After more than three years and many extensions, Britain’s breakup with the European Union is finally official. And the story of their divorce is a long and laborious one. A chapter might be over, but the saga continues.
Back in June 2016, 52 per cent of the United Kingdom’s population voted in favour of the Brexit referendum. Yet, the withdrawal of the UK from the EU was sold to voters without a clear idea of what it would mean. Now that it’s here, the question remains.
What exactly does Brexit look like? Alas, my friend, we still don’t quite know and Britain has more time to figure it out once again.
Ironically, even as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson officially signed the Brexit Agreement, which came into effect on Friday, Jan. 31, the UK still has another 11-month transition period. They need to negotiate new regulations over various issues such as trade and immigration, while the old rules still apply. They couldn’t figure it out in three years, but who knows what will come out of this transition period?
We are not just talking about a few new adjustments here and there. We are actually looking at more than 750 treaties and international agreements that will need to be looked over, according to Financial Times. It will take time, and it should. Changes of this nature can’t be made in a rush.
However, despite the separation anxiety the exit is causing, it actually could mean greater opportunities for Canada. While our country and the UK were trading under the EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) since 2016, another deal will have to be drafted and agreed upon by both countries. Seeing how the UK struggled in dealing with Brexit in the first place and how unsteady the road ahead is, Canada could end up with the upper hand.
But ONLY eventually, after the transition period (which could also be postponed for another year or two).
How Britain managed to conquer the world is a wonder.
A new decade is here, bringing with it new events. But before we look forward, here are the 10 defining news events that have set the stage for the 2020s, in no particular order.
Beginning in December 2010, anti-government protests shook Tunisia and, in 2011, quickly turned into a region-wide uprising referred to as the Arab Spring. This pro-democratic wave of protest that spread across Arabic-speaking countries in Northern Africa and Middle East overthrew the governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. This then led to civil war in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen.
Release of information
The 2010s were filled with whistleblowers and leaks. Notably, Edward Snowden worked for the National Security Agency and leaked documents about monitoring American citizens. Then U.S. army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning––then Bradley Manning––leaked thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, a website intended to collect and share confidential information, created by Julian Assange.
On Feb. 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, a Black 17-year-old boy was shot by George Zimmerman, who ended up being acquitted for murdering Martin. This acquittal prompted the creation of the Black Lives Matter Movement, an international activist movement against violence and systemic racism towards Black people.
In October 2017, #Metoo went viral, making international news, encouraging women to share their stories of sexual violence and harrassment. The #Metoo movement brought to light sexual predators like Bill O’Reilly and Harvey Weinstein.
In 2017, Donald Trump was elected and became the third American president to be impeached. The Trump administration is known for separating migrant families at the border and shutting down the American government for 35 days—the longest in American history—in an attempt to try to force the Democratic party to agree to a deal to build a wall along the Mexican-U.S border.
England held a referendum and voted to exit the European Union in 2016. This created a riff in the country’s political parties, who are unable, to this day, to agree on what may
be one of the biggest decisions in English history in decades.
Rising temperatures throughout the past decade have caused an increase in natural disasters around the world. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global temperature will increase by 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next 10-years, which will cause devastating damage to the planet. In 2015, 195 nations signed the Paris Agreement, agreeing to keep the global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius. The inaction of various government have caused people like Greta Thunberg to mobilize millions across the globe in a climate strike.
There have been approximately 180 school shootings in America from 2009-18, and 114 people have been killed. According to an article by CNN, school shootings have increased since the start of the 2010s.
Russian forces occupied Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in an attempt to stop Ukraine from trading with America. Over 10,000 people were killed in the long-lasting conflict between the two countries from 2014-18.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was born of an offshoot of Al Qaeda in 2013. The group was involved in multiple terrorist attacks across the world, notably the bombing of a Russian airplane, killing 224 people, and a series of attacks in Paris on the night of Nov.13, 2015, killing 130 people.
The only important event of the 2010’s is that DiCaprio won best actor in 2016 for his role in The Revenant. He had been nominated six times prior to his first win.
The last Harry Potter movie came out in 2011, ending the 14-year saga of the Wizarding World. The movie series brought in over $7 billion, and the book series sold over 450 million copies with a similar estimated revenue.
The Higgs field is theorized to be what gives matter mass and is made up of a particle called the Higgs boson. This particle has been theorized since the 1960s, but was only detected in 2012. This helps add to the understanding of the Standard Model, a theory that explains t hree of the four fundamental forces in physics.
