Fantasies About Post-Brexit Life in the UK

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

So now what?

Britain didn't really vote for anything; we voted to no longer be part of the European Union. There are plenty of ways in which we could make that happen. The entire population could walk with silent, purposeful strides along our charming rural byways and in our masses along the emptied motorways, congregating at the cliffs of Dover just before sunrise, to link arms as the sky turns from black to pink to blue, staring out at the welcoming sea and then diving together to our deaths: at this point, Britain would cease to be, in any meaningful sense, a part of the European Union. We could close the coasts, declare the airspace off-limits and return to a simple and wholesome life in the countryside, baling hay and dancing around maypoles and living in tiny thatched cottages and burning anyone who mentions the mythical lands beyond this charming little island for witchcraft. We could use nuclear bombs to divert the tectonic currents and push the United Kingdom to a more economically advantageous position, somewhere just east of Singapore. Nobody on the Leave side really has a plan for this, because none of them really expected to win.

Similarly, nobody in Europe really knows how to handle a British exit either; this simply hasn't happened before. Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, which determines the mechanism by which a member state can leave the EU, is a piece of meaningless tautology in the great European tradition: all it essentially says is that the procedure for any exit from the union is to be worked out within two years under Article 50. They may as well have just written "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." For all we know, Britain has just accidentally declared war on an entire continent, and while the fighting might be sluggish and unenthusiastic at first, once a few cities get popped like blisters and the bodies start really piling up, we'll probably get into it.

This sounds pessimistic. No, a negotiated start to World War Three isn't likely, but it's not impossible; it really could happen—there are at least two important precedents. The same can't be said of some of the other scenarios being floated by pundits and politicians, people who ought to know better. Predicting the future is a fairly stupid game, more than anything because it usually involves the assumption that people will act in a way that's predictable—in other words, rationally and intelligently. As recent experience shows, this is not the case. But it is possible to say, with absolute certainty, what won't happen. Everything is not going to be OK, and every imagined version of how it could be is more unlikely than the last. These are the roads Britain will not take after its referendum, the futures we will never see, the impossibilities that will haunt the short remainder of our lives.

"If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea," Winston Churchill once purportedly remarked, "she must always choose the open sea." This was the rallying cry of the Brexiters: we would wrench ourselves free from one cloistered and cobwebbed continent to feel the brave salt tang of the oceans again; we would leave the land powers of Europe to sink into their common bog and stride out alone to face the world. Britain has always been a naval power—a trading, mercantile nation—and we could be so again.

Yes, back then we did much of our trading in human slaves, but times change and we can change with them. Leaving the EU wouldn't just let us keep the hundred million trillion we send to Brussels every week; it would make us rich beyond our wildest dreams. British ships would buzz from port to port in all the fabulous tropics, and the riches of the world would pile up at home as we sold our—our what? What does the United Kingdom actually produce again? Financial services? Television formats? Boy bands? Commemorative royal baby tea-towels? Oh, fuck.

Leave it to the lawyers; within hours of the referendum result they were already finding devious little strategies by which the UK could stay in Europe, despite the million-plus majority for Leave. First, it was pointed out that the vote was advisory, rather than binding; there's no legal requirement for any government to invoke Article 50 immediately, and the longer we go without doing so—it's not expected to happen before the end of the year—the less chance there would be of it ever actually happening.

Decades from now, leaving the EU would become just another vague political promise, like fixing the NHS or forcing the BBC to commission something that isn't gut-curdlingly embarrassing. Political leaders would promise to finally start the negotiations before every election, and then balk once actually in power. We'd live in permanent uncertainty, but you can make a kind of home in purgatory: there are occasional tortures, but it's not so bad. This would be fine, except we'd all also starve to death.

The financial markets—the euphemism that's for some reason been given to a cruel and boisterous cabal of planet-ruling philistines—has only one real demand: that they be able to accurately predict the future at all times. It's not a big ask, but they are very insistent on it; capital will not function in a country permanently poised on the cusp of an unpredictable decision, and no prime minister will ever do what capital forbids. The idea that nothing will ever happen again is nice, but for once it's simply not possible.

The second great lawyerly idea is, if anything, even worse. When the devolved regional parliaments were formed in the early Blair years, part of their initial legal infrastructure was the requirement that they act in accordance with EU law. As such, getting rid of EU law across Britain would require the consent of the Scottish parliament, which could always vote against, effectively blocking us from leaving. It's all above board, it all makes perfect sense and who could possibly complain? When this happens, the Brexiters would think it over for a few moments, and then nod their heads in unison. Fair's fair, they'd say. You've got us there. Very clever, very well done, I guess we'll stop frothing about politics now and get on with our lives in a kindly and diligent manner. The great tide of resentful English nationalism will recede, skinheads will sing "O Flower of Scotland" in charming chorus with refugees from around the world, sales of the Guardian will skyrocket, and we'll all live happily every after.

As its opponents so often point out, the EU is a messy and Byzantine maze of overlapping institutions, and it's hard to say exactly where it begins and ends. Leaving Europe wouldn't necessarily mean backing out of all of them. In any minimally sensible deal, Britain would remain in the European Economic Area, along with Norway and Iceland, and like Switzerland, we'd want to participate in the European Free Trade Association, securing the free movement of goods, labor and, capital. It would make sense to build some arrangement so that we would continue to abide by the Common Fisheries Policy, and while we'd no longer be an EU member, our level of engagement with the union ought to allow us some kind of representation in the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Commission.

With sterling having so much trouble, we may as well just join the Euro, as long as it's understood that we are outside the EU now and no longer subject to its authority. All this would be in Britain's long-term interest. The other European powers, who are good and sensible and have no desire to punish us, would hardly object; neither would the electorate. It wouldn't be like not just sleeping with your ex, but continuing to live in their house and seeing their big spiteful face every morning until you start to feel your body stewing and boiling in impotent rage and you find yourself entertaining violent fantasies of murder-suicide and body parts splattered all over their obsessive imitation of a happy home; it wouldn't be like that; it wouldn't be like that at all.

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