"I roar". Lemuel Gulliver famously sprawled, with Lilliputians,1894. Wikicommons/ Charles E.Brock. Some rights reserved.
If we want to grasp the impact of Brexit on citizens’ and workers’ rights, we must mentally detach ourselves from the scheme adopted in the EU-UK negotiation on the Withdrawal Agreement.
This is not because the scheme is flawed or inefficient. In my capacity as co-rapporteur for my political group in the Brexit negotiations I endorsed such a scheme: it has consisted in the struggle to preserve the European rights (the so-called “acquired rights”) enjoyed by Northern Irish citizens (more than 1.8 million), by EU citizens in the UK (3.8 million) and by UK nationals within the Union (1.3 million). The total comes to almost 7 million people who either didn’t stand a chance to choose or voted Remain in Northern Ireland, and who are threatened by a radical erosion of their rights.
