Bracing for Brexit

After months of to-ing and fro-ing, the UK finally reached a decision on Brexit, and they voted to leave (though it is noteworthy that the most searched phrase in Britain the day after voting was ‘what is the European Union’), and with that decision comes a several year period of talks and trade agreements, deals and compromises that, hopefully, will be best for the country. Or maybe not. There are calls for another MP vote, a so-called ‘meaningful’ referendum about whether the UK should actually leave the European Union. Now, whatever your stance on current world affairs is, this reporter personally being on the left side of the political spectrum, we can all agree that this country is a democracy, and with that title comes a certain expectation: when the people vote for something, this something should be done, even if the votes were based on what was subsequently revealed to be a lie (namely that we would have an extra £350,000,000 to spend on the NHS, a fact that someone who we won’t name *cough cough Nigel Farage* later stated that it was a ‘mistake’). The parliament, however, has taken the vote as it is stated, word for word in the foundation of politics: a referendum is merely a suggestion from the public about what the government should do. Fair enough, after all, we have voiced our opinion, however people have lately started re-examining the current Brexit situation, in fact, an $85,000,000,000 investor (Alecta, Europe’s fifth largest manager of pension assets) has just requested that the EU be ‘nice’ to Britain in the Brexit negotiations. And now, amongst the Brexit negotiations, there have been calls for a second Scottish referendum. Only time will tell what will become of the Brexit negotiations, or if Brexit will be forgotten in six months and we remain in the EU…