The day is here, and much as many of us may have thought it wasn’t going to happen, the UK is leaving the EU. The Brexit we are getting is a right-wing one. But it won’t deliver what many of those who supported it wanted. That creates an opportunity to try to salvage something.
1. Don’t build expectations that it will be terrible
It’s easy to catastrophise Brexit – to say that there will be no medicines, the shop shelves will be empty, the army of workers who’ve come from around the world to do essential jobs will leave. While I recognise the psychological value of doing this it is deeply unhelpful. We must try not to do this.
A great deal of the momentum for “Get Brexit done” came from voters observation that there hadn’t been an economic crash after the Leave vote in 2016. Predicting doom that doesn’t happen doesn’t convince anyone. Of course, the damage done by Brexit is real, but has come slowly – and predicting it now does nothing to convince anyone.
