Brexit Unfolded: How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to)

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I am Emeritus Professor of Organization Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, and was previously a Professor at Cambridge University and Warwick University. Today, many remain unreconciled to Brexit whilst, in a tragic irony, some of those most committed to it are angry and dissatisfied with what was delivered. One of these reports, on 26 December, highlighted the case of ‘Silvana’, an Italian who has lived in the UK for fourteen years and faces removal from the country because she had not realized that her ‘permanent residency’ card is now insufficient, and that she needs to apply to the EUSS. I blog in a personal capacity and all views expressed are mine, not those of any institution or organization.

For that matter, those with greater knowledge than me, or who have dug deeper into the details than I have, could undoubtedly identify all sorts of other Brexit connections. According to the3million, the main campaign group for EU citizens living in the UK, at least 140,000 people are in Maria’s situation of having Certificates of Application, but awaiting the outcome.But, immediately, that got taken up by pro-Brexit social media accounts to show that claims it was all down to Brexit were false, even though no such claims had been made. Brexit Unfolded is a must-read for anyone who cares about what happened following the momentous decision Britain took in the 2016 referendum. Stephen Phipson, CEO of MAKE UK, has a similar message: “we don’t have the regulatory capacity to keep up: it’s not intentional but we’re lagging behind”. Left undefined by the referendum, the actual meaning of Brexit emerged only gradually, through the confusing and often dramatic events that followed.

This is one of the main reasons why millions of Brits, some of whom had never voted before, rose up and voted Leave in 2016 to leave another pan-European, rigged establishment club”? That’s not to dismiss some of the good work the IMA has done, including winning a court case against the Home Office in 2022 on one aspect of EUSS’s functioning.Taking everything together, then, this is a dismally instructive story, enfolding generalized myths about the second world war and specific myths about champagne bottles, metrication, and the supposed outlawing of imperial units, stirred in with the faux-victimhood of martyrdom. That will take many years, if it happens at all, but in the meantime a small step in that direction would be to start making a noise right now about the unfolding EUSS scandal. These include the fiasco of the original ‘permanent residence’ scheme and highly prescient concerns about the then emergent EUSS scheme, concerns which relate to all of the individual cases mentioned above, including the problems of a digital-only certification system. Hitchens’ article actually touches on it when he notes that it is “because that is the size of bottle most people like.