THE UNREAl DEAL

Brexit had the hall­mark of silli­ness upon it as soon as il­le­gally funded cam­paigns, barefaced lies and dig­i­tal tar­get­ing by the now dis­graced Face­book-rum­mag­ing com­pany Cam­bridge An­a­lyt­ica ca­joled 52% of Eng­lish and Welsh peo­ple into vot­ing Leave in 2016. That said, there have been mo­ments over the past four years when the ups and downs of the Brexit hag­gling have had us British pass­port hold­ers who live in Eu­rope shud­der­ing in fear for our fu­tures. But upon hear­ing that Boris John­son had struck a deal with the EU last Christ­mas Eve, many of us felt an un­usual mix of not only (some) re­lief, but also de­jec­tion.

Re­lief, be­cause we now stand a fairly good chance of not being kicked out of the coun­tries in which we’ve made our homes for don­key’s years. De­jec­tion, be­cause – among other things – we have now be­come com­pletely dis­en­fran­chised, un­able to vote for any­thing, any­where. Some 40% of British cit­i­zens who have mar­ried EU cit­i­zens abroad will not be able to bring their fam­ily to live in the UK un­less they’re earn­ing a min­i­mum of €20,000 per year, and if they have chil­dren, con­sid­er­ably more. Any EU cit­i­zen who has not ac­quired set­tled sta­tus be­fore the end of last year will only be al­lowed to stay in the UK for three months out of every twelve. British stu­dents will be ex­cluded from the Eras­mus pro­gramme and British uni­ver­si­ties, from joint re­search pro­jects. Seven out of every ten busi­ness peo­ple, ac­cord­ing to a re­cent LSE re­port, be­lieve Brexit will have a neg­a­tive im­pact on their com­pa­nies. British cit­i­zens trav­el­ling to EU coun­tries will be badly de­layed by the ad­di­tional checks they’ll face at the Schen­gen bor­der (in­clud­ing lorry dri­vers, who will not be able to take any British prod­ucts of an an­i­mal ori­gin such as ham and cheese or just about any­thing else they might like to put in a sand­wich any fur­ther than the white cliffs of Dover). And those same dri­vers, whether en­ter­ing or leav­ing the UK will be stuck in end­less tail­backs: when the French gov­ern­ment test-ran its Brexit cus­toms soft­ware last No­vem­ber, more than 7,000 trucks ended up stand­ing nose to nose in the Gar­den of Eng­land, se­cret­ing fumes and oblig­ing the dri­vers to an­swer their in­evitable calls of na­ture in a nat­ural set­ting (the UK gov­ern­ment has said it won’t be long be­fore it pro­vides dozens of strate­gi­cally placed road­side toi­lets).

On the ap­par­ently bright side, the British have in­creased their fish­ing quota, but this isn’t, how­ever, going to do them much good given that up to 80% of their catch is sold abroad, and an equally large amount of seafood is im­ported from the EU. Be­sides which, Eu­ro­pean crews have been fish­ing in UK wa­ters for decades any­way (long be­fore the UK joined the Com­mon Mar­ket), and vice versa.

Was this arrange­ment – which has too many other neg­a­tive con­se­quences to fit on one page – worth four whole years of fit­ful ne­go­ti­a­tion? Cue a West­min­ster MP who is an ac­tive mem­ber of the Eu­ro­pean Re­search In­sti­tute, the most hard-line pro-Brexit in­sti­tu­tion in ex­is­tence: a month ago he told a friend of mine that the real ob­jec­tive of Brexit was to leave with­out a deal, but that if there was going to be a deal, Britain would be bet­ter off sim­ply stay­ing in the Union. Now he tells us.