LONDON (AP) – As a separated couple who still live together, Britain and the European Union spent 2020 arguing and wondering if they could remain friends.
On Thursday, the UK is finally moving. At 11 pm London time – midnight at EU headquarters in Brussels – Britain is going economically and practically leaving the 27-nation bloc, 11 months after its formal political departure.
After more than four years of Brexit political drama, the day itself is a kind of anticlimax. The UK’s blocking measures to contain the coronavirus have reduced mass meetings to celebrate or mourn the moment, although Parliament’s huge Big Ben bell rings the hour as it prepares to ring in the New Year.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson – for whom this Thursday represents the fulfillment of his promise to “make Brexit” – said the day “marks a new beginning in the history of our country and a new relationship with the EU as his greatest ally ”.
“This time has finally come and now is the time to take advantage of it,” he said after Britain’s Parliament passed a UK-EU trade deal overnight, the last formal obstacle for the UK before departure.
It has been four and a half years since Britain voted in a referendum to leave the bloc it had joined in 1973. The UK left the EU’s political structures on January 31, 2020, but the repercussions of that decision are still have not been felt, since the UK’s economic relationship with the bloc has remained unchanged during an 11-month transition period ending Thursday.
After that, Britain will leave the EU’s vast single market and customs union – the biggest economic change the country has experienced since World War II.
A sealed free trade agreement on Christmas Eve, after months of tense negotiations, will ensure that Britain and the 27 EU countries can continue to trade products without tariffs or quotas. This should help protect the 660 billion pounds ($ 894 billion) in annual trade between the two sides and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on it.
But companies face a host of new expenses and paperwork. Traders are struggling to digest the new rules imposed by a 1,200-page agreement that closed just a week before the changes took place.
The Dover port on the English Channel and the Eurotunnel passenger and cargo route are preparing for delays, although the pandemic and holidays mean that there will be less traffic across the Channel than normal. The vital supply route was blocked for days after France closed its border with UK truck drivers for 48 hours last week in response to a rapidly spreading strain of the virus identified in England.
The British government insisted that “the border systems and infrastructure we need are in place and we are ready for the UK’s new start”.
But freight companies are holding their breath. UK transport company Youngs Transportation is suspending services to the EU from Monday until 11 January “to let things work out”.
“We think it gives the country a week or more to get used to all of these new systems on and off and we can take a look and hopefully resolve any problems before actually shipping our trucks,” said Youngs director Rob Hollyman.
The service sector, which accounts for 80% of the UK economy, does not even know what the rules for doing business with the EU will be in 2021 – many of the details have yet to be worked out. Months and years of new discussions and discussions on everything from fair competition to fishing quotas as Britain nd the EU establishes its new relationship as friends, neighbors and rivals.
Hundreds of millions of individuals in Britain and the bloc also face changes for your daily lives. After Thursday, Britons and EU citizens lose the automatic right to live and work in each other’s territory. From now on they will have to follow immigration rules and obtain work visas. Tourists will not need visas for short trips, but new headaches – from travel insurance to paperwork for pets – still loom over the British who visit the continent.
For some in Britain, including the prime minister, it is a moment of pride, a claim to national independence from a vast Brussels bureaucracy.
Conservative lawmaker Bill Cash, who has campaigned for Brexit for decades, said it was a “victory for democracy and sovereignty”.
For others, it is a time of loss.
Roger Liddle, a member of the Labor Party opposition in the House of Lords, said Brexit had separated Britain from “the most successful peace project in history”.
“Today is a victory for a poisonous nationalist populism over rule-based liberal internationalism and it is a very bad and very painful day for me,” he said.
This sentiment was echoed by France’s European Minister, Clément Beaune.
“It is a day that will be historic, that will be sad,” he told LCI.
“But we also have to look to the future. A number of lessons must be drawn from Brexit, starting with lies, I think, that have been told to the British. And we will see that what was promised – a kind of total freedom, a lack of restrictions, of influence – I think it will not happen ”.
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John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, contributed to this story.
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