We are more or less at the halfway point in the Brexit process. With about sixteen months gone since the vote and another sixteen to go to March 29th 2019. What we have experienced so far is the quiet before the storm, a sort of phoney conflict with a lot of speculation and few hard facts. The second half will involve much more than shuffling position papers. Many hard and uncomfortable truths will need to be confronted. None of it will be easy.
The harsh realities of Brexit will soon begin to dawn on people. Some kind of deal must be stitched together in about twelve months, to give time for national legislatures in the EU to vote on it. An awful lot will need to be packed into those months. It seems to me that more and more work needs to be compressed into less and less time, always a recipe for disaster.
The government has never given any impression that they have a plan or that they're in control of things in any meaningful sense at all. Let's be honest, even when a cabinet is totally united and the civil service fully committed with unlimited time and resources, the problems that governments face are so difficult and complex that they often go very wrong. But Brexit is a problem of monumental complexity that we have never seen before. It had catastrophe written all over it and all through it like a stick of rock, from the very beginning.
There was no plan before the referendum and none now. The cabinet is far from united and the civil service mainly opposes it, as does parliament where the government doesn't have a majority. There are any number of legal challenges rumbling away in the background and an economy heading south. Business is becoming nervous of all the uncertainty. Immigrants that we rely on for so many things are returning home in increasing numbers. The difficulties may have seemed almost insurmountable back in June 2016 but they have only multplied in scope and complexity as time has gone on. The next year will be critical. At what point does the government conclude Brexit cannot be delivered?
The government has never given any impression that they have a plan or that they're in control of things in any meaningful sense at all. Let's be honest, even when a cabinet is totally united and the civil service fully committed with unlimited time and resources, the problems that governments face are so difficult and complex that they often go very wrong. But Brexit is a problem of monumental complexity that we have never seen before. It had catastrophe written all over it and all through it like a stick of rock, from the very beginning.
There was no plan before the referendum and none now. The cabinet is far from united and the civil service mainly opposes it, as does parliament where the government doesn't have a majority. There are any number of legal challenges rumbling away in the background and an economy heading south. Business is becoming nervous of all the uncertainty. Immigrants that we rely on for so many things are returning home in increasing numbers. The difficulties may have seemed almost insurmountable back in June 2016 but they have only multplied in scope and complexity as time has gone on. The next year will be critical. At what point does the government conclude Brexit cannot be delivered?
