The European Parliament gave today its final approval to Britain’s divorce deal from the bloc, paving the way for orderly Brexit to take place this Friday.
EU lawmakers voted 621 for and 49 against the EU Withdrawal Agreement sealed between the UK and the 27 other member states last October and ratified by the UK Parliament on 23 January 2020. The negotiations over the deal clauses have lasted for more than three years, although Brexit was originally meant to happen on 29 March 2019.
The UK will quit the bloc an hour before midnight on Friday. There will be a status-quo 11-month transition period running until year-end, during which the UK will remain in both the EU customs union and single market.
The country’s withdrawal from the bloc after 47 years of membership is going to deliver a major setback for European integration. The country joined the then European Communities in 1973. But the recent euro zone crisis, increasing pressure of European leaders for a closer integration and uncontrollable mass immigration prompted the 52 to 48 percent vote to leave.
Dissent among EU member states is growing. “A very major country is leaving and maybe people should start to think about why that is,” said Nigel Farage, one of the main leaders of the 2016 Brexit campaign. “This European project wants to become an empire.”
The UK and EU are currently considering a zero-tariff, zero-quotas free trade agreement. “But the precondition is that EU and British businesses continue to compete on a level playing field,” European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen said. “We will certainly not expose our companies to unfair competition.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “We’ll be out of the EU, free to chart our own course as a sovereign nation.” He has promised that there will be no so-called ‘level playing field’ clauses on fair competition in the new EU-UK deal.
The June 2016 Brexit referendum showed a deep national divide about European policies. Europhiles praised the freedom of movement of goods, people, services and capital over borders, while eurosceptics disagreed that national states should lose sovereignty and the right to make decisions about their own laws and policies. Some feared that Brexit could even lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom: England and Wales voted to leave the bloc, while Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to stay.
“Brexit is a reconceptualisation of our country, of our politics and of our place in the world,” said Anand Menon, director of The UK in a Changing Europe think-tank. “It is the most significant thing certainly to have happened in our history since the Second World War.”
Additional reporting by Barbara McGuinn
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