Brexit. The view from the South

I recently received an email from my Accountancy body expressing their concern about the Brexit process. That’s understandable. Anybody with an IQ above minus infinity knows that Brexit is the biggest political mistake since the Confederacy tried to leave the Union in 1860. That is a little unfair perhaps. I’m sure there are many people in the wastelands of Northern England who wanted nothing better than to give the establishment the middle finger. The sad truth is that they are cutting their nose off in the process.

My Accountancy body wanted to warn me that I may not be able to obtain an Auditing Certificate in the United Kingdom after 2020. I was devastated to hear this news. I qualified in Ireland in 1987 and have never found the need to obtain a British Auditing Certificate. But it was comforting to keep it in the locker if I ever wanted to semi retire to Sunderland and spend two days a week preparing accounts for people on zero-hour contracts within the gig economy.

The other thing this email made me realise is that Brexit’s tentacles can still find me, even down here in New Zealand. I also have a bank account in the UK and I’m watching the value of this drift away like snow in spring.

That being said, I have to admit that I’m a Brexit obsessive. I’ve always been interested in the mechanics and theatre of politics. I’ve attended election counts, poured over results in obscure constituencies and to take a recent example, spent far too much time reading about the congressional campaign in the 9^th district of Texas. Brexit ticks all the boxes for political nerds. Brain numbing complexity, outright lies being bellowed with gay abandon and the slow car crash of a country destroying itself on live TV.

I read everything I can on the subject in the Guardian and the Irish Times (while safe within my liberal echo chamber) and listen to Brexitcast and the regular reports on New Zealand radio where the presenters take turns to laugh at their former Mother country. Part of my fascination is that this is a process that will barely impact me but will affect all my friends and family in Ireland and the UK. So, I thought it was time that I wrote down my thoughts on the subject.

Brexit at its heart is about immigration and that gnawing feeling that somebody on the outside is responsible for all your ills. At a simple level, the free market fundamentalists in British politics (both Labour and Tory) introduced the free movement of eastern European labour to drive down wages and working standards. When the locals got angsty, the British political system conscripted their old private school buddies in the media to blame some shadowy cartel in Brussels for everything that was going wrong. It’s a lie on the level of Hitler convincing the German people that Jewish peasants in Poland were responsible for the humiliation of Treaty of Versailles.

The British establishment thought they were getting away with it. An endless supply of cheap labour producing goods and service that they could then sell into the European market at massive profits while simultaneously blaming the Europeans for the social ills this caused. The mistake they made was to pretend that they were democrats who cared about the feelings of the general public. They called a referendum they never thought they would lose and which was designed to be a safety valve to allow the lumpen proletariat to blow off some steam. They miscalculated and the rest is history. History that unfortunately the Irish and British people now have to live through.

Every country has concerns about immigration. Ireland, for example went from zero immigration to 10% of the country being foreign born within twenty years. Not everyone welcomed this. A former justice minister took away the right to citizenship of kids born in Ireland to foreign parents. A decision that made zero difference to immigration but will lead to many elite athletes and footballers declaring their allegiance to Nigeria rather than the country they were born in.

In the early days of immigration to Ireland My Mother used to say “I don’t mind the blacks but I don’t like those Bulgarians.” There wasn’t many Bulgarians in Ireland at the time but they were lots of Romanian gypsies. Which just goes to prove, that is you are going to be racist, you should at least be specific. Britain had the same issue. The Brexit campaign brought up immigration and the protection of borders constantly. For those who didn’t like immigrants, this brought to mind Islamic terrorists and Pakistani taxi firms involved in child abuse. The irony is that this immigration came from former British colonies and not from the EU. But the seed was sown.

I fear now that no deal is the most likely outcome and that Britain will crash out of the European Union on March 29^th next year. The reason I say this is that all other possibilities, including Teresa May’s deal and an extension of Article 50 require a majority vote or consensus among the other 27 countries in the EU. “No Deal” just has to plod along and hope everyone else keeps arguing with each other. This is becoming more likely every day.

There is an assumption that nobody wants a “No Deal” scenario but this isn’t true. The nutcases within the European Research group and their backers within the Russian troll industry would like nothing better than the chaos that will come with crashing out. Jacob Rees Moss and his cronies would love to build a new Jerusalem from the embers of modern Britain and the Russians would be happy too.

I hope I’m wrong. I have too many British and Irish friends to take any pleasure from the misery that a no deal will result in. But nobody wanted World War One to happen either. It just did but because nobody shouted stop.