Since Brexit the happy Brexiteers have been banging on about ‘out means today’, ‘let’s dump it all and get on with being Brits!’ and even bring back pounds, shillings and pence, and dump metric measurements’.
Search the internet and read newspapers, and there is the torrent of triumphal twaddle from the Brexiteers.
Now, however, light begins to dawn that it is not at all that simple. We have the anti-golfing and outspoken Brexiteer David Davis wisely – some say – appointed to the Exit Europe Department.
“Easy peasy” he must have thought.
We are indeed at an early stage, but David has significantly changed his tune. Directly contradicting pre-brexit statements he has humbled himself before a Lords’ Select Committee by saying – and I quote – “Brexit” he says “is likely to be the most complicated negotiation in modern times, maybe the most complicated negotiation of all time.” By comparison (as he showed us a part of his educated background) ‘Schleswig-Holstein is but an ‘O’ Level question’.
Mrs May has wisely told us that she views 2017 as her target timetable, but in the light of Mr Davis’ humble and critically important statement, it might be further out. What do we do, for example, about Europol? What do we do about the pay and pensions account for the Brits working within EU organisations?
So far I understand there are 75 critical areas of negotiation with more appearing day by day.
Some Brexiteers say ‘slash the Gordian knot’. Simplistic nonsense. We are entangled, as was so carefully explained pre-vote, in many highly beneficial EU wholly or partly funded programmes.
Whatever, David Davis’ clear statement hits the angry and active Brexiteers who dreamed of simplicity and a 24 hours ‘OUT’ process very hard indeed with a strongly worded statement of reason. Remainers were, and are, a little more contemplative than Brexiteers who voted for sunshine, savings, salutations and British sausages galore.
They have to read David Davis’s statement again.
Tom Jones, Plymouth
