Au Revoir Britannia by Sylvie Bermann sampler

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au revoir britannia Kingdom is a pure invention on the part of Brexiteers who act as though they had been asked to leave and claim that the British were being targeted, whereas they brought this punishment upon themselves. They don’t seem able to understand that the European Union is based on rules of law that it has no intention of modifying to benefit a country that has decided to leave. Paradoxically, British leaders, who lost no opportunity to explain that they had joined the EU solely in order to access the common (now single) market and rejected all the other aspects, decided after the referendum to leave this same single market. They decided to do so while trying, at least initially, to stay as close as possible to the other policies such as those in relation to justice, security and defence, which they found useful, and even hoped to join several programmes at the risk of having to adhere to rules that they would not have been involved in drafting. Those who are not Brexit fanatics know that there is no such thing as a ‘good’ Brexit. They know that it will cost the country a lot in terms of national influence and that the sacrosanct ‘people’ who listened to the sirens of the Brexiteers will be those who will suffer the most, especially if the result is a ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ (the tax haven dreamed about by the most extreme) even if, especially given the COVID pandemic, this is not the most likely outcome today. Perhaps, if they were to have avoided suffering the consequences, the least well-off should have paid more attention to the slogan ‘Brexit is for the Rich’. In fact, the somewhat rare company directors who were ardent supporters of Brexit, lost no time in transferring their head offices out of the United Kingdom – including James Dyson, the maker of vacuum cleaners, who relocated Dyson to Singapore. On the other side, during the three uncertain years following the referendum, never had there been so many EU flags flown in the streets of London and other large Northern cities; flags flown by those, in particular the young, who rejected this fateful decision to divorce. 30
introduction Weary of the never-ending strife, plagued by uncertainty, anxious, above all, to prevent the election of the Labour bogeyman Jeremy Corbyn – a figure stuck in the ideology of the 1970s – the majority of the British voted for Boris Johnson and for Brexit in 2019, since his campaign slogan, ‘Get Brexit done’ left no room for ambiguity. But this did not mean that relations with Brussels had been settled. In the autumn of 2020, the second phase of the negotiations, delayed because of the health crisis, gave rise to further acrimony. During the first phase, aware that they had become an international laughing stock because of their indecision and lack of coherence, the British showed a certain reserve in their dealings with the EU. With the election of an apparently strong and charismatic leader like Boris Johnson, they reverted to type and asked again for special treatment – to have their cake and eat it. A former Remainer was prompted to say that the United Kingdom was not a third state country, or a state like any other – ‘We are not Malta or Austria’ – forgetting, once again, that no one asked them to leave, that their decision brought consequences with it and that solidarity is owed to members of the club, both large and small. As for Boris Johnson, he tried an enormous bluff by repudiating his signature and his country’s word, calling into question the ‘fantastic agreement’, to use his own hyperbole, that he had concluded a year before. But just before Christmas, drawing the conclusions of the election of Joe Biden, which was not favourable to him, and while thousands of lorries stranded in Kent gave a taste of what Brexit without an agreement would be like, the Prime Minister ended up making concessions previously deemed unacceptable, in relation to competition and fishing. This was in order to avoid the shock of a ‘no deal’, considering that if he could, nevertheless, affirm that the United Kingdom had recovered sovereignty over its waters, its money and its laws, then there was no loss of face. Reminiscent of the tennis ball in Woody Allen’s film Match Point, which could easily have fallen on the other side of the 31
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Au Revoir Britannia by Sylvie Bermann sampler

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