{"id":129343,"date":"2025-05-25T00:41:15","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T00:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/129343\/"},"modified":"2025-05-25T00:41:15","modified_gmt":"2025-05-25T00:41:15","slug":"those-thrilling-days-brexit-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/129343\/","title":{"rendered":"Those thrilling days \u2013 Brexit revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I should state upfront that I\u2019m a Yankee Doodle Dandy. I know next to nothing about UK politics and parliament. I know there are two big parties, Labour and Conservative, and a number of smaller ones. I can name a few prime ministers \u2013 Winston Churchill, of course, Maggie Thatcher, of course, and Tony Blair. I vaguely remember someone named Major and a Neil somebody. In short, I\u2019m the perfect person to do a Brexit recap.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Brexit, to an outsider, made no sense. I\u2019ve always thought of the British as being a thoroughly sensible people, except for cricket. So how did these sensible people get themselves bogged down in what those who knew a lot more about the situation than I did called Brexit \u2013 the biggest crisis in the UK since the end of WWII? How could the nation that gave us the Magna Carta, Shakespeare, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones produce such an unholy mess? Having tumbled higgledy-piggledy into the Brexit pit, how did British politicians turn it into a cesspool?<\/p>\n

The immediate fallout<\/p>\n

Keep in mind that although 51.9% of those who voted ticked Leave, 73% of the 650 MPs supported Remain. About 90% of Labour MPs favoured Remain, but roughly 70% of their constituents voted Leave. Even 56% of Tory MPs wanted to stay in the EU. PM David Cameron strongly urged voters to choose Remain. Three weeks after his humiliating defeat, Cameron not only resigned as PM, he left parliament altogether. He didn\u2019t want to have to deal with the dog\u2019s breakfast that he and his party had served up.<\/p>\n

Pundits thought the most vocal Leave MP, Boris Johnson (aka BoJo), would take over. Other names were bandied about: Amber Rudd, Liam Fox, Dominic Raab, Andrea Leadsom, but they all said they had other things to do, like shampoo their hair. Theresa May became prime minister by default. Reversing her support for Remain, she assured her Tory colleagues: \u201cBrexit means Brexit.\u201d Dealt a bad hand, she played it poorly.<\/p>\n

May\u2019s doomed efforts<\/p>\n

One of the many ironic aspects of this fiasco was that May thought she might improve her chances of getting a deal by increasing her thin Conservative majority in parliament, so she called a snap election. Instead of winning more seats, Tories lost seats. May had to cut a deal with the 10-member Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to maintain her majority. DUP was 100% hardline Brexit, contrary to the Northern Irish public who voted Remain by 11 points in 2016.<\/p>\n

Poor Tessie tried and tried and tried again to get parliament to approve her withdrawal agreement with the EU, and she failed and failed and failed again. She was stifled at every step by a minority of Conservatives known popularly as the Brextremists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They numbered fewer than one in three Tories, but they made a lot of noise, and were led by MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who could easily be cast as one of Monty Python\u2019s upper-class twits. If she wasn\u2019t being zapped by the Brextremists, she was being whacked by the DUP or poked by Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. Half of May\u2019s cabinet threatened to resign if she accommodated the Brextremists and the other half threatened to resign if she asked the EU for a longer extension. Tessie had fewer friends in her party than a brown marmorated stink bug<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A fractured parliament<\/p>\n

Over on the other side of the chamber, Labour split into four factions: moderate Remainers, moderate Leavers, leftist Remainers (the biggest group) and leftist Leavers (the smallest group but one that included then Labour leader Corbyn). Corbyn told his people to vote against May, hoping to bring down her government so that he could move into 10 Downing Street, while Tessie tried to placate the Brextremists and keep her party from imploding. Parliament had become the hell-broth that the three witches in Macbeth cooked up, toiling and troubling, boiling and bubbling.<\/p>\n

In 2019, parliament rejected four eminently sensible motions:<\/p>\n

1. Customs union avoiding a hard border for Northern Ireland: defeated by three votes.<\/p>\n

2. Common market like Norway had with the EU: defeated by 21 votes.<\/p>\n

3. Confirmatory public vote in which voters would confirm any Brexit deal parliament came up with: defeated by 12 votes.<\/p>\n

4. Parliamentary supremacy which would a) compel parliament to seek an extension if it couldn\u2019t reach a deal before 10 April, and b) if the EU rejected an extension parliament would vote either to crash out with no deal, or to revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU until they could get their act together. Parliament didn\u2019t like this one at all, defeating it by 101 votes.<\/p>\n

This happened on April Fools\u2019 Day, of course. Tessie tried again in May and failed again. Lord knows she gave it her all. Fed up, she resigned. Enter BoJo Johnson to shepherd the UK out of the EU. Britons waved bye-bye to the EU on 31 January 2020. Less than a month later, Britons said hello to Covid-19.<\/p>\n

Is hindsight 20\/20?<\/p>\n

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp recently admitted to his Tory colleagues<\/a> that the Johnson-led government did not have its act together at the time the UK left the EU. Regarding refugees claiming asylum, he said: \u201cBecause we\u2019re out of the European Union now \u2026 we can\u2019t any longer rely<\/a> on sending people back to the place where they first claimed asylum.\u201d So much for BoJo\u2019s promise<\/a> that once out of the EU, Britain would \u201ctake back control\u201d of immigration.<\/p>\n

During all the to-ing and fro-ing 2016\u201319, Sky News interviewed a fresh flower importer, Paul Smith<\/a>. He said: \u201cif Brexit isn\u2019t worked out \u2026 everything will be affected \u2013 my family, my house, my staff \u2026 we\u2019ve been trading for 33 years.\u201d Yet he had voted Leave. He explained: \u201cwhen I voted, I really didn\u2019t think about the business side of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since 2020, a lot of Britons have thought about all sides of Brexit. A YouGov poll in January 2025<\/a> found the following:<\/p>\n