As you’re probably aware, the UK has a month before it is no longer a member of the European Union and at this point absolutely no deal has been hashed out. If there’s a thing which is somehow affected by movement within, trade with or communication via Europe – which in this global economy is pretty much everything – then the answer to the question “what happens after March 29?” is currently a terrified stare.
Will food and medicine rot on dockyards while customs checks cripple movement? What happens at the Irish border? No-one knows!
As a result companies are already pulling out of the UK, or collapsing inside it, and even the richest and most pro-Brexit man in the country has decided to up stumps for tax reasons, and the economy has already taken a £40 billion annual hit despite nothing having technically changed as yet.
Meanwhile the government has been assiduously preventing itself from agreeing on any possible deal that might provide certainty or even basically survival. And thus most hopes were pinned, unreasonably as it turns out, on the opposition Labour Party.
And just before anyone got their hopes up the party split – well, more accurately, seven MPs have quit to sit as independents on the grounds that Labour is still pro-Brexit and supposedly anti-semitic (which seems to mean “supports Palestine” in this context), meaning that the alternative government is just as divided and distracted by their own internal discord.
I think all political news would be improved by someone muttering “we’re fucked” over it pic.twitter.com/MZVHhtZkZx
— Alan White (@aljwhite) February 18, 2019
And thus we salute the BBC tech who accurately muttered his assessment in range of a mic which was inconveniently on.
“I’m not gonna lie, but with this and Brexit we’re actually f*cked,” this unnamed sage intoned. “It’s going to be really divided.”
Someone give this man a news programme, or at the very least a job doing muttered commentary over all news stories forever.