Brexit - what a mess

Well, that’s it then, all the rhetoric is over and the result is a Brexit. As the Chinese proverb says, beware of what you wish for – you may get it.

Now I know that we are all being urged to treat this as a “positive opportunity” and to “work together and work to heal our differences”. Yeah, right. The Scots are seeing as a “positive opportunity” to finally get their independence. The Irish are talking about a United Ireland. The Welsh are crying for the money they’ll lose from the EU and Yorkshire have realised that the development  money they were getting to places like Hull will also disappear A joke web-site for London to declare independence and stay in the EU got 30,000 signatures in just a few hours. As a Yorkshireman with Celtic roots I’m not proud of my country any more. No wonder the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, wants us to get out as quickly as possible.

Looking at the map, it is pretty clear that it’s the English agricultural areas and the needy development areas that produced the biggest “leave” support – and they are the ones that receive the EU subsidies. Worst of all there are so many “Leavers” interviewed on TV who are saying “I only voted 'leave' as a protest; I never thought it would happen”. For them, it must be like walking up after a drunken one night stand with an ugly bedfellow and a hangover. “Oh my God, what did I do?”

Having organised their postal votes, my children were in Spain and Germany on Black Thursday. My son has a small company with customers in Europe. His Facebook post read “I’m thinking of applying for political asylum” and my daughter “with a Spanish husband and Scottish mother, I have options”. Both of them are part of the wealth-creation class, doubtless they will be asked, no forced, to pay additional taxes in future to continue to provide the leaving areas with equivalent subsidies. There is no other way that the rebate to the NHS could be funded. And me and my wife? We live outside the UK, but pay UK taxes there which we can’t escape for reasons I won’t go into here, we rarely take any of the services offered to people of our age, as we are not here to do so: we woke up on Friday considerably poorer.

Of course there are those Bremainers clinging on to hope. A referendum is advisory, so, in theory Parliament have the right to reject it: very unlikely, but just possible. Since many were disenfranchised, like EU residents who have been living in Britain for a long time but have never applied for British Citizenship, since they didn’t need to – we belong to the EU and have signed up for the free movement of people – an appeal could be made (where, the European Court?) to enable them to vote retrospectively: hmmm, I can hear the screams from the Brexit camp already. Parliament takes on board the rerun petition and authorise another go, even have a best of three perhaps: in your dreams.

So, we are all going to have to live with consequences. Here are a few that I predict. Many of those pensioners living in France, Spain, Italy and elsewhere in the EU will discover their free health care there will no longer be available there, sell up and come back to the UK, putting pressure on the Health Service, so needing the illusory 350 million a week promised. The fall in the value of the pound will create higher priced manufactured goods in shops, this will depress the High Street and cause inflation at the same time, leading to higher interest rates, increased mortgage payments and so less money to spend: hence, we will see higher rents and increased unemployment. Some Europeans living here will go, particularly those in low paid jobs, requiring increased immigration from poorer non-EU countries to do the jobs that Brits won’t do. Scotland will leave the United Kingdom, so Hadrian’s wall will be renamed Farage’s wall as it is strengthened to keep out all those Syrian refugees shown on his poster streaming unchecked into the North. 

If you can feel anger coming through, you are right. Perhaps later I will start to see a plus side, but not today. All I see is a positive opportunity for damage limitation.