Finished #reading Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?, by Ian Dunt.
“You lost! Get over it!” cry the Brexiteers. This book by Dunt shows what “getting over it” involves in practice, as he takes the reader through the steps required to achieve Brexit while avoiding the disaster that would be crashing out with no negotiated settlement, two years after invoking Article 50: a disaster that Dunt describes vividly in his opening chapter.
Dunt sets out methodically both the scale of the task - negotiating trade deals with the EU and the rest of the world while keeping the UK in one piece and avoiding crashing the economy - and his belief that the UK government has so far shown itself to be far from adequate to the task, far even from comprehending the magnitude of the task (to take just one example: the UK’s meat industry is entirely dependent on EU27 nationals to carry out veterinary examinations at abattoirs, and there won’t be time to train UK-born replacements).
To make matters worse, the debate around Brexit has so far been marked by a “new and unsettling form of nationalist hysteria” in which “obstacles start to look like conspiracies and those who point to them start to resemble traitors.” In the face of this, Dunt’s appeal is for “nuance and sober reflection”:
Ultimately, it is British values which will help get the country through this difficult new period: calm debate, instinctive scepticism, practical judgement and moderation. We appear to have lost sight of these values. The sooner we reaffirm our commitment to them, the better off we will be.
He isn’t entirely negative about the UK’s position. As he observes, while the UK does not hold “a winning deck of cards,” it is not entirely without leverage in its negotiations with the EU:
Britain remains a strong economic and military power. With canny negotiation, some goodwill, sufficient resources and a sensible timetable, it could secure a decent deal to exit the European Union.
The problem is that we lack any of those things at present, with many Brexiters preferring to gloat about how “the EU needs us more than we need them,” creating a standoff which Dunt compares to:
two men in a room threatening to shoot themselves, except the EU’s gun is pointing at its foot and Britain’s gun is pointing at its head. If it comes down to brinkmanship, the EU still holds the stronger hand, even if both partners suffer.
In short, an excellent guide to what lies ahead of us between now and 2019.
One criticism: the Kindle edition is poorly formatted, with no contents page or chapter markers, and some wayward fonts. It would be good to see this corrected in a future update, as it makes the book harder to navigate, especially as a reference once you’ve read it through.
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