Brexit Metaphor No 69
Dogs evolved from wolves that adapted to live close to human settlements and gradually started cooperating with humans over some 10,000 years. Dogs have gained genes for digesting starch to make use of grain-derived human food, while even puppies recognise a basic pointing human gesture without being taught.
The UK evolved in the last 45 years in close cooperation with the EU: Britain's economy and trade are geared towards making efficient use of European markets and supply chains, while UK law transposes the 108,000 legal documents contained in the EU body of law (acquis communautaire).
With Brexit looming on the horizon, the British "dog" that had learned to live with and inside the EU will now need to learn to live on its own again, like a wolf. And if this is not possible, the far-flung Commonwealth provides a hybrid alternative, the dingo: a feral dog that lives in the Australian wilderness but is descended from domesticated ancestors.
Britain should be free to decide to become a "dingo". However, in the process it will not only need to learn to hunt for food in the wild again; it will also need to be careful not to take on the reputation of dingoes for eating human babies (an economic policy of extreme deregulation, commonly known as Singapore-on-Thames).
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| Australian dingo with a fish (Source: Wikipedia) |
Notes:
1. Timeline: This article is part of a series of original #BrexitMetaphors published daily. A total of 69 have been posted so far and another 92 Brexit Metaphors will be published every day until the planned Brexit date of March 29, 2019.
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Brexit will need to unwind 45 years of economic and legal convergence between Britain and the EU. This is similar to unwinding the genetic evolution of the domesticated dog and turning it back into a wild wolf...or at least into a dingo (a feral dog). Britain's choice of divergence strategies (dog-into-wolf OR dog-into-dingo) is actually not much of a choice. Sadly both come with the stigma of being an outsider to the civilised human world.
ReplyDeleteIf the dingo/baby metaphor is geographically too far, Thomas More has a similar one for 16th cenury England: the sheep that "eat up and swallow down the very men themselves."
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