mailto: blog -at- heyrick -dot- eu

Oh, the butthurt!

Farage is annoyed.

He thinks that the various countries of Europe are acting like "thugs and bullies".

Sorry, Farage, not everything has to do with Brexit. There's a wider world out there, and they are aware that you guys in the UK have a new possibly nastier form of the plague, and nobody else particularly wants it.

But there is actually a much more pertinent point here that the likes Farage would prefer to get shouty about in the hopes that this point doesn't occur to you.

You see, a lot of Brexit was predicated on the concept of the UK having the freedom to control its borders. Border control, something the UK has sucked at for decades, suddenly became a big topic. Control of borders somehow became intertwined with the concept of sovereignty.

To this end, Britain has undergone nearly five years of political and social turmoil, pillaged and savaged the economy, walked away from the world's largest trade zone with next to no idea of what to do next, and flushed several hundred billion quid and god knows how many jobs down the toilet in order to have the freedom to control the country's borders.

France, on the other hand, simply issued an official edict and the borders were closed. Several other EU countries did likewise. But, wait, how is this possible? Don't tell me that the Brexiteers were lying...

Of course they were lying. They felt that it would be an oven-ready easiest negotiation in history because those dirty stinking Johnny Foreigner types were playing with Britain's toys and Britain wanted them back.
The reason why the country leaves in less than ten days and still with no actual agreement in place is because the leadership of Britain is clearly having a hard time understanding that the toys that it thought were theirs...aren't.
A small country of 67 million people was important to the outside world because of its connections within the EU, because it natively speaks English, it had a cushy special relationship with the EU, and the capital is the financial hub of the EU (even as a non-Euro country).

Now? It's a country of 67 million people who has just walked away from their primary trading partners, who doesn't seem overly concerned about respecting international agreements, is no longer an EU member so no special relationship. Well, the citizens still speak English, I suppose.
You'll note that I've not mentioned The City. Come, now, if the agreement is not to the EUs liking or if the country is dumb enough to actually crash out, for how much longer do you think the EU countries will be happy for their finances to be handled by a third party country? I can see The City being about as irrelevant as the rest of England in less than a decade.
Yes, I said England. Here's to Scottish Independence.

Oh, yes, that too. The possible (likely?) dissolution of the Union.

Was it worth it?

Because when France needed to close its borders for an urgent sanitary reason, it just did so. Because France, as a sovereign country, has control over its borders. It chose to relax border controls in the Shengen zone. And, as was demonstrated earlier in the year during the first lockdown, it could close them if it needed to...

 

Advent Calendar day 22

 

 

Your comments:

Please note that while I check this page every so often, I am not able to control what users write; therefore I disclaim all liability for unpleasant and/or infringing and/or defamatory material. Undesired content will be removed as soon as it is noticed. By leaving a comment, you agree not to post material that is illegal or in bad taste, and you should be aware that the time and your IP address are both recorded, should it be necessary to find out who you are. Oh, and don't bother trying to inline HTML. I'm not that stupid! ☺ ADDING COMMENTS DOES NOT WORK IF READING TRANSLATED VERSIONS.
 
You can now follow comment additions with the comment RSS feed. This is distinct from the b.log RSS feed, so you can subscribe to one or both as you wish.

No comments yet...

Add a comment (v0.11) [help?] . . . try the comment feed!
Your name
Your email (optional)
Validation Are you real? Please type 61223 backwards.
Your comment
French flagSpanish flagJapanese flag
Calendar
«   December 2020   »
MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
 
2526
282930   

Advent Calendar 2023
(YouTube playlist)

(Felicity? Marte? Find out!)

Last 5 entries

List all b.log entries

Return to the site index

Geekery

Search

Search Rick's b.log!

PS: Don't try to be clever.
It's a simple substring match.

Etc...

Last read at 16:14 on 2024/03/29.

QR code


Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional
Valid CSS
Valid RSS 2.0

 

© 2020 Rick Murray
This web page is licenced for your personal, private, non-commercial use only. No automated processing by advertising systems is permitted.
RIPA notice: No consent is given for interception of page transmission.

 

Have you noticed the watermarks on pictures?
Next entry - 2020/12/23
Return to top of page