Rick's b.log - entry 2020/12/22

Oh, the butthurt!

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

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