Second part of my "Oh god do I really need to pay attention to Brexit now?" thread, mostly for Americans who have enough to worry about at home. 
So it’s now June 2016. Cameron has lost the referendum; Cameron leaves. After a summer of chaos Theresa May becomes PM by default. She was a Remain supporter but now she tells everyone she’ll deliver Brexit. Since then, everything has continued to be a gigantic mess.
The core problems haven’t changed: 1) People who voted to Leave were sold a bunch of lies about Europe; 2) the UK will suffer serious economic harm if we go through with Brexit; 3) many politicians realise that Brexit will be a disaster but are scared of the Leave majority.
European leaders have been patiently waiting for us to get our shit together but realise we can’t square the circle: if we want frictionless trade with Europe, we’ll need a deal with the EU that gives us much of what we already have, minus any say over future rule changes.
Oh, and that deal would make it nearly impossible for us to sign new free-trade deals with other countries that have different regulatory standards from Europe.
(Just to give an example: if we want to do a trade deal with the US, we’ll need to accept different standards for our produce than the ones we currently share with the EU. Bye bye frictionless trade & cheap parmesan cheese; hello chlorine-rinsed chicken.)
Then there’s the Irish question. Peace in Northern Ireland was achieved in the late 1990s partly because the UK and the Irish Republic were in the EU — no need for a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
If we want to sign independent trade deals with China and the US, we’ll need a hard border at which goods and people are inspected; the island of Ireland will be physically divided again; the peace process will be threatened. theguardian.com/politics/2018/…
This has become a huge part of the focus in the past few months as Theresa May has been negotiating a withdrawal agreement: a deal with the EU which keeps the UK in some kind of alignment after Brexit Day (scheduled for March 29) and prevents us from being plunged into chaos.
And by ‘chaos’ I mean planes not flying, trucks piled up at Calais and Dover, medicine shortages, etc. A No-Deal Brexit is basically like a Purge movie with slightly politer protagonists. Cambridge colleges will be stockpiling snuff!
The plan is for the ‘withdrawal’ agreement to lead to a transition period of around 2 years in which we figure out a long-term relationship; but the EU cleverly insisted that we sort out the Ireland problem first of all, which has made it harder for Theresa May to fudge things.
In the interest of ending this thread before Brexit Day, I’ll skip over the fact that Theresa May had a totally unnecessary election last year, lost her majority, & now relies on Northern Ireland Unionists to keep her government alive. (These guys make the GOP seem reasonable.)
I’ll also skip over the fact that the effects of eight years of Conservative austerity are now so horrific that the UN has sent an envoy to consider “extreme poverty” in the UK. nytimes.com/2018/11/13/wor…
But here’s where things stand: Mrs May now has a draft withdrawal agreement, but she needs to get it through parliament before it can move forward. Most MPs — Brexiters and Remainers — will find lots to hate about it.
The deal’s only just been published but it confirms what we’ve always known: to keep a ‘soft’ border in Ireland AND to avoid breaking up the UK, any Brexit agreement will the UK to remain in close economic alignment with the EU.
This means similar rules to the ones we currently follow, but without any say in making them (i.e. worse than the status quo). It'll stop Top Hat Brexiters from imagining that we'll re-conquer India or fight another opium war or whatever we need to do to recover our greatness.
The hardcore Brexiters will try to vote it down in Parliament; so will the Northern Ireland unionist. So will the Labour Party — who’ll remind Mrs May that it doesn’t deliver what the government promised back in 2016 ("everything we already have in the EU and MORE!").
So that means either (a) that Theresa May will have to renegotiate; (b) that she’ll be forced out as leader; (c) that a general election will happen; (d) that we’ll get No Deal (i.e., the Purge scenario); or (e) that we’ll have a new referendum.
The most British thing imaginable would be for us to spend three years in convulsions about radical changes to our politics and constitution, and then to have a think about it and decide that we’re probably OK with what we have, thanks. Will this happen? Wish us luck. /
