Brexit Scenarios 2021 - 2031

This article is taken from a forthcoming book about Brexit and steps to Rejoin the European Union. It was developed from consultations with people from right across Europe in 2021 and is offered as a piece for discussion and dialogue. Check our current books out here .

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During 2021, I worked with over 100 people of all persuasions across Europe, to develop some plausible scenarios for our eventual re-admission to join to the European Union.?Scenarios are a strategic planning tool that describe ‘the history of the future’. ?Originally development by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970’s for long range business planning they are a tool that enables us to ‘prepare to be prepared’. ?A good scenario is not so fantastic that it is discounted as science fiction, nor is it so close to current reality as to be discounted as being ‘boring’.?The political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental scenarios we developed are presented here as a series of stories an aid to your own thinking about how we might bring about our re-admission to the EU which we examine later.?

I guarantee that they will be both accurate and of course faulty, as we indulge in the dangerous game of making predictions about a disruptive and mercurial situation.?The many moving parts in these scenarios may of course interact in different ways.?Nonetheless the group considered these to be plausible routes and journeys which will set the tone in terms of responses to external events.

Breadline Britain

By 2031, the impact of The Brexit Hunger Games had been fully felt through civil unrest, the fragmentation of traditional politics and the formation of The People’s Progress Party (PPP), formed from the fragments of Labour, Lib Dems, the influence of powerful individuals such as Gina Miller, a merger with The Green Party and Memoranda of Friendship with the independent Governments of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and The European Union. Although The PPP could not stop the damage done by Brexit, Brexit carnage had eventually unified the people against the remnants of the Conservative Party, allowing a return of some of the more moderate conservatives to public life.?This took place after an attempted takeover by Jacob Rees Mogg and following the worst riots ever seen on the streets of Britain in 2022, after the impact of Brexit on food supplies, gas and electricity supplies, the three-day week, drinking water safety issues and availabilities of goods and services previously taken for granted.?One of the earliest acts of the PPP was to prosecute various culture carriers of Brexit, assisted by The Good Law Project.?In 2026 a group of these people were jailed for various offences, including Boris Johnson, Mark Francois, Nigel Farage, Lord Bethel, Daniel Hannan and Priti Patel.

The PPP was formed in 2023 in a complete volte face of traditional politics.?People were selected for office, based on rigorous selection methods and then elected by people’s assemblies.?Whilst the party had some politicians drawn from the best of the crop, it was formed from people from business, the arts, community leaders, public figures and so on.?This was informed by the insight that some celebrities and sportspeople were more skilled and popular than Westminster politicians.?However, this was no populist uprising.?The PPP insisted on informed democracy, fought the election in 2024 on some old-fashioned ideas about truth, fairness, trust, reforming politics and healing the country.?They won a majority of votes but lost the election to the Conservatives due to the existing First Past The Post (FPTP) system, which Labour had failed to confront and which eventually led to the breakup of the Labour party.?The PPP’s meteoric rise was based on some very good campaigning, based on an ‘Enough is Enough’ message and a promise to make a Better Britain in a Better Europe through Better Politics.?This included plans for electoral reform.?It had become clear that the European Union felt they were better off without Britain at the table and, although they had left the door open to rejoining the EU, it would come with some important pre-conditions.?The most important one was for a complete removal of the Brexit ultras from power, to avoid a ‘Hokey Cokey Brexit’ i.e. an in / out / shake it all about approach to EU membership.?Other items such as Schengen and Euro membership were negotiable depending on whether they felt that our standards of democracy were acceptable and the degree to which English exceptionalism and cakeism had been removed from the political culture.?Some former Brexiteers hid in the shadows rather like people did from 1975 until 2016.?

