Brexit Unfolded: How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to)

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Of all those whose lives have been damaged by Brexit, EU citizens who were living in the UK, most of whom were not even entitled to vote in the referendum, along with UK citizens living in the EU, some of whom could not vote, have surely been the worst and most directly affected. If they can genuinely show that some of these claims are false, it becomes easier for them dismiss those which are true. Moreover, although EU citizens’ rights are overseen by the Independent Monitoring Authority (IMA), which is formally an “executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice”, it would seem that, as with the Post Office case, the effectiveness of political and public accountability is limited.

So, at the very least, we are a Meanwhile, Simon Berry, Chairman of Berry Bros and Rudd wine importers, a keen Brexiter who has campaigned for the re-introduction of champagne pints, mentions that the Conservative politician and diplomat Duff Cooper was bemoaning its demise as early as the First World War, and Berry’s own campaign started in the 1970s. The Northern Ireland issue, despite a different kind of Brexiter bluster, to the effect that it was a non-issue, turned out to be far more complex, vexed, and intractable. The UK can’t just ignore the EU because, despite having left it is directly affected by what the EU does. Apart from his blog, his commentary on Brexit has been published by New Statesman, Prospect, the i, PMP Magazine, Byline Times, the New European and The National, amongst others, and he has appeared on the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Germany’s ARD, as well as giving invited expert evidence to the Scottish Parliament.

This important book is not just a historical record – it is a vital foundation for anyone trying to work out how Britain can move forward. The wine was shipped in barrels and, since the British measured in gallons and the French in litres, in the nineteenth century the practice emerged whereby barrels of 50 gallons or 225 litres were used, thus yielding 300 bottles of 75 cl each (clearly this is compatible with Hitchens’ account, as there are eight pints in a gallon, yielding six bottles of a pint and third, although I can find no other reference to such bottles being a traditional English measure). But it was book-ended by three reports by Lisa O’Carroll in the Guardian which received far less attention. That’s not to dismiss some of the good work the IMA has done, including winning a court case against the Home Office in 2022 on one aspect of EUSS’s functioning.

Inevitably, Brexiters were quick to try to rubbish it, such as in a ‘Briefings for Britain’ article (curiously, written in the first person but credited to Briefings for Britain collectively, so we’ll never be able to assess the author’s credentials). One rather amusing side-story was the beaching Lee ‘prolier than thou’ Anderson, who resigned as Deputy Chairman so as to be free to rebel, but then pulled out of voting against the government because some Labour MPs laughed at him (and perhaps because he could see how few were going to join him).Some politicians, too, including Green MP Caroline Lucas, have taken an active interest in it, just as a few did in the Post Office case. I originally studied Economics and Politics at Manchester University, where I also gained a PhD on the regulation of financial services. For if ‘staying aligned’ demolishes the central argument made for Brexit by its advocates, it still does relatively little to allay the costs of Brexit: Britain is aligned with single market rules, which is certainly less costly than diverging, but does not get most of the benefit of that in terms of single market membership. So in evaluating Brexit, the real test is whether it has delivered these promises – promises of specific, concrete, often economic, benefits, and not simply ‘sovereignty’ as an abstract ideal; promises sold using grotesque emotional manipulation, and made with no suggestion that they would take decades to transpire, or would have any downsides at all.

The most general one is that the Brexit dishonesty that I discussed in last week’s post isn’t negated, but exacerbated, if it is replicated by anti-Brexiters. Global economic development in previous decades has of course meant that in percentage terms the EU accounts for a declining share of world economic activity, but that doesn’t mean it is declining in absolute terms. It will just mean that the relative gap between the rates of UK-EU and UK-ROW trade growth will have shifted.For all these reasons, Alexandra Bulat, another campaigner in this area, and who is now the first British-Romanian Labour County Councillor, argued in February 2018 that public perception that Citizens’ rights had effectively been dealt with during phase one was mistaken. Yet, with Britain having become, in their terms, an independent country, the Brexiters have created a situation where such discussion is impossible.