Just what did Boris get done?
The goal was clear, the objective easy to mark as a success or failure. Get Brexit Done. And he did, pat on the back, Boris. Congratulations. But with something so simple, a statement of done or not, with us or against, the nuances, when something so complex is expressed so simply, are inevitably lost. And here is where Boris was quintessentially Boris.
No one outside the internal struggles of Westminster and the UKip crowd knew more than the basics of Brexit. There were so many types, so many escapes, so many options. A hard or a soft, a union of sorts or an independent state. Free trade but without the UK offering anything but our brilliance. We wanted Sovereignty above all else, but also a balance struck to conserve economic lives.
But this was not a heads or tails, a fifty-fifty split. There was an option to continue working with what we had or to take a leap into the hypothetical and see where we land. Brexit had many shapes and forms, so many variables that no two groups could agree on what were important or not. And this was because no one knew the reason for Brexit.
What was Brexit for? What was the actual objective? Boris said he was there to ‘get it done’, but he never went as far as to say what. Brexit was going to happen with or without him. The referendum result was in, the date for the end of the previous relationship set in stone. The first of January 2021, the UK left the EU. We could have all sat back and done nothing, all waited and watched and seen Brexit pop into existence at the moment in time we had named its start. Boris had no say in this, we all set the date and looked forward with hope or trepidation as the calendar rolled down.
Brexit was a mainstay in papers and twitter and online debate, Facebook on fire with friends falling out over whatever they imagined Brexit would mean, could be, or whether it should in fact happen at all. And the last 18 months we had Boris gurning, ruffling his thinning hair as his jowls dropped further, telling us he would ‘get it done.’. He just missed out the bit about what exactly and how.
Teressa May had a Brexit mapped and planned. A version of Brexit she put together once the foundations of what the public and her party, on the whole, wanted. This boiled down to the end of free movement of trade. You can’t have just any old person rocking up in England, looking for work because they were born within the huge geographical area marked Europe and its ever widening expansion into places further east. We wanted our sovereignty back. From this, the knock on was huge. The idea of a soft Brexit went. Soft Brexit, which was a bit of sovereignty back, but plenty of the old agreement involved became a non-starter. No free movement, no soft Brexit. So we had to go hard, but just how hard is hard?
May had a plan, made it early, made it clear, made it quite compelling as the time ran down. She put in Services, she put in everything that was feasible. A lovely middle ground that neither the remainers, nor leavers would accept. Neither enough for one nor strong for the other. So Boris and allies brought the May government down, and the allies were plenty in Labour. Boris got in, a PM of the people, the man driving the Bus, the man who would actually, ‘get Brexit done’. And he did, but what did he do?
He excluded services from the deal, an area that is 80% of the UK economy. A free-trade deal that has so far provided no free-trade. He took back the fishing waters of the UK, and somehow destroyed the fishing industry as an off-shoot. He broke international law, and convention with a clause in a new law that counteracted the agreement he had signed just months before. He played brinkmanship up to the last week. His Christmas Eve deal, he heralded as a bossy triumph for good old Britain. It was a deal of nothing. The removal of the UK from the EU system was achieved for a moment, but replaced with such arcane new inter-state committees and reference points that the famous Brussels bureaucracy of which years were spent in ridicule, have been replaced with untested complexities of regulatory controlling bodies which have never worked because they have never been in place.
We have achieved a Brexit, A Brexit from Boris. Something worse than was offered by May years previously, an option Boris ridiculed and brought down so his own version could be put in place. Only he didn’t have a version, he has no foundations of beliefs on which to build anything solid. His Brexit is worse than May’s. A Brexit put together at a negotiating table, one with no foresight or planning, something cobbled together at the last moment, something which wasn’t ratified or scrutinised in parliament, something that was thrown together by two groups of negotiators in record time. A record time not being something to celebrate. You put so much complexity together in the shortest time possible and mistakes pop up. And the y have. We have a last minute, unscrutinised, untested deal, that Boris got done. His target was to have a Brexit, but doing nothing would have achieved that. It would have been a hard Brexit, advocated by many in the Tory party. But doing something earlier, with thought and planning, and reassessment, would have resulted in a more rigorous and solid Brexit. What we are left with is a last-minute, rushed Brexit. One that isn’t finished, and isn’t in fact, ‘done’. We are left with the start of a process where the UK and EU, still very entwined, will need to continue to talk and barter and negotiate over exactly what has happened. Brexit is far from done because the UK put its faith, and its long term future, in the hands of Boris, Britain’s Biggest Blagger.
