LONDON (AP) – As a separated couple still living together, Britain and the European Union spent 2020 arguing and wondering if they could remain friends.
On Thursday, the UK finally moves. At 23:00 London time (midnight at the EU headquarters in Brussels), Britain will leave the bloc of 27 nations economically and practically, 11 months after its formal political exit.
After more than four years of political drama about Brexit, the day itself is something anticlimax. UK closure measures to curb the coronavirus have reduced mass rallies to celebrate or mourn the moment, although Parliament’s huge Big Ben bell will ring as it prepares to ring the new year.
The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, for whom Thursday represents the fulfillment of his promise to make Brexit, said that the day “marks a new beginning in the history of our country and a new relationship with the EU as its major ally “.
“This moment has finally come to us and now is the time to seize it,” he said after the British Parliament approved a trade deal between the UK and the European Union, the UK’s last formal hurdle before the way out.
It has been four and a half years since Britain voted in a referendum to abandon the bloc it had joined in 1973. The United Kingdom left the EU’s political structures on 31 January 2020, but the repercussions of this decision have not yet been heard, as the UK’s economic relationship with the bloc remained unchanged during an 11-month transition period ending on Thursday.
After that, Britain will abandon the big single market and the EU customs union, the biggest economic change the country has experienced since World War II.
A free trade agreement sealed on Christmas Eve after months of tense negotiations will ensure Britain and the EU of 27 countries can continue to trade goods without tariffs or quotas. This should help protect the £ 660 billion ($ 894 billion) in annual trade between the two sides and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on it.
But companies are facing lots of new paperwork and expenses. Traders have a hard time digesting the new rules imposed by a 1,200-page agreement that was agreed just a week before the changes took place.
The Port of Dover on the English Channel and the Eurotunnel passenger and freight route are set to be delayed, although the pandemic and holiday weekend mean there will be less traffic between the English Channel. usual. The vital supply route was twisted for days after France closed the border with UK truckers for 48 hours last week in response to a variant of the rapid spread of the virus identified in England.
The British government insisted that “the border systems and infrastructure we need are in place and we are ready for the new beginning of the UK”.
But cargo companies hold their breath. British transport firm Youngs Transportation is suspending services in the EU from Monday to January 11 “to let things get settled”.
“We assume it gives the country a week or so to get used to all these new systems inside and out and we can look at and resolve any issues before we ship our trucks,” said Rob Hollyman, director of Youngs.
The services sector, which accounts for 80% of the UK economy, does not even know what the rules will be for business with the EU in 2021, although many of the details have not yet been analyzed. Months and years of discussion and discussion about everything from fair competition to fish quotas are ahead as in Britain and the EU establishes itself in its new relationship as friends, neighbors and rivals.
Hundreds of millions of individuals in Britain and the blog are also facing changes in their daily lives. After Thursday, the British and EU citizens lose the automatic right to live and work in each other’s territory. From now on they will have to follow immigration rules and obtain work visas. Tourists will not need visas for short trips, but the new headaches (from travel insurance to pet documentation) are still planted for Britons visiting the continent.
For some Britons, including the Prime Minister, it is a moment of pride, the recovery of national independence from a large bureaucracy in Brussels.
Conservative lawmaker Bill Cash, who has campaigned for Brexit for decades, said it was a “victory for democracy and sovereignty”.
For others, it is a time of loss.
Roger Liddle, a member of the opposition Labor Party’s House of Lords, said Brexit had separated Britain from “the most successful peace project in history”.
“Today is the victory of a poisonous nationalist populism over rules-based liberal internationalism and it is a very bad and very painful day for me,” he said.
This sentiment was echoed by the European Minister of France, Clément Beaune.
“It’s a day that will be historic, that will be sad,” he told LCI.
“But we must also look to the future. We need to draw several lessons from Brexit, starting with lies, I think, that were told to the British. And we will see that what is promised: a kind of total freedom, lack of restrictions, of influence, I think will not happen “.
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John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, contributed to this story.
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