Brexit is not a certainty… we can still change our minds

Friday, 7th April 2017

• YOUR Our Neighbours page (Pupils celebrate the art of diversity, March 31) refers to Brexit as “now a certainty”. It isn’t.

All that has happened is that the UK has notified the EU of our intention to leave. Lawyers take different views on whether the notification can be withdrawn before the two years for negotiation are up.

The government has stated (perhaps more for political than for legal reasons) that it can’t. But a lot of experts in the field are confident that it can. If they’re right, Brexit isn’t a certainty.

But it’s a high probability, of course. Very high – just for now, at least. A large proportion of last June’s Leave voters are still dead-set on getting out of the EU, no matter what the terms.

And a lot of Remain voters now just want the government to get on with the job. They don’t want to spend the next few years worrying about what’s going to happen. They have other things going on in their lives – bigger worries, more pressing claims on their time – and feel powerless to shape the way things will unfold.

But this could all change. Many Brexit voters are already feeling badly let down by the way things are going. They’d voted to leave on the strength of promises to stay in the single market and customs union, of extra money for the NHS, of “restoring” parliamentary sovereignty. All these, and more, are now seen to be hollow.

The disillusion will spread when people see how inflation is eating into the pound. When they see jobs being lost, factories losing orders, businesses moving overseas.

When they realise that controls on EU immigration do little to reduce immigration overall, instead just harming large swathes of our economy.

When they see momentum growing for the break-up of the United Kingdom, and the citizens of Gibraltar sold down the river. And all of this when there are so many more challenging things going on in the world.

We can’t know how it will all play out over the next couple of years. But we don’t yet have to hand over the reins to hard-right ideologues and ultra free-marketeers.

Groups up and down the country, including Islington in Europe, are working to keep options open. It’s still possible that, if opinion shifted decisively against Brexit, our notification to leave could be withdrawn.

P LAIDLAW
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