switched to the Cisco Webex digital video conferencing application.
High above all these thousands of hours of detail in windowless rooms loomed over political actors: in London, there was Boris Johnson with his promise to “end Brexit” and his well-known reluctance to delve into the details.
Even When the British prime minister announced the final deal on Christmas Eve, he did not seem to understand what a “non-tariff trade barrier” was. Countless journalists who have been forced to learn these concepts back and forth over the past four years have banged their heads on the table.
This is not to say that Boris Johnson has not won a major political victory. He has. He played strong when he resigned in July 2018 as foreign minister in Theresa May’s government. It was a way of positioning himself for the post of prime minister and a way of saying that he thought a different kind of Brexit was possible than the one Theresa May was negotiating.
Boris Johnson wanted a “tougher” Brexit. To put it bluntly, he was willing to accept more friction at the border and more hassle for businesses and individuals in exchange for a greater degree of national self-determination for Britain as a nation.
It has also succeeded. Today Boris Johnson celebrates Christmas and is happy.
But there is big questions remain. Brexit negotiators have spent thousands of hours solving the problem of how many mackerel French fishermen should be able to harvest, but the fishing industry still accounts for only 0.1 percent of the British economy.
The new agreement, for example, says very little about the service sector, which is so important to the UK.
There are also potential political problems. Just take a detail like that the UK has chosen to leave the Erasmus program. It has made it possible for British students to study in other European countries and for European students to exchange at British universities. Now it disappears. Scotland’s Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon immediately called this “cultural vandalism” by Boris Johnson. This small example points to two possible future headaches for the Prime Minister.
first young people. Brits under 45 tend to be against Brexit. When Boris Johnson has now ruled the country, not just against Brexit, but against a hard Brexit, he has dragged young people to a place they don’t want to be at all.
It would be strange if this did not become a political problem for the Conservatives as a party in the long run.
Second, there is the Scotland issue. In Scotland, there has never been a majority in favor of Brexit. And Scotland, as you know, is governed by the Scottish Nationalist Party, which wants to break completely with Great Britain. The question of Scottish independence will not go away. Furthermore, Boris Johnson’s Brexit means a solution for Northern Ireland that ultimately drives the region away from the UK in a purely economic way. This, of course, infuriates many Protestants in Northern Ireland.
Boris Johnson has achieved the political feat of uniting his own Conservative party around a new British relationship with the EU. The gods must know that this was not easy. From Margaret Thatcher to Theresa May: Every British Conservative Prime Minister since 1979 has fallen for the fact that they have managed to provoke a phalanx in their own party vis-à-vis the EU.
Boris Johnson has handled this life-threatening inner balancing act.
But it has failed to unite Britain as a country.
Read more:
This is how world leaders react to the Brexit decision
Löfven: With a Brexit deal, we are much better equipped
Pia Gripenberg: The tension is not completely over, will France approve the agreement?
Katrine Marçal: That’s why Brexit has become a 4.5-year marathon
