Brexit to Bregret

Brexit is proving to be extremely messy. PM Cameron resigned; but suggested he might hang around for 3 months. That, of course, made the EU frothing mad: with nobody in power for 3 months, who’d they negotiate with?

The UK government has to invoke Article 50 of the EU treaty, a formal notification to leave. With Cameron a lame duck, who’s going to that? Besides, the referendum is non-binding: so in theory, the government could choose to ignore the result altogether. Which, by the way, is exactly what many petitioners for a re-referendum want!

Weirdly, even 2.3 million who voted to leave say they have changed their minds! Already? The phenomenon’s being called Bregret.

Scotland’s representatives at the EU Parliament repeatedly pointed out that they had voted to stay; and the EU should keep that in mind. A thinly veiled hint that Scotland intends to secede and would want to be a part of the EU.

Whenever Article 50 is activated, it would just start the clock on a 2-year countdown to negotiate the terms of separation. As the EU keeps saying, we can expect those negotiations to be bitter and acrimonious.

The UK currently trades with the rest of the world as a member of the EU. Once out, they’d have to negotiate new trade deals with pretty much everyone in the world.

Depending on how the EU negotiates with UK, it would indicate to existing EU members how the next withdrawal might be handled. With many parties in other countries already advocating their own referendums, it would make it hard for the EU members to push through any economic reforms since those would be unpopular. Then again, any other country wanting to leave the EU has a problem: they don’t have their own currency. That’s not a hurdle the UK has to overcome.

Does all this sound complicated? Absolutely. Interesting? Yeah. Dangerous for the global economy? Maybe; maybe not. No wonder Brexit eclipsed even porn as the most googled term on the Net!

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJuly 2, 2016 at 4:40 PM

    Your famous (at least with one person, me) last sentence could well have been, "Weirdly, even 2.3 million who voted to leave say they have changed their minds! Already? The phenomenon’s being called Bregret". What a mess!

    ReplyDelete

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