by Paul Kavanagh
We’re just a few weeks in, and already the Brexit process is going as well as a teenage camping trip in a slasher movie. We’re at that bit in the movie where the spurned former lover has laid traps and cut off the line of escape and is sharpening his machete while Theresa and her gang of bullies are still taunting the Scottish kid, blithely unaware of the terrible fate that awaits them. They’re still arrogantly confident that they’re the biggest and baddest kids in the woods, little realising that they’re messing with people far bigger than they are. People who are looking at them through the undergrowth and who have anticipated every move they’re going to make.
To be honest, it was always predictable that Brexit was going to descend into a horrific chaotic mess, it’s just that few expected it to happen so quickly. I thought it would take at least a couple of months, but within a couple of days of Theresa May’s letter invoking Article 50 and triggering Brexit was delivered to the EU the British establishment was utterly blindsided by a response from the EU that anyone who had been paying attention had been predicting ever since the EU referendum last year. Any Brexit deal that includes Gibraltar is going to be subject to a Spanish veto. Cue shock and horror of the Freddy Krueger variety in the pages of the right wing British press and calls to form an armada and set off to war. Outraged that Spain had done something that it has been saying for a year that it was going to do, former minister in the Thatcher government Norman Tebbitt suggested that the UK should negotiate with the Catalans, to which a Spanish politician retorted that the EU could very well negotiate directly with Scotland.