Ah now, for the day that’s in it.
Five years ago, on 31 January 2020, the UK left the European Union.
The vote had been taken in 2016.
However, Prime Minister Thersa May did not invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty until 29 March 2017.
This meant that the UK gave formal notice to the European Council of its intention to withdraw from the EU to allow withdrawal negotiations to begin.
For the adults in Brussels, this meant facing a bizarre collection of spoofers from the state that once dominated the planet.
The whole process seemed interminable.
Thankfully, our gallant allies in Europe were advised by their Irish colleagues that getting the Brits to leave was a long and difficult process!
As I have written here before, I always thought that Brexit would be a slow-moving Suez crisis for our once-omnipotent neighbours.
Just like that ill-judged intervention in 1956, it would be a wake-up call regarding their reduced status in the world.
From that glorious morning in my father’s town, as I walked into Westport, I was also convinced that the UK leaving the EU would somehow put the partition of this island back on the political agenda.
Of course, I could not have envisaged just how gloriously the Bradaish in Narne Arne would be thrown under the wheeler of the big red Brexit bus with the sea border.
Observe the sons of Ulster queueing up at Post Offices in East Belfast to get application forms for an Irish passport!
The conundrum of being quintessentially British but wanting to retain free movement within Europe even reached some Ibrox chaps.
It’s all just too deliciously cruel for a novel.
Then there are the other queues- the ones in airports.
It has become snigger material here in Ireland to return from Continental Europe with stories of passing by large lines of dishevelled Brits.
Of course, not all of those on the neighbouring island were carried away with delusions of sunlit uplands in 2016.
James O’Brien of LBC has been a constant voice point in putting the madness of leaving the biggest trading block on the planet in exchange for tariff-free Tim Tams from Oz.
Here he is today in fine form.
Despite the noises coming out of the current British government about a “re-set” in UK-EU relations, there is no real appetite in Brussels to re-visit any of this shitshow.
Apart from anything else, the possibility of Prime Minister Farage in five years cannot be discounted.
Consequently, there isn’t any basis for the EU to trust Britain’s trustworthiness on the matter.
At last, listening to James O’B, I’ve found a Brexit benefit, the sale of frying pans to smash ourselves in the face has rocketed, and the fact that we wear them out so quickly gives a constant stream of ‘Frying Pan’ sales!
I agree with the rest of you here, it’s an unmitigated disaster that even the rich moved their businesses to another country. I’m thinking of Dyson and his friends, Dyson, who voted for Brexit, blamed everyone one else for his companies bad sales but not what he voted for. My cousins who live in England voted for the thing. I’ll never understand them.
It was a vote engineered by rich men to keep the poor poor, playing on raciscm
I suspect if Starmer’s motley crew of prancers, dancers and chancers were ever to get the right-wing tabloid-driven ‘crisis’ of immigration under control (which is highly unlikely) then attention might turn to the fact that the promused ‘Brexit dividend’ is in fact the opportunity to pay more tax for longer in return for reduced public services, broken health, education and welfare systems, and greater vulnerability to market volatility, trade wars and the unpredictable whims of the Madman Across The Water and the crackpots in the background operating him like the ventriloquist’s dummy that he is. My own Irish passport was secured a couple of years ago, when I concluded that sadly there was no chance of a Scottish Passport being anything other than a novelty item sold in tartan tat shops during my lifetime.
The purpose of Brexit was not to leave the EU but to ensure nobody else did . The UK will be back and the desire to leave gone for generations. The UK is not an isolationist state but a globalist one and their role as the sacrificial lamb as warning to others will be well rewarded.
The UK is not a country & it NEVER will be, it is a union of countries ONLY TILL IT ISN’T.
Can you apply for political asylum on the grounds that everywhere you look you are surrounded by fucking idiots?
Asking for…eh, Me.
Spot On!…..
listened to james this morning , an absolute belter of a show , the lies they all told to get brexit through and they all ended up in the lords , was unfortunate not to hear fish and chips woman as i had to go out
The term British is on its way out, little Engerlend will not be to happy when the are inevitably put in their place by a Scotland that has had enough of their ‘UN-exceptional’ bull💩
Brexit remains a monument to British ‘exceptionalism’. Exceptional stupidity. There is something fundamentally wrong with a country where Johnson could become Prime Minister. After 150 years of compulsory education and a century of universal suffrage the British opted to stab themselves in the back. Yeats had them to rights: ‘The best lack all conviction, The worst are filled with passionate intensity.’
Scotland voted nearly 2:1 to Remain. Brexit is primarily an exercise in AngloBritish exceptionalism and is ongoing. A Reform government at Westminster is next stop on the line in this process.
The continuation of the catalyst that will be the end of the union, the day Scotland puts little Engerlend in it’s place, is the day SCOTLAND WILL NEVER LOOK BACK. 🏴☮️🇪🇺