Breadline Britain tipped over in March 2022, when children were seen crying in the aisles of Dudley Tesco, as their parents fought over the last packets of frozen chicken nuggets, Pampers and Haribo, brought about by lorry driver shortages and lack of Carbon Dioxide supplies.?An angry woman was heard to say ‘I voted to get my country back, but not for a chicken run and nappies.?I was duped’.?Once Brexit food import restrictions kicked in on January 1st 2022, the situation rapidly deteriorated.?Shortages were not limited, sporadic and selected.?They were continuing, occasionally deep and they touched everyone in strangely different ways.?Still one or two leave voters celebrated the Blitz spirit, egged on by Nigel Farage who continued to claim victory over imperial measures, something we have had throughout our EU membership.?Laura from Basildon won a prize on ‘Come Dine Without Me’ and went to No 10 Downing Street.?She was reported as saying ‘I’m actually not that hungry’, when having an austerity lunch of Pease Pudding and Faggots with Boris Johnson.

Government plans to mitigate foreign lorry driver shortages due to Brexit backfired badly into 2022.?The 2000 army HGV drivers diverted to deal with the 100 000 foreign lorry driver shortage were quickly rediverted to deal with the Winter of Discontent, which emerged because of the food and utility shortages and rationing of specific items.?Attempts by food retailers to up HGV driver wages to ￡55 000 were of course welcomed by lorry drivers.?However, it quickly became apparent that this would ‘drive traffic’ around the supply chain of drivers, as some refuse collectors,?ambulance drivers, HGV drivers in other sectors etc. decided that they fancied a better wage.?It simply created deficits in other areas and more disruptive effects.?For example, waste was not collected in certain parts of Britain.?The initial reaction of the public to the ‘Keep on Trucking for Britain’ campaign was positive but turned sour quickly, as people realised impacts on prices, NHS services and rotting food in bin bags full of custard.

A tipping point in the Brexit debate was the so-called sporadic ‘Pigs in Blankets’ famine of December 2021 where frantic parents fought for chipolatas in supermarkets after the supply chain broke down.?Preceded by a number of marches for and wildcat disturbances at food depots in Britain, Jason Matthews (son of Bernard Matthews) was asked to join a Government taskforce with Ian Botham and Roger Daltrey on the future of turkeys for Christmas.?Botham promptly attempted to blame farmers for the problem and was squewered by Matthews, who was heard to say ‘Bootiful’.?Meanwhile M&S Chair and former Conservative Party MP Archie Norman eventually caved in and said ‘This is totally down to Brexit.?Nothing to do with COVID and the product of a party I was once proud of, but which has now put Brexit ideology above pragmatism’.?For the first time, the underground chasm in the Tory Party was exposed.

But Britain was not beaten.?Boris Johnson, buoyed up by the birth of his second / twelfth son, Winston, whipped up enthusiasm for British Bulldog Spirit and initiated a new scheme called ‘Grow for Britain’, where house owners were given a ￡50 grant to convert their gardens to allotments, using Afghans as live-in labour, as part of their cultural conversion.?Johnson appeared on Gardener’s World in a project with Monty Don to convert the No 10 Rose Garden into a cabbage patch after the scandals about Partygate.?This was swiftly followed by the delivery of Winston to offset people’s thoughts about food shortages.?In real life however, the British people found that micro farming celeriac and cabbages was not popular, especially in the middle of winter.?They were also too preoccupied with parochial concerns to celebrate ‘royal babies’.

Brits, freed from lockdown restrictions and loaded with cash sought to unload their excess financial baggage by holidaying in Europe and beyond in 2022 and 2023.?But they faced a new problem.?Sterling.?In 2022, Sterling had parity with the Euro and in 2023, with the dollar, due to Britain’s new standing in the world as a third country.?Although some continued with their holidays, Rishi Sunak introduced restrictions limiting the amount of money taken on holidays to curb the Sterling crisis.?The Daily Express was unable to blame the problem on Johnny Foreigner and used the headline ‘Pounded by Brexit’.?Queues at passport control when the EU channel was absolutely empty made holiday makers irate, aside from the hassle and ￡30 per family charge to go into Europe.?But most staycation holidays in Britain were out of reach financially for many people, as prices were hiked due to supply and demand considerations.