The viral phenomenon of people dumping buckets of ice water over themselves to raise awareness for ALS and fundraise for the ALS Foundation took place in 2014. Celebrities like Tom Cruise and Robert Downey Jr. participated in the challenge. The campaign raised over $10 million in 30 days, and funded a number of projects. One of these was Project MinE who, in 2016, were able to identify a gene associated with ALS which could possibly lead to a treatment.
We got to see the first ever photo of a black hole, located more than 50 million lightyears away in the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy. The photo was created by the Event Horizon Telescope project, a global collaboration of more than 200 scientists using observatories around the world, ranging from the South Pole to Hawaii. It took more than two years to assemble all the photos gathered from all observatories to create an actual image of the black hole.
Biologists discovered new species at an incredible rate, averaging approximately 18,000 per year. Some of these include the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey and the Vangunu giant rat. New categories for animals were made to describe newfound fish with “hands” and frogs smaller than a dime. Yet, in 2019, scientists warned that a quarter of plant and animal populations are at risk of extinction.
Sixteen people have been sentenced to death for setting a 19-year-old girl on fire after she accused her teacher of sexual harassment in Bangladesh. The verdict came after the country was left in shock, protesting for justice. It was one of the quickest sentences to be pronounced in such cases. Nusrat Jahan Rafi was murdered in April by classmates who urged her to retract her complaint. They lured her onto a rooftop 11 days after she came forward to the police with accusations of sexual harassment, as reported by BBC. Bangladesh has an alarmingly high rate of sexual violence. According to UN Women, more than half of Bangladeshi women have experienced some form of sexual violence from their intimate partner in their lifetime.
On Sunday, Trump announced the death of one of the most wanted terrorists, Islamist State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Several media outlets reported that he died in a raid conducted by American troops in northwest Syria, on Saturday night. It was later confirmed by Trump that al-Baghdadi ran into a dead-end tunnel with three of his children, where he detonated a suicide vest. Yet, people are reluctant to link his death to the end of ISIS, as the terrorist organization is most likely to name a successor. Talking about a possible ISIS resurgence in a TIME article, Michael Downing, former head of the Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau for the Los Angeles Police Department said: “Now is one of the most dangerous times, when you injure an animal, that is when it is most dangerous.”
A new Brexit deadline has been granted to Boris Johnson’s government after the Prime Minister was forced by the parliament to request a further extension.On Twitter early Monday morning, President of the European Council Donald Tusk referred to the setback as a “flextension” – meaning if a deal was to be made before February 2020, Britain could still have the opportunity to leave the EU. Johnson has repeated many times that a Brexit deal would happen by Oct. 31, but it has become increasingly difficult to reach a consensus with a minority government. Brexit, the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU, was first voted for in 2016 and has been extended three times since.
It may not be a coincidence that Brexit, the United Kingdom’s planned exit from the European Union, is scheduled for Oct. 31, which, as you know, is also Halloween.
In fact, Brexit is a pretty scary prospect for my family and friends back in my native Northern Ireland (NI). Their fears are not unfounded: a Sept 04 report by the Canadian credit ratings agency DBRS suggests that if the UK crashes out of the EU on Oct 31 it could “inadvertently lead to the breakup of the Union” – (namely the UK) by increasing support for Scottish independence and the unification of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.
The prospect of a breakup of the UK is a serious matter: even casual students of history know that the birth or death of a nation is usually a very messy business.
A potential flashpoint would be the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (ROI). Since 1973, when the UK and the ROI joined the EU, people and goods moved freely across the border. However, if a no deal Brexit leads to a NI-ROI border with infrastructure – fences, passport and customs posts. This so called “hard border”, in confirming the 1921 partition of Ireland would become a target for the catholic paramilitary IRA (Irish Republican Army). IRA attacks on border infrastructure would mean reprisals on the catholic community by the protestant paramilitary UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force). British military intervention to separate the two sides could revive the shooting war that lasted from 1969-1998, reports the BBC.
Bertie Ahern, former PM of the ROI, in an article for Irish Examiner expressed how the Irish feel about a hard border: “They fear that any infrastructure at the border equals trouble, disagreement, Army, soldiers, police. Some of it might be exaggerated but there is that fear of the slippery slope. It is something that really worries people.”
