Wee Ginger Dug

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.

The first round of negotiations between the EU and the UK last year ended with the humiliating capitulation of the UK. Remember how Jean Claude Juncker and Michel Barnier were going to learn that Theresa May was a bloody difficult woman. Remember how David Davis went into the first round of negotiations insisting that it was all very simple and that the EU would capitulate before the logic and resolution of the strong British position. Only it turned out that the only thing that was bloody difficult about Theresa May was the bloody difficulty of getting her to say what she wanted, while David Davis has gone through the EU negotiations doing a very good impression of a man who has a very good grasp of the contents of the sandwich he’s having for lunch, but of precious little else. And that was supposed to be the easy bit. The hard negotiations start this month. They don’t look any more likely to end up as a resounding success for the forces of Brexitdom.