Brexit Metaphor No 92.
Have you noticed that disembarking a plane is always faster than boarding a plane? And packing to check out from your hotel room is always faster than packing at home for the same trip? It seems so much easier to take everything which is yours and sweep the hotel room clean than deciding what to bring from home and what to leave behind. Yet, one should not underestimate the time needed to vacate a hotel room or a plane.
Britain spent 402 months as a (committed) EU member state from January 1973 until June 2016, and is scheduled to spend 33 months in the process of leaving, from June 2016 until the end of March 2019, i.e. a difference by a factor of 12. Building up a sui-generis supranational organisation does take time, but leaving it turns out not to be an easy job either - at least not of the calibre of the 12:1 ratio of membership to "departure-ship". Sensible Brexiteers (while still passionately believing that Britain belongs outside the EU) must be secretly wishing that Article 50 gave five years to prepare for proper withdrawal rather than merely two.
Spending 33 months in "departureship" is turning out insufficient to actually depart the mothership at all. Wouldn't it have been easier to disembark if the luggage on the plane was kept on open racks (as in the 1970s photo below), rather than in closed overhead luggage bins as it is nowadays. If the EU had been simply a Customs Union, unravelling membership would have been easy. However, the EU has become a lot more compartmentalised since the 1970s and the acquis communautaire now contains 35 chapters (compartments), all of which have to be "cleared" before a new relationship between the UK and the EU can be forged.
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| Boarding a plane in the 1970s (Source: Wikipedia) |
Notes:
1. Timeline: This article is part of a series of original #BrexitMetaphors published daily. A total of 92 have been posted so far and another 69 Brexit Metaphors will be published every day until the planned Brexit date of March 29, 2019.
2. Disclosure: The author has a master's degree in European Integration. He also thinks he knows a bit about business, economics, entrepreneurship, China, history, geography, nature, science and Rubik Cubes.
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