Can’t get no

Shortages continued at a deep level for two more years until 2024, but they never actually went away completely, despite the Government’s attempts to incentivise farmers to grow more crops rather than animal feed.?Some items simply disappeared from shelves.?Many were unexpected, such as bleach, diagnostic tests, Pesto, tonic water, sun dried tomato paste and some medicines for rare critical medical conditions.?As with all crises, human ingenuity finds a way.?If an out-of-stock item was discovered in a particular town on a given morning, all the stock would be gone by 9 am and then sold on the black market.?‘Only Fools and Horses’ became the reality in trading scarce goods and every village had a character known as Del Boy.?Clandestine banana trading was used as a kind of proxy to preserve community spirit as Del liked to say “Ave a Banana” to keep the customers satisfied when things they wanted were out of stock.?The Police noted a small rise in looting, not of money or property, but of vegetables from gardens.?All the while Boris Johnson refused to accept humanitarian aid from the EU during the UK ‘hungry gap’.?This is the few weeks, usually in April, May and early June, after the winter crops have ended but before the new season’s plantings are ready to harvest.? Boris Johnson continued his campaign of deflection into 2023 after he swapped Carrie up for a debutante who was working as a media relations executive at The Daily Express.?This followed Carrie’s failure to host a fourth child for the Johnson dynasty and Stanley Johnson’s unfortunate declaration on GMTV that she was ‘barren’.

Little things seem to irritate more than the big-ticket items.?Whilst people seemed prepared to shrug at the ￡37 billion wasted on fictional PPE and the 150 000 unnecessary COVID deaths, they found queuing at airports almost intolerable whilst EU citizen lanes were empty.?Even more humiliating was when it was discovered that the EU’s new satellite system Galileo made GPS navigation much more accurate.?This had serious implications for driverless cars and HGV’s into 2027.?Insurance companies started to offer discounts to drivers who had installed Galileo instead of the UK satellite system as the gold standard for driverless vehicles.?British citizens were able to access Galileo from the EU on a paid for basis, much to the annoyance of PM Truss who had tried to over-rule access but was thwarted by a class action from the insurance industry supported by The Good Law Project.

Although Boris Johnson attempted to deflect the fact that Britain has systematically degraded its levels of food security over decades, people were more persuaded by the continuing food shortages in 2022 and the so-called ‘Andrex Wars’.?Strategies to pay lorry drivers extra by commercial companies backfired after it became obvious that these were taking staff away from NHS ambulance drivers and critical services.?In any case smart young people who saw the future did not want to take up careers as lorry drivers as they saw the advent of driverless trucks in 2028.?Some hauliers upgraded to LHV rather than training new HGV drivers.?The trucks were more efficient, with lower GHG emissions per tonne transported.?The combined effect of Brexit and the unattractiveness of the jobs meant that Britain’s food and goods shortages became normalised.?Despite the protestations of the remaining few Brexiteers that ‘shortages would make men of us’, most real men and women saw a return to WWII supply chains as a backward step for Britain and began to realise just how harmful Brexit had been.

The mainstream media became more fickle as a result of realising that they had backed the wrong horse with Brexit.?GB News appointed a Brexit correspondent in 2023, whose sole job was to identify problems caused by Brexit.?In truth it was a desperate move as audience numbers crashed following Nigel Farage’s decision to move to Monaco ‘ for health reasons’.?Dominic Cummings gradually continued his journey of attacking the Conservative Party to the point where he released a book in 2023 about the critical mistakes from 2017 – 2023 in Government Brexit Policy.?The book ‘My Brexit Mistake’ was a revelation in so far as Cummings openly criticised the implementation of Brexit, saving himself from being the subject of attention, by saying that his vision had been perverted by useless politicians.?In 2022, The Daily Mail, Sun and Express began open warfare on Brexit and the Government that caused it.?They held back at backing Keir Starmer and the Labour Party though, preferring to focus on their audience and casting themselves as supporting the people and not the politicians.

