Turns out that the best explanation of my personal experience of the brexit process so far is the five stages of grief. Obviously it is neither sensible nor appropriate to equate a political decision to the personal loss of a loved one, but the process of coming to terms with brexit does seem to be moving through the same five stages

DENIAL

Denial is the first of the five stages of grief and brexit – surely this cannot be happening? There has to be some sort of mistake. In this stage, the world became somewhat meaningless and overwhelming. Life mades no sense. We were in a state of shock and denial. Numb. Initially the focus was just on finding a way to get through the day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible by helping us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you begin the healing process. You are become stronger, and denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying begin to surface.

ANGER

Anger is a necessary stage of any healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing.

The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is God in this? Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural to feel deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t attend the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – – your anger toward them. The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love.

BARGAINING

After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if we hold a second referendum. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?” We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our life and country restored. We want to go back in time: find the political tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only.

Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain.

We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.

DEPRESSION

After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss.

We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness, wondering, perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of.

The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If grief is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.

ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case.

Most people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. Thus people who voted to remain in the EU may well accept that we’re leaving but they won’t ever be ok with leaving and will never like this reality. We may learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live.

In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganise. Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones.

Beyond tired of brexit, like most people however they voted, I still couldn’t describe myself as resigned.

Certainly I would not characterise myself as wanting my MP and the government to push ahead with the current brexit plan to “get it over with” not least because we haven’t even started the trade negotiations with the EU yet so this process is going to run for years.

But I have been trying to work out what to expect next.

There seem to be two scenarios coming into focus: a shitty deal where limits to immigration are prioritised followed by trade in goods or leaving with no deal at all.

Since the UK makes most of its money overseas from trade in services, even with the shotty deal now being discussed, our economy will obviously be damaged and as the negotiations go by, more and more compromises will be required to limit the damage to our economy from setting those two priorities.

Each one of those real-poilitik compromises will be met with horror by those currently cheerleading for brexit. The lack of transparency by the UK government means people have been allowed to keep their illusions so when each and one of those illusions fractures, people will be looking for someone to blame. Never themselves. They will claim that leaving with any deal at all was the mistake, not leaving itself. WTO rules only will become the mantra because unhappiness needs a meaningless slogan to coalesce around.

So politics will stay fundamentally divided and fractious. Society will remain divided and fractious. And people will still split between “remainers” and “leavers”. Economically things will get worse. Nothing will be fixed.

If we leave with no deal at all, then things will get difficult quickly. A developed country will see empty supermarket shelves for the first time in a generation. We will risk medicine shortages and see immediate price rises as WTO tariffs are applied to all imports.

But the world won’t come to an end. We are wealthy and the cost increases won’t stop us eating what we want when we want. Food used to talk cup 30% of people’s disposable income compared to today’s 10% so maybe it will just rise, offset by falling housing costs. Neither will the increased costs stop us taking holidays and living our lives much as today. We will have less but we won’t have nothing. Plenty of people will be significantly worse off. London will be damaged, but it is wealthier and perhaps more able to mitigate that damage.

Our children are maybe now more likely to go and work and live overseas.

We will see a slow decline of our economy relative to the rest of the world. Initially we’ll be able to pretend it’s a worldwide phenomena as we pull the EU down with us, as the US-China trade war starts to bite.

Away from the sheer anger that brexit creates, I’m left with just a sad resignation. For my generation the walls came down, the threat of war receded and we all felt we were going to be richer, healthier and better. For my children’s generation, that is no longer true. The walls are going up, the threat of war is rising and they will be poorer, less healthy and generally worse off.

My expectations are sad.

Brexit means brexit: it means leaving an organisation and all that we’ve built up over 40 years and it will be both difficult and time consuming. It’s a big deal. People who have been told they should expect an easy negotiation, a straightforward transition with no need for a period of adjustment will react badly when that turns out to be untrue.

Sovereignty is not a one-way street; neither is brexit. Having chosen to leave, we cannot sensibly expect the EU to change, to alter its behaviour for us. We have chosen to become independent and compete with the EU: we need to accept being treated as independent competitors

The EU is very good at process, and we need to start taking the process seriously, to get much better at managing the process, if we expect to come out the other side of brexit with anything worth having.

It is not possible to suggest that there is only one way to leave the EU that happens to be the way the government of the day, or certain leave campaigners, choose to leave. The method, the distance from the EU etc were not on the ballot and it is dishonest, disenfranchising and fundamentally and unnecessarily limiting to insist otherwise. Where we end up, our post-brexit relationship with the EU will be as a result of political choices made by our government, not by the electorates vote in the referendum.

WTO rules are not good enough for the UK. It is not possible to argue both that it is perfectly fine to leave a deep free trade agreement with easily our largest export and import market for the next generation, and trade on WTO terms because that is how we and others trade with everyone else……. AND argue that it is imperative we get out of the EU in order that we can strike preferential trade deals with large parts of the rest of the world, because the existing terms on which we trade with the rest of the world are intolerable. .

The huge problem for the UK with either reversion to WTO terms or with a standard free trade deal with the EU is in services. And make no mistake, the current plan sacrifices the UK’s trade in services where we run a healthy surplus, for limiting freedom of movement.

There is no such thing as a trade deal + . “Pluses” merely signify that all deficiencies in the named deal will miraculously disappear when we Brits come to negotiate our own version of it and are simply not true.

Transparency is important in politics. You cannot and should not try to hide the reality of this kind of negotiation from the electorate. You can’t possibly run one of the largest and most complex trade negotiations on the planet, and leave people in the dark about the extremely difficult choices we shall face. The electorate need to be aware of the choices and inevitable trade-offs that the UK will need to make.

