What have we learned since Brexit? Anything useful?
Don’t you love the post-Brexit Remoaner whinges? Oh woe is me! I can’t buy courgettes anymore! A far cry from: “the UK economy will disappear overnight in a puff of blue and gold stars”
Seriously, though, what have we learned in the few weeks since we left?
Well, short-term problems certainly seem to have affected our imports and exports as businesses get used to the paperwork, but that will be resolved quickly. After all, we are used to such paperwork when importing and exporting to the rest of the world. As far as I understand it, neither Iceland nor Norway have many problems in that regard.
What we have really learned though, is that the EU is not interested in dealing with the UK as a free and sovereign nation. They have been petty (confiscating ham sandwiches), obstructive (holding up produce at the border for no reason) and frankly dangerous – invoking article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, after complaining for the last 4 years that the UK would put the GFA at risk if they didn’t agree to the restrictive terms. Well now we see their complaints for what they really are: another way to break up the Union, and put the boot in.
But of course, they overplayed their hand this time. The UK government is actively examining the continued damage and the increase in tensions. They will soon have no option but to invoke article 16 and do away with the protocol altogether. As exports to the EU from the UK have drastically fallen due to the overly strict interpretation the EU has decided to apply, abandoning the fake FTA with the EU will not be a great hardship, if that’s what it takes. In any case, we owe NI much more than we owe the EU.
What else? The vaccine debacle in the EU and the amazing success of the British efforts. Not only has the EU failed to secure the amounts necessary to vaccinate their population and save lives, they have actively sabotaged the only vaccine (AZ/Oxford) that could have saved them.
The Handelsblatt article that suggested that the AZ vaccine didn’t work was based on false data. It was also immediately denounced by German scientists, but the German government decided to ban the drug for all over-65s and the French now believe Macron that it is “quasi-ineffective” for that age-group. We know, of course that it is , in fact, very effective as we have real-world data. Needless to say, the UK, more agile and able to act alone was in a far better position than the sluggish and highly incompetent EU Commission.
So now the EU is in a pickle. It’s reopening will be significantly delayed, possibly past summer. Its sovereign debt crisis, already acute before Covid, is now barely held together by the ECB who’s quantitive easing has gone into overdrive. Soon not even the ECB will be able to help and a major debt restructure is in the offing – putting the richer countries in the invidious and unpopular position of bailing out the club med countries. The extreme-right and extreme-left parties are going to have a field day!
Meanwhile, the UK is busy agreeing more and more free-trade agreements with countries who are interested in doing business with us. Soon our fish will be flown to Asia – the biggest fish market in the world. Our financial services will also reorganise to be more competitive with the rest of the world, dumping the ridiculous EU MIFID 2 regulations, putting the EU stock-exchanges at an even greater disadvantage, meaning capital for EU businesses will be harder to obtain and much more expensive.
All this in just two short months.
What have we learned? Thank God we left!