Emmanuel Macron, president of France, is correct about Britain’s post-election Brexit realities. At a joint news conference with Prime Minister Theresa May in Paris last week, he said the UK decision to leave the EU could be reversed: “As the negotiations go on, it will be more and more difficult to go backwards.”
May knows she must respect the positions on Brexit of other parties, given her failure to secure a majority and the loss of 13 MPs. She is also under pressure from Brexiters on her own backbenches who could topple her as prime minister if she fails to deliver on their expectations. The world, however, knows that she and David Cameron with good reasons supported Remain in last year’s national referendum.
Asked in Paris if her minority position would lead Britain towards a softer Brexit, she insisted that she remains determined to make a success of Brexit but wants to maintain a “deep and special partnership” with the EU.
Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, with 30 new Labour MPs, was criticized for not campaigning energetically enough for Remain. In a pre-referendum speech, he did say: “We, the Labour Party, are overwhelmingly for staying in, because we believe the European Union has brought investment, jobs and protection for workers, consumers and the environment… our membership offers a crucial route to meeting the challenges we face in the 21st century, on climate change, on restraining the power of global corporations and ensuring they pay fair taxes, on tackling cyber-crime and terrorism, on ensuring trade is fair with protections for workers and consumers and in addressing refugee movements.”
In Dublin last week, Fintan O'Toole, the pro-EU columnist for the Irish Times, wrote: “Brexit is a back-of-the-envelope proposition. Strip away the post-imperial make-believe and the Little England nostalgia, and there’s almost nothing there, no clear sense of how a middling European country with little native industry can hope to thrive by cutting itself off from its biggest trading partner and most important political alliance …The Brits want what they can’t possibly have. They want everything to change and everything to go as before. They want an end to immigration–except for all the immigrants they need to run their economy and health service.”
What is to become, for example, of the legal rights of one million UK citizens living in EU member states other than Britain? What of those of three million EU citizens now resident in the UK?