Real honesty with the public is the best – the only – policy if we are to get to the other side of Brexit with a healthy democracy, a reasonably unified country and a healthy economy. And we haven’t seen much honesty from either side of the debate in the UK so far. That has to change.

Real honesty with the public is the best – the only – policy if we are to get to the other side of Brexit with a healthy democracy, a reasonably unified country and a healthy economy.

The debate of the last 30 months has suffered from opacity, delusion-mongering and mendacity on all sides.

The Prime Minister’s call for opponents of her deal to “be honest” and not simply wish away intractable problems like the backstop, which was always, and will remain, a central question in any resolution of the issue, is reasonable enough.

And at the extremes we have the “no dealers” quite happy to jump off the cliff, lying openly about the extent to which WTO rules provide a safety net if we did, and producing fantasy “managed no deal” options which will not fly for the reasons I have set out.

And the “people’s voters”: they want a second referendum with remain on the ballot – for which one can make a case, given the dismal place we have now ended up, and given possible Parliamentary paralysis, but must surely understand the huge further alienation that would engender amongst those who will think that, yet again, their views are being ignored until they conform.

Where is the great idea or plan to address that alienation?

And even now we can hear a Shadow Cabinet Member promising, with a straight face, that, even after a General Election, there would be time for Labour to negotiate a completely different deal – INCLUDING a full trade deal, which would replicate all the advantages of the Single Market and Customs Union.

And all before March 30th. I assume they haven’t yet stopped laughing in Brussels.

Too much of our political debate just insults people’s intelligence and suggests that every facet of Brexit you don’t like is purely a feature of only the Prime Minister’s version of it, rather than intrinsic to leaving.

The Prime Minister’s deal is obviously a bad deal. But given her own views and preferences, her bitterly divided Party and the negotiating realities with the other side of the table, I can at least understand that she is on pretty much the only landing zone she could ever reach.

Those aspiring to a radically different one owe us honest accounts, not pipedreams, of how they propose to get there, and the timescale over which they will.

But the dishonesty of the debate has, I am afraid, been fuelled by Government for the last 2½ years.

It took ages before grudging recognition was given to the reality that no trade deal – even an embryonic one – would be struck before exit, and that no trade deals with other players would be in place either.

Even now, though, the Prime Minister still talks publicly about the Political Declaration as if it defined the future relationship with some degree of precision, and defined it largely in line with her own Chequers proposal, when it simply does neither.

It is vague to the point of vacuity in many places, strewn with adjectives and studiously ambiguous in a way that enables it to be sold as offering something to all, without committing anyone fully to anything.

Any number of different final destinations are accommodable within this text, which was precisely the thinking in drafting it, to maximise the chances of it being voted through, when all the EU side was really determined to nail now was within the Withdrawal Treaty: rights, money and the backstop.

For the same reason – the desperate inability to acknowledge that it was going to take very many years to get to the other side of the Brexit process – we have had the bizarre euphemism of the “implementation period” after March 2019, when there is nothing to “implement”, and precisely everything still to negotiate.

I dislike the “vassal state” terminology, but anyone can see the democratic problem with being subject to laws made in rooms where no Brit was present and living under a Court’s jurisdiction where there is no British judge.

And if we are to avoid the backstop coming into force, we are now going to end up prolonging the transition, because the FTA won’t be done by the end of 2020, and the EU well knows the

U.K. won’t be keen on cliff jumping in the run up to an election.

We have had the several bizarre contortions over trying to invent a Customs proposal which enabled us to escape the Common External Tariff but still derive all the advantages of a quasi Customs Union. Even the all U.K. backstop proposal has ended up being called a temporary Arrangement, when we all actually know it to be a temporary Union, as nothing else could fly under WTO rules. But the U word is too toxic for polite company evidently.

On the backstop itself, it was obvious, reading the December 2017 Agreement document from outside Government that this must lead inexorably to where we have now reached.

There was no other endgame from that point.

But we got sophistry, evasions, euphemisms and sometimes straight denials at home, whilst in the EU, the PM and senior Ministers several times appeared to be backsliding on clear commitments as soon as they saw draft legal texts giving effect to agreements they had struck.

That deepened the distrust and if anything hardened the EU’s resolve to nail the issue down legally. And, from the apoplectic reaction to the Attorney General’s advice, which elegantly stated the totally obvious, you can now rather see why.

There is no point in my speculating here precisely on what might now get manufactured and its legal status. The EU is always very adroit at such exercises in solemnly reframing things which have already been agreed in ways that make the medicine slip down.

But however they re-emphasise their intention, which I believe, that the backstop should not be permanent, it is the very existence of it in conjunction with the cliff edge which will dictate the shape of the trade negotiations.

We may well now be beyond the point at which any clarification Declaration or Decision can sell.

And if we are, it’s largely because the whole conduct of the negotiation has further burned through trust in the political class.

That should force a fundamental rethink of how the next phase is conducted; whether this deal staggers, with some clarification, across the line in several weeks time and we go into the next phase with the cards stacked, or whether we have a new Prime Minister who attempts to reset direction, but will find, as I say, that whatever reset they attempt, rather a lot of the negotiating dynamics and parameters remain completely unchanged.

Either way, the final lesson is that we shall need a radically different method and style if the country is to heal and unify behind some proposed destination.

And that requires leadership which is far more honest in setting out the fundamental choices still ahead, the difficult trade offs between sovereignty and national control and keeping market access for our goods and services in our biggest market, and which sets out to build at least some viable consensus.

The time to lose ourselves in fairy tales has ended. Our politicians can no longer get away with strutting and fretting or with sound and fury. It’s time to wake up from the dream and face the facts.