Lines of cars snake from gasoline stations. Fights break out among angry motorists trying to get fuel. Grocery staples are out of stock on store shelves. A charity warns that doubling heating bills will force a million households to rely on extra blankets to stay warm.
This was supposed to be the year the UK broke free of the European Union and forged ahead as a buccaneering free trader, delivering the benefits of a new, confident ‘Global Britain’ to workers and companies at home. Instead that picture of Brexit utopia is looking more like a dystopia.
(Bloomberg, October 4, 2021)
Ah Brexit … and just think, the antic desolation its isolation has wrought has only just begun. But this is what you get when British arrogance misleads you to believe you can thrive as an island entire unto itself.
Whatever Britons thought of Gordon Brown as prime minister, he’s right. Britain’s only hope is to reverse Brexit, by any means necessary, and rejoin the EU, ASAP!
A few weeks ago, French President Emanuel Macron reacted like a Cold War adversary when Australia announced it was cutting France out of a submarine deal (valued upwards of $66 billion). The deal would now include only the UK and US, hence the Aukus affair. But British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went viral for publicly rebuking Macron by telling him to “get a grip”.
Instead of thumbing his nose at Macron, however, Boris should be enlisting Brown as a special envoy to negotiate lifting the albatross Brexit has become around Britain’s neck.
Because it was bad enough when US President Joe Biden told him last month he has to wait at the back of the line for a trade deal (just as Obama warned, incidentally). But it must’ve fatally wounded what little pride the UK had left when Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro mocked him just days later for begging for emergency food aid.
For now, though, I fear Brexit Britain will continue suffering self-inflicted privations at home and indignities abroad. And the intraparty spat between Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Business Secretary Kawsi Kwarteng – over the causes of and solutions to these shortages – is not inspiring any confidence. I see no point in elaborating. Except I will note that this Tory row makes the in-fighting between moderate and progressive Democrats – over Biden’s Build Back Better agenda – look wholesome.
Unfortunately, one can just imagine the national sniggering as the black Kwarteng and Punjabi Sunak, both of African descent, make themselves poster boys for Dominic Cummings’s lamentation about the “surreal chaos” that prevails at Downing Street under Johnson’s premiership.
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