Union Jerk

The United Kingdom is officially out of the European Union (EU), the withdrawal having taken place this past Friday.  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is looking forward to negotiating new trade deals with the EU before the end of the withdrawal process on December 31.

Good luck with that, Boris.  Experts who know a whole lot more about these things than I do say that Johnson will have a tremendously difficult time negotiating with a 27-nation economic bloc with a hundred million or so more people than the U.S., a country that would theoretically benefit from Britain's new free-agent status in terms of trade. Britain is a country of only sixty million people or so.  What's Johnson's leverage?

The British probably dream of restoring their empire, which is pretty hard to do when you remember that its collection of overseas dependencies is down to Bermuda, a few islands in the Caribbean, the Falkland Islands, a military base on some forgotten atoll in the Indian Ocean, and a rock on the Spanish coast.  They probably hope to re-affirm their close ties to the Commonwealth formed out of its former colonies, particularly its economic ties, but at this point re-affirming its connections to Canada and India, and other places mentioned in that Kinks song, would sort of be a parent-child relationship in which the children take care of the mother country.  Ironically, it was the Commonwealth that served as a reason for French President Charles de Gaulle to block British entry into the EU, then called the European Economic Community (EEC), or the Common Market, and worries about the fragmentation of the Commonwealth made joining the EEC made it a hot issue in Britain for the Wilson and Heath governments.  (Britain joined in 1973.)  

Britain is not profiting off its exit from the EU just yet and may not do so for a long time.  The pound is sinking (to cop a song title from Paul McCartney),  and economic growth has stagnated.  Scotland, where the EU is more popular, is thinking of seceding and joining the EU, and Ulster could re-unite with the rest of Ireland on the basis of Scottish independence.  But no matter how dumb this withdrawal from the EU may be, Brexit is nowhere nearly as stupid as the U.S. exiting the Paris Agreement.  Crashing out of a continental market is much less severe than crashing into the climate. >:-(