Britain’s Brexit Ordeal Has Barely Even Started
Exhausted by the negotiations that concluded last week? There’ll be plenty more.
Britain’s free-trade agreement with the European Union, announced last week after months of fractious talks and days before the transitional Brexit arrangements were due to end, is certainly better than the alternative. Separating with no deal at all would’ve poisoned relations and been worse for both sides than what lies ahead.
Yet this agreement settles less than you’d think. Supposing it’s duly ratified by governments and the European Parliament, it is just one stage in a literally endless process of further negotiation. This might be the saddest aspect of the whole misadventure. Many in Britain wanted to break free of the European Union — to stop dealing with it, talking about it, and having to think about it. Brexit’s greatest fallacy was that this would ever be possible.