For me the main consequence of Brexit will be the breakup of the UK. This will, I think, start with Northern Ireland.Tories hold 15-point lead over Labour with just days until election
This will translate to a significant majority if true. So how will this all turn out? One possible path:
- Brexit 31st Jan 2020 with Boris deal
- EU agree a 5 year trade deal to kick in at the end of 2020
- Quotas could reduce year on year
- Boarder checks could increase over the 5 years
- This would stop a cliff edge but allow Boris to start implementing other trade deals
- Will EU position themselves in a way that would encourage UK to re-enter the EU?
- Scots will initially complain but probably save their dry powder for the following election - see how Brexit unfolds
- Smaller trade deals will kick in 2021
- Larger deals will be constrained by continued (but reduced) EU alignment
- UK request that we re-enter EU following election 2024
- EU demands will be onerous, UK put on the back burner
NI voted Remain and if, as Corbyn has suggested, border controls between the island of Ireland and England, Wales and Scotland are introduced then post-Brexit a united Ireland will shortly follow. The Good Friday agreement makes provision for a reunification referendum. The RoI would then be effectively merging with NI, an economically disadvantaged country, (much as west Germany did following the end of the Soviet Union) but the EU will likely financially support the new, unified country.
This will leave the enlarged RoI to capitalise on being the primary english speaking territory within the EU. Those parts of the international banking business that have not already departed London for Frankfurt will end up in Dublin.
Once the NI has gone Scotland, which also voted Remain, will almost certainly follow. Even if Westminster has sufficient majority to forbid Scotland from calling another independence referendum the SNP seem likely to gain sufficient power to do so autonomously. The SNP may even find themselves the power brokers as the DUP were post 2017.
Brexit has always been mainly about English nationality. Ireland and Scotland were considered to be the first of the colonial possessions and as such are expendable but finally these too will gain independence.
After five centuries the empire will have been fully dismantled and England will be revealed as a rather small, post industrial country (previously doing rather well out of financial services and Banking), that has just excluded itself from a customs union with its primary market and its closest neighbours.