[LINK] "Britons will enjoy their victory today. But tomorrow, the hangover will be fierce"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail features an article by Margaret MacMillan looking at the post-Brexit United Kingdom.

As I watched UKIP leader Nigel Farage chortling in triumph, I was reminded of what the British humorist Peter Cook once said: that Britain was in danger of sinking giggling into the sea. In an act of unparalleled frivolity, a majority of the British public have just taken a giant step closer to that fate. They will enjoy their victory today, but they are going to wake up tomorrow with a massive hangover. British exports will probably fall off with key markets no longer freely accessible; a falling pound will make imports and foreign holidays expensive; and even more hospital beds are likely to disappear because there will be curbs on immigration even of nurses and doctors.

And the map of the British Isles is going to look different. A large majority of Scotland’s voters were for staying in the European Union. A new referendum on independence is almost certainly now on the cards and this time the Scots may vote to leave. Why after all would they want to stay in a Disunited Kingdom? There will have to be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because the latter is a member of the EU. As the triumphal Brexiters in the Leave camp will be quick to point out, the present open border would allow all sorts of migrants to flow northward and then into Britain.

History was called into the debate and, as so often, shamelessly misused. We got the obligatory references to Winston Churchill on both sides and the spirit of Dunkirk. The Leave camp painted a picture of a mythical golden age when jolly beef-eating Britons sat serenely in their island fortress.

Think of the Tudors, the Brexiters cried – they didn’t give a hoot for all those foreigners on the other side of the Channel.

The reality, of course, was something different. England was a minor power with a hostile Scotland to the north and an unruly Ireland in the West. It had few friends on the continent and lived in fear of invasion. The fallout of this referendum will leave an England about the same size as the one then. Will the English have to take up piracy again to help pay the bills?