BREXIT

The campaign for Britain to leave the European Union was based on some ideas that were far from safe. For instance, that Britain could "go it alone", depending upon trade agreements it could make or renew one by one in the future , depending also on an "ourselves alone" policy on everything , freely making and unmaking its own laws on justice, foreign policy, trading and much else.

Forgetting that Britain was never self-sufficient.  

It built up its great industries, power and wealth not from  its own natural resources but by using the natural resources of other nations whom it attacked and controlled. When an English monarch first  licensed and gave military support to pirates the pirates changed status to "privateers",  that is, piracy was nationalised and became a protected and successful English national industry. Historic out-sourcing by government.

Empire building nations including the British fought each other for control of the slave and piracy, opium and other trades, making them into national industries.

Two things about that : the need to be self-sufficient, to provide for a nation's needs and development from its own resources, was not necessary,  military conquest provided resources that really belonging to other people.  As long as this was happening Britain , like other empire builders, did not have the need, or even the possibility or desire of being self-sufficient. And in any case the nationalising of slavery and piracy and the seizing of resources was to provide wealth for only some of the population at home. Many of the rest lived in poverty.  

Another idea was that if Britain left you, the loss is yours, or if you left Britain, the loss was yours. People believed the Empire's foreign resources were worth fighting for, waiting for , hoping for, even if only a minority got the benefit. The English author Charles Dickens, recognising the poverty and misery of so many English people seemed to believe the remedy lay in a flourishing middle class becoming kindly and helping the poor.

Nowadays we are watching the development of huge trading and military groups in competition with each other and threatening each other, among them the USA, China, Russia. Whether these nations or groups of nations are morally or politically  good, bad, democratic or whatever, to cut loose from any of them or enter into competition with them is something to think  long and hard about.

The European Union is a vast trading bloc too.  Did London really expect it would be possible without hard thinking, planning and much preparation to create new trading agreements when so many powerful rivals are waiting in the wings ? Agreements on its own terms like in the good old days when Britain ruled the waves sailing on hulls of free Irish oak ? Relying  perhaps on the goodwill and resources of the old empire whose countries  were now changed from obedient subjects to profit-making traders on their own account?  To create trading arrangements in a world where you had to think twice and more before sending in the military ? President Trump is putting in place a programme of  war  for trade and  trade for war.  You  don't get into that game without a lot of preparation, a lot of internal domestic resources and a lot of allies.

There was no real preparation for Brexit.  There is still no realistic preparation for it. The best that can be done now may be to start at the beginning, spend two years, three years, more if necessary finding out and telling people what exactly is the price they and we would pay for doing business with the biggest hosting of trading and military empires the world has ever seen. Rushing into that situation with patriotic cries and waving flags will not do.  

Many years ago wise people said that if London lost control of Ireland that would signal the collapse of the Empire. They were right. Then they said that if London lost control of the north-east of Ireland that would signal the breakup of the United Kingdom. Were they right about that too? For the first time in the past hundred years British politicians are using the word " secession" in relation to Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland. London and those who put their faith in it seem not to realise what is happening even to England. When empires fall the world realises for the first time how weak the centre of an empire really is when left to its own devices  - and how the very devices created to save an empire may one day prove the empire's undoing. Devices for instance like artificial borders in the Middle East .

Or in Ireland.