Last week, I went to London for a meeting organized by the London School of Economics with my former doctoral colleagues in Political Science. The main topic circulating in all the discussions was Brexit and the traumatic departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. Ninety percent of the attendees at that meeting were not British.
I understand that the letter by which the United Kingdom triggers the mechanism to leave the EU, delivered on March 29 to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, will represent the greatest sacrifice of British sovereignty in history. And I reached this conclusion after listening to the conversations it sparked among my British friends.
“What will happen is that the Europeans will tell us the conditions under which we can trade with our largest neighboring market, and this will become evident when we start losing things. The supposed increase in our level of sovereignty that all those Europhobes, nationalists, and populists talked about will be exposed, and we will realize how hypocritical those who only sowed hatred to reap these storms are,” one told me.
“Our exit from Europe is and will be the end of the period of the highest benefits in British history.”
“What will really happen when Brexit is executed in two years?” others wondered. “Well, what will happen is what Margaret Thatcher feared most—and it wasn’t the Argentinians (laughs). She feared losing control over the conditions in which British companies operate, harming our trade and industry, which have their largest market in Europe.”
And another colleague, a bit of a Eurosceptic, interjected: “Suppose you’re wrong. What will happen then?” “Well, if I’m wrong,” a colleague replied, “future events will tell me I’m wrong. But what will really happen with the worn-out story of the money that left our coffers and now seems to be back, what will happen with the famous 350 million dollars that could be invested every day in our public health service, what will happen with those buses that roamed London loaded with false slogans and lies is that they will disappear, and we will face reality.”
And the Eurosceptic replied: “Many believe that Europe was, in reality, an elitist operation.” To which an eminent professor responded: “Our exit from Europe is and will be the end of the period of the highest political, economic, and social benefits enjoyed by the British people, and it will be more perceptible for each of us when we feel it in our pockets and freedoms. I have an idea of what this country was like, and how, even though we have had a decade of frozen living standards, our present cannot be compared to the conditions we lived in all of Europe during the 1920s, 30s, or 40s.”
The Spanish Parliament is turning into the famous and successful Telecinco program Sálvame.
“It is evident that European unity has provided the longest period of peace in the history of our continent, has achieved democracy in all latitudes, got rid of fascism in Spain and Portugal, ended the colonels in Greece, buried the Iron Curtain, and ended communism. Why do you think all these immigrants come here? Because we are among the most prosperous parts of the world,” he concluded.
And now, to watch with sorrow, how one of the most influential countries in history, with the greatest cultural wealth, owner of the language of business, creator of parliamentary democracy and the father of hundreds of nations and peoples, dissolves like a sugar cube in coffee, with the fissures beginning to emerge among the English, Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish, who are already in open and legitimate dispute over how to abandon the once-thriving ship of the United Kingdom to swim, like castaways, to the shores of our beloved and denigrated Europe.
As I was flying back, I fell into a state of semi-wakefulness and dreamed of how the bloody British scenario extrapolated to my country, and at one point, I saw how the tyrannical hordes of the sowers of hatred and populism reaped the anger of the discontented with the sole purpose of destroying Spain.
The Spanish Parliament is turning into the famous and successful Telecinco program Sálvame, where the commentators/deputies throw questions and answers at each other on topics that no longer matter to anyone, dress in ridiculous t-shirts, carry stupid banners, and demonstrate their pauper level every day. What selection processes have they undergone? To whom are they accountable? What free press faithfully scrutinizes their work? Atresmedia or Mediaset?