Brexit: One Year On

 It will soon be the anniversary of the UK leaving the EU-- so how has the last year gone?

The year started with Brexiteers suddenly realizing the magnitude of what they voted for. The first major instance was of Leave voters living in Spain who soon found out that they couldn't watch their favourite British TV show, "Only Fools and Horses," anymore.  

Sam Allardyce, manager of West Bromwich Albion, who had admitted that he voted to leave the EU, learned that signing footballers for his team from Europe had just become doubly hard due to the extra paperwork needed for players coming from clubs in the EU. Oops!

Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who, complained that the UK’s trade deal with the EU was failing UK musicians. He was one of the 110 signatories of a letter to the government that accused the government of “shamefully failing” live performers. The irony of all this? Daltrey voted to leave the EU. 

June Mummery, a former Brexit Party MEP who campaigned to leave the EU, soon discovered that the grass wasn't greener on the other side of the water. "As fishing goes, and if we want to hang on to the industry we have, because five years is a long time when you have nothing. We're on our knees. We've waited 40 years and quite frankly a lot of people will pack up, including myself. I've got no fish."

In March of last year, Tory minister Paul Scully was talking about renewable energy when he said that Brexit was "the start of building back greener. This is the start of 6,000 jobs in the UK, using British jobs, British manufacturing, and of course British wind to power UK homes.”

Brexit ushered in violence to the streets of Northern Ireland as a dispute erupted over a proposed Protocol that would have placed a de facto border in the Irish sea and enforced checks on goods being imported into Northern Ireland and Britain.  Former Labor MP Kate Hoey suggesting on GB News that NI was ‘sacrificed’ just so Brexit could happen and that the unrest seen on the streets of Derry was a consequence that many leavers already knew was going to happen.

In May of last year, there was a very real concern that the UK could end up in a military conflict with France all because of post-Brexit fishing restrictions that stopped French boats from operating in the waters surrounding Jersey. French fisherman staged a protest blocking the main St Helier port. Things were so tense that a member of the Jersey Militia reenactment group fired a musket blank at the boats.

Tim ‘Wetherspoons’ Martin (who, as one of the most vocal proponents of Brexit, exploited fears of immigrant workers to campaign to leave the EU) soon began to call for UK migration laws to be loosened for EU workers to tackle the staff shortage at pubs and restaurants.  WTF?

Tory MP, former deputy chairman of the European Research Group and the so-called ‘hard man of Brexit’ tried to take a jab at Labour leader Keir Starmer in August over his net-zero policy. However, Baker ended up with egg on his face by adding: “Politicians need to level with the public about the scale of change needed in our lives so we don’t have another political fiasco like Brexit.”  

Britons were told that everything was going to be fine and that supermarket shelves would remain as full and as replenished as ever. But come August, many shops and restaurants were struggling to meet demands as Post-Brexit immigration rules meant that many EU workers were now staying away from the UK. Even Nando’s ran out of chicken.

Possibly one of the most famous moments to come out of the truck driver shortage was this explicit condemnation from a Dutch trade union boss. On the 27th September edition of Radio 4’s Today Programme Edwin Atema bluntly said: “The EU workers we speak to will not go to the UK for a short term visa to help UK out of the shit they created themselves!” His rant predictably went viral.  

One memorable moment last year came from Mariella Gabutt, a wholesale market worker in Manchester who went viral after appearing on BBC News and sarcastically explaining how the cost of one container of fish went from £3,000 pre-Brexit to £14,000 post-Brexit.  But of course, it had nothing to do with Brexit!

The lack of truck drivers took was one of the most evident consequences of Brexit. Things didn’t get much better when the transport secretary Grant Shapps claimed that the shortages weren’t anything to do with exiting the EU and that Brexit had actually helped the situation as it had made it easier to process more driving tests.  What a tool!

In more denial of Brexit not being to blame for anything, the September petrol crisis (which saw members of the public queuing for hours at petrol stations just to fill up their cars) had apparently nothing to do with a lack of truck drivers being able to deliver the fuel. Former Tory leader and staunch Brexiteer Sir Iain Duncan Smith said that ‘brainless bureaucracy’ and Covid was actually were the actual culprits.

Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show, went viral in October after summing up the shambles that is Brexit in just a few seconds by pointing out that people voted to leave because they were “sick of the ‘dirty foreigners’ coming in and taking their jobs and now there’s a fuel crisis - partly because ‘dirty foreigners’ are the ones driving all the dirty gasoline trucks.”

Things really started to get serious when people who actually voted for Brexit were appearing on Question Time to criticise the entire debacle and were so critical that host, Fiona Bruce was shocked to discover that the man in question, actually voted to leave.  

The post-Brexit trade deal struck with New Zealand was so negatively received, that one Kiwi broadcaster likened British farmers to ‘sacrificial lambs.’

It is bow clear that the impact of Brexit has been worse than that of COVID. According to Richard Hughes of the Office for Budget Responsibility, the toll taken on the UK’s GDP by Covid has been 2 per cent but when you add in leaving the EU that results in a further 2 per cent decline for the GDP which isn’t exactly great news, especially when one was self-inflicted and the other wasn’t.

Along with not having any truck drivers or fuel, the UK was also short ofnacademic personnel. In May the government launched a scheme to fast track Nobel laureates and other prize winners in science, engineering, humanities and medicine. Six months later the grand total of people who applied for this was zero.

Pro-Brexit Tory MP, Mark Francois released a book in December called ‘Spartan Victory: The Inside Story of the Battle for Brexit.’ It was self-published because according to Francois “it was fairly evident after a while that no publisher wanted to publish.”