The farce that is now unfolding before our very eyes in the UK regarding the decision of the government, following a public referendum, to leave the EU clearly shows the decision to leave to be manifestly wrong.
The reason that led the UK to vote leave the EU in the first place amounts to a nostalgic yearning for the imperial past of the UK, couched in anti-immigrant rhetoric and nationalist overtones, and is anything but rational. During the referendum, it was obvious that people – egged on by the sophism and downright false arguments of certain politicians – were not seeing the wood for the trees. They were being given the wrong information by those who should have known better but decided to impart misinformation based on idealistic rather than objective criteria.
Now, a couple of years down the line, the impracticality of leaving has started to become evident to several UK citizens and politicians because they have now started to identify with tangible concrete issues that are appearing as they decide to leave, such as employment, the economy, transport and hard issues like the Irish border. So much so that it is now being reported that there is a tangible swing in the voting population towards not leaving.
The options facing the UK government are rather clear cut now. First, call another referendum to see whether people still want to leave when it is so manifestly obvious that leaving is going to fry the economy. Second, they can try for an agreement that will give them access to a customs union, which will give them the advantage of preventing high duties on their products when entering the EU but over which rules they will have no control politically.
They also have an option of working out an agreement to remain in the EEA or European Economic Area where they can pay to access market rights as they wish. Norway has chosen this option. This will also ensure that there will be no hard Irish border, between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland with all the political ramifications that this gives rise to, in effect reversing the Good Friday agreement with all the fall-out that will come with that!
Finally, the fourth option is that the UK can opt to crash out of the EU without any agreement, so that only World Trade Organisation rules will regulate trade with the 450 million EU block. The UK has nothing to achieve from this, as its exports would become impractically expensive and hopelessly non-competitive.
The really funny bit is that, after crashing out, the UK is hoping to survive on bilateral agreements between it and members of the Commonwealth countries – countries which have been there for a long time already and there has been nothing to stop the UK from having reached these bilateral agreements before. The UK alone would not be able to cope with the large trading countries such as China and the US when it itself has decided to leave a large trading block of 500 million inhabitants which is the EU. The small fish never eat the big fish and the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts! There are economic and political realities that cannot be ignored.
The fact remains that all this is already history and should have served as an eye-opener! In the 1950s, when the Treaty of Rome was being set up, the EU precursor was signed by the six founder states. Britain opted to stay out of this initial union and tried to form its own European Free Trade Area (EFTA) which was not as closely knit socially and politically as the EU. The result was a manifest failure, as one EFTA member state after another left the EFTA agreement to join the EU agreement which was so manifestly more than a free trade agreement and was comprised of economic, social, environmental and political solidarity, the like of which had never been seen before.
Eventually, Britain itself was tempted to finally join the EU under the then Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath. The fact remains that if Britain was obliged to join the EU then, because it became economically difficult to live outside it alone, what has changed now to reverse this thinking? The answer is nothing because, if anything, the whole world order today shows that without political solidarity one cannot survive the current economic milieu.
The British were always unenthusiastic Europeans and one could say that, at best, they dragged their feet on all the European initiatives taken, as their politicians played out the them-and-us game and always blamed every unpopular decision on the EU and vice-versa, even when it was obvious that this was not the case at all.
Now it seems that the collective memory is being given a rest as the UK forgets the past and seeks to go back to a political order that can never again be a reality, with all the dire consequences that a hard Brexit will bring not only to Britain but particularly to England and its people. This is even more confusing when the Irish and the Scots have so manifestly rejected the decision to leave and when the world is more globalised than ever.
I am a firm believer in commonsense and I still hope that, in the coming months, a commonsense rationality will ultimately prevail! Keep in mind, however, that nationalist agendas alone can never obtain for the world what social and political solidarity can obtain, especially since we have already passed through this as the causes of the first and second world wars!
The current regression to nationalist causes will only be a step back in the two-step advances of what is obtained by supranational solidarity! The imperialism of the past is dead and no wishful thinking will ever make it return to the countries that have lost it. The king is dead, long live the king!
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