Monday 31 July 2017

Transition To What, Exactly?

To full membership of the EU again, that's what.

Over 10 years, or thereabouts, and having barely left in the first place.

The only difference between the United Kingdom that had pretended to leave and the United Kingdom that came back definitively forever will be the absence of Northern Ireland.

Behind the sea border between Great Britain and the whole island of Ireland, Northern Ireland may or may not have been incorporated into the Republic, but Britain will certainly have withdrawn.

The partition of Ireland was never intended to last this long, anyway.

For be in no doubt, if the Republic wants a sea border, then the Americans will always have wanted it to have a sea border, and the EU now also wants it to have a sea border, so there is going to be a sea border.

In dealing with Britain, what the Republic wants, then America has always wanted, and the EU now also always wants.

But who in Britain ever notices what happens in Northern Ireland?

And within about a decade, a United Kingdom in which the whole of EU law had never ceased to apply will have formally re-joined the EU, probably without even so much as a referendum.

That is what is meant by a transitional period.

If you really want to get out of the EU, then you need a Prime Minister who probably voted Leave (Theresa May certainly didn't, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove probably didn't, even the hopelessly out-of-his-depth David Davis is highly questionable), who is surrounded by people who undoubtedly voted Leave, who himself voted Labour in 1983, and who voted No in 1975.

Thankfully, such a Prime Minister is available.

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