Brexit. Is it done yet?

A couple years ago I was looking for new Podcasts as I was growing tired of the ones I’d been listening to for years.

I had noticed a trend similar to the bars in Bangkok. They lure you in with innocent promises before demanding money with menaces once you had made yourself comfortable. Advertisements started appearing with increasing regularity, pleas for voluntary donations that would shame charity muggers and teasing you with clips of what was available behind the paywall.

I found myself gravitating towards the comforting shores of the BBC. They maintain a public service principle that applies not only to the British people who pay the BBC licence fee but to those of us in their former colonies. That was how I stumbled upon Brexitcast.

As is obvious from the name, this is a Podcast about Brexit and given that it comes from the BBC it is pretty balanced. It has the rabidly pro Tory Laura Kuenssberg on one side, and the pro-European Katya Adler on the other. I lean towards Katya of course but I enjoy listening to Laura Kuenssberg because she balances up the echo chamber stuff I read in the Guardian and The Irish Times.

It means that although I live as far from the UK as possible, I’m as up to date on Brexit as a resident of Birmingham. I wonder sometimes why I’m so obsessed by it. Is it because I lived in the UK for seven years or because I grew up five kilometres from what has now become the land border between the United Kingdom and the European Community? Actually, I don’t think it’s either of these. I’m just a political nerd who loves watching a country destroy itself.

Brexit is the sort of thing that will be studied by Political Science students in years to come and their reactions will be like Economics students today who study the Dutch Tulip Mania in the 17^th Century. Amazement that people could ever be so stupid and yet strangely fascinated at the same time. It is patronising to tell the people who voted for Brexit that they are idiots. But I’d say the same about the people who voted for Trump or the ones who vote for right wing parties everywhere. And I do this safe in the knowledge that none of them will ever read this.

A British friend once told me that the biggest trick the Tories ever played was to convince the working class that they cared about them. I think Brexit trumps that. There are deep rooted problems in Britain but hardly any of them are caused by the European Union. Take immigration for example. If you scratch below the surface, those British people who don’t like immigrants are usually upset by brown people who come from ex British colonies and not Europeans. The ones who are upset by trade are annoyed because traditional manufacturing that powered the towns of Northern England has vanished. But it has moved to China and not the European Union.

Britain had a lot of problems in 2016. People used the EU referendum as a chance to protest against these issues. But none of them will be resolved by leaving. They are like a miserable teenager who yearned to leave home because they thought that their parents were the root cause of their misery. Only to find themselves in a rat infested squat with the dawning realisation that their spots and bad breadth were a bigger put off to the opposite sex than their Dad’s lame jokes and their Mother’s nagging.

They finally left the European Union on 31^st January 2020. Or at least, they moved into the next transitional stage. Leavers will boast that the sky has not fallen in, as though this was any measure of success. You could equally say that none of the promised land of independence has materialised yet. The truth is that Brexit will be a slow poison. The coal mines and steel works of Northern England will not reappear. There will be no queues of scruffy Englanders waiting to take fruit picking jobs at minimum wage.

Few things are predicable with certainty when it comes to the political and social future. But it’s hard to see how Brexit will turn out positively for the British, at least for the next twenty years or so. They may turn themselves into a Canada, bordering a huge trading empire but having a positive outlook to immigration and the World generally. But it’s more likely they will become like Singapore. Inward looking, hostile to its neighbours and a playground for the wealthy and a prison for the less well off.

I shouldn’t really care to be honest. I live in New Zealand after all. But Brexit will impact my friends and family in Ireland. That border I grew up beside is likely to become a centre of tension and hostility in the coming years.

And then there are my friends in Britain. An Irish journalist once said that the English are fine on an individual level. They only become problematic in groups, like at football matches or on ships on their way to the Falklands.

I tend to agree. Some of my best friends are English and all of them are Remainers. I really feel for them as they must think that they fell asleep on referendum night and then they woke up in a different country. It must be tough to look on half your fellow countrymen and realise that you’ve got nothing in common with them.

Brexitcast continues although they are rebranding it as Newscast as the public are sick and tired off the word Brexit, I’ll continue listening because I love the BBC and I’m a political junky. My next blog will be on New Zealand politics. Nothing as exciting as leaving the world’s largest trading block or inviting the Political wing of a terrorist group into government. But I’ll do my best to come up with something juicy.