In less than ten hours’ time, the transition period will end and the UK will change its relationship with the EU. I won’t say “end,” because we’ll obviously still have a relationship with the EU, just a very, very different one. So I don’t know if this marks the end of Brexit, the beginning of Brexit, or more likely, the end of the Brexit process and the start of our position outside the EU.
One thing is for certain, there are rights we have undoubtedly lost. The freedom to live in another European country. A single market for goods and services (including financial services). Who knows what travel will be like when the pandemic is over, but I foresee much more time spent queuing at the border of other countries.
Trade will not be the same, regardless of the ‘deal’ that has been struck. There will be more paperwork, there will be more customs declarations, and there will be delays. Time will tell how bad those are going to be. We have created an internal border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and perhaps another soft one between Kent and the rest of the UK for lorries if they’re to be prevented from entering the county without the right paperwork.
Speaking of which, how are those customs systems progressing? Bloomberg is reporting that shipping firms are refusing contracts to bring goods into the UK, fearing their trucks and drivers will be sitting idle waiting to enter or exit the country. The chaos when France shut its borders following the discovery of a new variant of COVID was a taste of things to come.
I need to read up on more details — particularly what it means for data storage and privacy (I think the headline is that agreement wasn’t possible and the UK agreed to be bound by the EU’s terms for another six months), this “Erasmus replacement” scheme, and out of sheer curiosity, what it means for Gibraltar*.
I did not travel much as a child, or even as a young adult, but since starting a lot of European work in 1999 I’ve tried to make up for that gap in the intervening 21 years. Today is a sad day, and I can only cling on to the hope that some have expressed that the Brexit ‘deal’ is going to inevitably end with closer integration as it is reviewed every five years and in the meantime any transgressions by the UK are dealt with firmly by the EU. I don’t want to see the UK fail (my wife hints that we deserve all we get), but there can’t be many that still think we’ve made it easier for ourselves at the end of this?
Nobody reads this, but Happy New Year to you regardless. I think in the New Year I shall attempt to start to make this into a wider political blog (like there aren’t many of those around), if for no other reason than to help me keep track of all the broken promises that emanate from Westminster.
* Moments after I typed that, my phone pinged with an alert to say a draft deal between the UK and the EU on Gibraltar has been agreed which allows it to join European programmes, including Shengen! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/31/spain-and-uk-reach-draft-deal-on-post-brexit-status-of-gibraltar