Irish people are angry and frustrated by what they see as the UK’s cavalier attitude towards Ireland as Irish Journalist Una Mullally writes in The Guardian, “With every bungled stage of Brexit, there is a dismayed head-shake about the fact that this is the first century where all of Ireland isn’t under British rule, yet still Britain finds a way to screw us. When Britain sneezes, we catch the cold.” Of course it’s not just about the Irish and the NI-ROI border. About 3 million EU citizens established in the UK may have to rethink their futures after Brexit. Polish citizen Niko Cichowlas who runs a London based construction company explains: “When I hear the guys talking, they feel that the British are turning against them, they feel this rightwing antagonism, and some of them end up becoming quite anti-British themselves – the process works both ways. They feel under attack, it is very sad.”
The crazy thing is, Brexit didn’t have to happen. It only came about because of a throw away promise made during the 2015 UK election campaign by UK Prime Minister David Cameron. He said he would hold a referendum on EU membership if his party was re-elected. Probably, when he made the promise he just couldn’t imagine that on June 23 2016, 17.4 million UK citizens (52 pc of eligible voters) would vote to leave. In this way, a casual election promise led to the UK’s biggest political and constitutional crisis in half a century.
There may be some hope of a last minute deal to take the UK out of the EU in an orderly manner. Following their October 10 meeting in Liverpool, the Irish PM Leo Varadkar and the UK’s Boris Johnson stated they could see “a pathway towards a possible deal.” I hope so — Halloween isn’t far away and there’s already too much scary stuff happening in the world without tacking on a disorderly Brexit.
A Northern Ireland student’s take on Brexit and how it will affect his home
Within “Brexit”––the United Kingdom’s pending withdrawal from the European Union (EU)––is a lesson on how an international border can return to haunt the foreign power that imposed it, long before for reasons of political expediency.
The border that separates my native Northern Ireland (NI) from its southern neighbor, the Republic of Ireland (ROI), also separates Britain from an orderly Brexit which is ironic, since it was Britain that created the border when it partitioned Ireland in 1921. It would even be amusing if a disorderly Brexit wasn’t such a threat for Ireland, north and south.
In 2016, Brexit came about, largely, from British immigration angst. Since the NI-ROI border will be the UK’s only land border with the EU, you’d expect it to have customs posts, passport control, and barriers of some sort. However, this “hard border” scenario is problematic because of Ireland’s history and the tangled web of national identities that didn’t disappear with partition.
In NI, those citizens––usually Catholic––who identify as Irish see the border as an emotional reminder of partition that deprived them of basic civil liberties for 50 years. For instance, there were cases where access to social housing and to employment in private and public employment was denied to members of the Catholic community. However, some NI catholics pragmatically cherish the border for locking the UK into injecting roughly (CAN)$16 billion annually into the NI economy.
NI citizens––usually Protestant––who identify as British see the border as confirming the union with the UK and their own distinct society. Others, seeing their future in the EU, have obtained ROI (EU) passports and some might even buy into a united Ireland as to remain in the EU, according to TheIrish Times.
Hardcore NI nationalists are fundamentally opposed to the border. In fact, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) would consider border infrastructures as “legitimate military targets.” But any border attacks by the IRA would provoke reprisals by the––mostly Protestant––Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). In this way, a “hard” (visible) border might reignite the violence that ended with the 1998 Belfast Peace Agreement, according to The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, south of the border, ROI citizens see it as a firewall against the craziness of NI sectarian politics, which is why, in a 1999 referendum, they massively voted to relinquish the ROI’s constitutional claim of sovereignty over all of Ireland. However, the border question is not exclusively in their hands because the 1998 Belfast Peace Agreement allows NI’s Secretary of State to call a referendum on the status of the border. A similar referendum would have to be held in the ROI. How those referenda would play out is anyone’s guess.
To avoid a hard NI-ROI border, the UK’s Withdrawal Agreement includes a so called “backstop,” a post-Brexit temporary customs union between the UK and NI with the EU. However, after the UK’s attorney general judged that the backstop could tie the UK to the EU perhaps indefinitely, according to The Irish Times, the Withdrawal Agreement was struck down by more than 200 votes in the UK Parliament on Jan. 15, 2019.
At the end of January, Prime Minister Theresa May was considering an alternate backstop with technology replacing visible border infrastructures. If this option is rejected, the UK may crash out of the EU on March 29, creating a hard NI-ROI border and a possible return to armed conflict in NI, according to The Guardian.
Last year, I had a chilling reminder of the violence I knew growing up in Belfast. On DW’s “Belfast facing Brexit”, ex-IRA member Bob talks of bombers and ex-UVF member Noel, although referring to his past, speaks in the present tense: “I’ll shoot a Catholic nationalist … that way the message is sent to that community…” This is just one example of the consequences for NI, of Brexit, and the border.
