Brexit is the start, not the end

The moment of Britain’s departure from the EU was always likely to be an anticlimax, both for those who expect great things from Brexit and for those who had been braced for disaster. Departure day is not much of an event in itself, merely a moment at which new economic policies become possible. Thanks to the transition period and the Withdrawal Act, there is no cliff edge — at least not for now. Tough negotiations will begin again, but the Prime Minister has a chance to handle all this in a better, less divisive way than his predecessor.

After leaving, Britain now takes on a new role: as the European Union’s strongest ally. Although the UK has opted out of the EU’s bureaucratic hierarchy, we remain part of Europe in terms of geography, culture, trade and outlook. There are a great many areas where we will achieve far more by working together. Ursula von der Leyen, the new European Commission president, put it well: the negotiations now are about building an alliance, not dismantling one.

The Prime Minister has told his cabinet that their role is to ‘love bomb’ Europe in an attempt to set a different tone. He’ll be up against others who preferred it the old way. Leo Varadkar, for example, this week taunted Boris Johnson by saying that the EU will have the stronger hand and that Britain has ‘yet to come to terms with the fact it’s now a small country’. The EU, he says, is a 27–member bloc with 450 million people — and the UK is a mere 60 million. ‘So if these were two teams up against each other playing football, who do you think has the stronger team?’

Mr Varadkar will of course have the chance to test his football analogy when Ireland (pop: 5 million) comes to negotiate the survival of its low corporation tax rate with the rest of the EU.