New Year's Eve - the ball drops, the champagne corks pop and the United Kingdom finally officially finishes its divorce from the world's largest trading bloc, the European Union. Brexit has huge consequences for business, travelers and regular people who built lives based on a Europe that spanned the English Channel. This is a big gamble for the U.K., one that started more than four years ago when one of the biggest cheerleaders for Brexit was a former London mayor named Boris Johnson.
Johnson and his fellow Brexiteers had no real plan for how to actually untangle decades of economic and legal integration with Europe. And so a country known for effective, sometimes dull governance was plunged into years of political chaos that cost two prime ministers their jobs; first, David Cameron, the man who called the referendum, even as he urged Brits to vote against it.
From the perspective of a political scientist, you could not have hoped to live through a more interesting time to study the politics of your country. The other thing for me that is fascinating, though, is that many - for many people who supported Brexit, leaving the European Union wasn't an end in itself. It was a means to an end. That is to say if we leave the European Union, then we can, dot, dot, dot. You fill in that blank as you want - become a more activist international player, deregulating the way the European Union would never let us. So actually, the real test of Brexit in many ways is yet to come, which is now you've got that freedom. What the hell are you going to do with it? And how are you going to make people's lives better because of it, despite the fact that you're in charge of an economy that is growing less fast than it would have done had we not left in the first place?
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How U.K.'s Separation From EU Will Affect The Country : NPR
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