A relationship that lasted almost 50 years and shaped modern Britain ends on 1 January. Here, we examine the forces that finally pushed the UK and the EU into this momentous break
The metaphor of divorce has never felt wholly adequate to describe the complexity of ending 47 years of union with our 27 European neighbours but it has always captured the emotional brutality of the choice. How else, anyway, to imagine that morning this week when, after all these years of angst and haggling, the UK will finally hear the door slam on its long-time family home and find itself suddenly alone with all its baggage in the chill air outside, contemplating what’s next, while the locks are changed?
For many, that moment will retain the liberating bravado of bedsit independence, an opportunity to refresh a midlife crisis Tinder profile. For more of us, though – even many of those, I’d guess, who had vaguely wanted out – there will be instead a powerful sense of “what have we done?” And a dawning knowledge that all we have helped to build in Europe since 1973 – for better and worse – will now carry on without us. The 1,650 days of the troubled transition will melt away – all the exhausting wrangling over visiting rights and the price of fish; the costly delays and the desperate triumphalism – and we will be left with the starkness of that decision made in June 2016: we’re out.
