Going Global: Brexit

You win, you daft buggers

In one night, my British passport loses the majority of its value. I’m mad as hell.

For once, a world event has directly and concretely had an affect on my life, and in a very bad way. I’ve had the hope of living and working in Europe after my graduation for a long time, but depending on how the next several months play out, my hopes could go down the drain.

The benefits of having an European Union passport are huge—you are granted the legal right to live and work in any other EU state, as well as Iceland, Norway and Switzerland to a degree. You’re also protected under the various EU laws concerning workers’ rights and other human rights.

Something that should be noted about this situation is the way the EU is treating the UK in the hours after the vote. In Canada, we worked hard to keep Quebec from separating because we realized the federation would be weaker without them. The UK tried to keep Scotland from leaving because they realized that the union would be weaker. The EU is making no attempt to keep the UK from leaving. In fact, they’re trying to speed things along.

Since the EU is cognizant that they don’t need the UK—which is definitely now a second-tier power—instead of trying to coax them back, they will punish them with legal impunity. It’s in their geopolitical interest to keep the union united, and to make exits look as unappealing as possible.

What this obviously communicates is the fact that the ultimate goal of the EU is to create a “United States of Europe,” which makes a lot of sense. All of the individual countries that make up the EU have everything to gain by being part of the single market, and while some countries likely get more out of it than others, everyone gains a tremendous amount. This is most clear when observing the disastrous market reaction to the vote result. Consider the United States– would they have ever become a superpower if they didn’t have the economic strength of the west? Or the oil from the south?

What happens next? You’ve likely read by now that there’s still a lot of uncertainty. I’m honestly hoping that the Queen steps in and invokes her powers to reverse it, but unfortunately that’s not happening.

What’s more likely, and what I personally hope for, is that the UK will go the way of Switzerland or Norway, and get a special deal with the EU. A deal that, like these two countries, would give them some of the benefits along with some of the costs. The British government needs to consider the million or so British citizens that live in other European countries for their livelihood. Over 100,000 of those live and work in France alone.

Most worrisome is that Leave campaigners have seemingly vanished. Nigel Farage admitted on television that the “350 million pounds to NHS upon leave” was bullshit, and the rest of the Leave camp seemingly has no actual plan on how to leave the union. More and more people seem to be coming to the understanding that a lower immigration isn’t guaranteed by an exit from the EU. Boris Johnson was seen as the next potential PM, but he has promptly vanished and ruled himself out of the race. Good riddance.

Even worse, the current political elites in parliament are falling apart at the seams. Cameron won’t be Prime Minister after October, and the alternatives aren’t great. Michael Gove is an utter embarrassment to the intellectual history of his nation, but hopefully the UK will get female Prime Minister #2 by way of Theresa May, but she also has her flaws

As I write this, 20 shadow cabinet ministers (their term for “critic of …” in Canadian parliament) of the Labour party have quit their posts and held a vote of non-confidence against Corbyn. This makes Labour look even worse, considering their poor performance as part of the Remain campaign.

June 23 will get its own chapter in the next edition of your political science textbooks. This is a massive international event, on the same scale of the 2008 credit crunch. David Cameron will go down in history for possibly the biggest political fuck-up in British history. He gave the country a completely unnecessary referendum, which only a handful of wingnuts were asking for, and it didn’t go the way he expected. As a result, Scotland might call another independence referendum and actually leave, undoing a 300-year-old union, and the British economy as a whole has been thrown into uncertainty.