give it 40 years.(another vote) I think that would be fair, as the British public had no say over the eu for that amount of time
if any political party have a brain they wouldn’t go anywhere near brexit for a good while yet. The public are fed up of it and the only people talking about rejoining are remainers who won’t accept what happened
I would say as well Labour and all remainer mps had the option of a soft brexit and turned it down…
Soft Brexit was never available. May ruled out Single Market and Customs Union in her Lancaster House speech in January 2017. Thereafter the only option left was hard Brexit.
The wrangling for the next few years was the UK trying to be out of the Single Market/Customs Union, but retain the benefits. The UK was convinced the EU would cave and agree to this. They didn’t.
May did, belatedly, realise her mistake and tried to row back on SM/CU, but it was too late. She was ousted and Johnson replaced her with his ‘fuck business’ policy. Turned out he had a ‘fuck fishing and agriculture’ policy too.
If the UK at some point signs up to EEC/EFTA and EU Single Market to facilitate trade the EU is never going to agree to us rejoining. Too much trust and goodwill has gone and if we are in the EU economic zone why risk the hassle? If we try and stay out of the EU economic zone (barring NI) then we are subject to EU influence anyway because we have given away our leverage. We in effect extorted opt-outs by threatening to leave. Once we left, the leverage disappeared and we still wanted to be part of Horizon, Lugano Convention, Euratom etc. We also need tariff free trade (which we kind of got, but didn’t - ie the Rules of Origin small print), but still overlooked the non-tariff barriers which are hurting SME’s especially.
At the moment we have a shitty deal, where the rules apply to us and less so to the EU and its businesses. As the OBR pointed out, many EU large companies can’t be bothered to follow our new UK only rules, which is why we punted the UK kite mark standards into next year. We of course have to follow our rules and EU rules.
We are in for a rough time because we can’t rejoin; but unless we rejoin we can’t politically influence EU Single Market and Customs Union rules and regs which we won’t except unless we have political say and influence over them. But not accepting them means a reduction in trade and higher admin costs and red tape for UK businesses.
Basically, we dug ourselves a big hole with no way out. Our only option is to stay in the hole and pretend it’s great.
