by palu kavanagh
In less than 400 days, the UK will leave the European Union and enter into the gods know what. According to the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, it will be the sunlit uplands of a gloriously reestablished Great Britain, boldly making advantageous trade deals with the USA and China who will quail before the might of the UK. It will be as though the Empire was never lost. In the imaginations of Conservative Brexiteers, the UK possesses more economic and political heft all by itself than it does when it’s a part of a bloc of 28 EU member states. It’s rather like imagining that a balanced set of scales with a heavy weight on one side and a pile of stones on the other will swing towards the stones when you remove all but one of them.