If you’re a fan of 1970s punk rock music then no doubt you have heard the Sex Pistol’s song “Anarchy in the U.K.” and Johnny Rotten’s guttural vocals on the track. Six days after the Brexit vote that split the United Kingdom from the European Union that phrase isn’t a song title as much as it is a sentiment and the guttural vocals are all the conflicting voices on the process.
One group of people who is not carrying the tune of Britons who are pleading for a few months to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty which starts the exit process are the other leaders of the European Council which is made of all 27 heads of government of the states of the European Union. The Union now has to find a way to persuade some of its other members not to seek similar exit in a wave of anti-establishment xenophobic bigotry (of which Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party is the leading voice) and one of the ways that the Union and all of it’s complex organs can do that is to make this exit process a bit like a trip to the dentist where they don’t numb you before they start yanking at your teeth.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said explicitly: “Britain does not have months to mediate.” This may seem coolly unsympathetic to the plight that will now afflict U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron now until his resignation date, maybe even to the day he dies, but the European Union doesn’t want to drag this exit process out any longer than it has to and it feels like it’s gone on a lot longer than just shy of a week.
Britons may be pleading for more time but the unspoken consensus seems to be that if they needed more time to mull this decision over they should’ve waited to vote on it until a later date, or found another way to conduct the process. Perhaps the most damning quote concerning this process has come from German Chancellor and unofficial champion of the European Union Angela Merkel saying about the United Kingdom’s waffling and their insistence that they get the fabled ‘better deal’ that caused this vote in the first place: “If you want to exit and leave this family, then you can not expect to drop obligations and have privileges continue”.
If this activation of the leaving process, which could drag on until September because the E.U. has no way to force the U.K. to do it, is already getting this contentious then this promises to be the ugliest geopolitical divorce in the history of the Post-War order and the U.K. stands to lose everything. I’m still waiting for the terms of the “Better Deal” because if it turns out, and it appears so already given the lowering of the national credit rating, the stock market strife, and general sense of malaise that the U.K. is chasing a political Unicorn what stings now will really hurt later as the world watches the sun potentially set on the relevance of the British Empire.
