Today we finally, properly leave the European Union, and I’m still sad and angry and frustrated about it.
Brexit was sold by liars to people who had no idea what they were voting for. Successive British governments failed to make the benefits of EU membership clear to the British people; instead, there was a constant false narrative of obstruction, failure and red tape.
The opposite was true. Being part of the EU helped our economy, saved us money, and removed huge mountains of red tape.
The hopeless, pointless, self-inflicted harm caused by Brexit and its supporters won’t be easy to see at first. But over the coming years, we’ll all notice it.
We’ll all know someone who’s lost work because their employer went under, unable to sell goods to Europe under the new rules.
We’ll all watch as self-important Tory politicians bullshit their way around the world, building new trade agreements that give us a fraction of what we had before.
We’ll all have to spend more time and money organising travel in Europe. Booking your holidays will be more tedious, more annoying, more bureaucratic than ever before. Each change quite small, and not a huge burden in itself; but one of dozens of changes, piled one on top of the other. A thousand paper cuts to suffer, just because you fancy a long weekend of cycling in the Netherlands.
Everyone will complain about it. The Tory newspapers will blame “EU bureaucracy” but we’ll all know who’s really to blame: fucker Farage and bumbling Boris.
Well fuck them, and fuck Brexit.
It’s madness, it’s stupid, and one day, I hope we reverse it. I’m still European, and I’ll always vote with that thought in mind.
Filed under: life
(31 December 2020)