After a complete meltdown of the Conservative party in 2027 and the removal of the Brexit ultras from power with some being imprisoned, the PPP finally got elected in 2028 and began the business of Rejoining the EU.?This was preceded by the so-called Zimmer Riots by pensioners, after free prescriptions were removed in 2026 on the road to privatisation of the NHS.?The tipping point occurred after two pensioners glued themselves inside No 10 Downing Street on a visit of a delegation of elderly citizens to a VE Day commemorative dinner on 8th May 2025.?This had been preceded by a series of wildcat strikes in the NHS.?One or two very memorable protests had been dubbed ‘Crapping for Carers’ after a series of sporadic E-Coli outbreaks had occurred in hospitals due to water purification problems.?An outbreak of Legionnaires disease in Medway Maritime Hospital also claimed 735 lives.?It seemed that lowering standards had entirely predictable effects which were not obvious to PM Sunak.

Never Ready

By 2023, the implications of Britain’s decision to leave Europe’s internal energy market started to become visible.?Initially it was simply steep rises in electricity bills.?People were asked to remove additional lightbulbs from their homes by Grant Shapps who had become Minister for Power in 2023.?Restrictions were also imposed on commercial buildings and corporate premises and these were floated on the general ambition of environmental need rather than Brexit induced desperation.?Self-appointed wardens sprang up in some areas who were referred to as ‘Mr Hodges’ with their call ‘put that light out’ taken from Dad’s Army.?

The ‘Build Back Better’ initiative was confounded by hyper-inflation in the building industry and shortages of materials that led to a stop-start building cycle.?Builders were initially happy about it as demand for their services increased and they could to some degree name their price.?However, it paid back in terms of unaffordable homes and unemployment in the sector.?Attempts by Alok Sharma, Minister for Reconstruction, to slash safety standards, remove listed building status, occupy the greenbelt and increase hours in the industry, were met with mass disapproval.?As a result, many new housing developments were ‘never ready’.

Bluff, Bluster and Bust

London made a bid for independence in 2030 as news that the UK economy slipped from No 4 in 2015 to No 11 in 2029. This had been preceded in 2028 after the UK Brexit economy finally tanked.?The Mail reported the headline ‘England sick as a Brexit dog’.???

The rot had started much much earlier, when Rishi Sunak removed the triple pension lock in 2022.?Although originally stated as a temporary measure, it became a permanent one as the astronomical bills for Brexit mounted up.?This produced a generation of pensioners that were effectively living on the breadline, unable to support children and grandchildren, selling off their homes to pay for retirement and private care homes and increasingly privatised healthcare.?This was compounded by further lowering of student loan thresholds which would see a generation of young people living below the poverty line, stagflation due to Brexit, as wages levelled off and National Insurance increased.?Working people struggled to get well-paid jobs.?Brexit economists struggled to find diversions to point the finger for Britain’s problems elsewhere but the underlying logic of high structural costs and declining economic activity defined our early years of so-called freedom.?Things became so bad in 2024 that some people in UK insisted on being paid in Euros.?The Lugano Convention had still not been signed by 2026 but Britain continued to rely upon services to drive its economy, yet Lugano prevented UK from thriving in a post Brexit world.?Save for an uptake in food production which happened as a necessity after The Hunger Games in 2022 with ‘conscription’ of 18 year-olds to work on farms, Britain was broken.

The new EU tax avoidance scheme came into force on January 1st 2022.?Brexit supporters started to become angry that it meant that Amazon et al had to pay tax in the countries they operated in within EU countries, whilst Britain became a haven for companies who wished to avoid tax.?This meant that people were exploited at work to even greater levels than before as compared with employment practices in more progressive countries in Europe.?Thus, the dream of Brexit became ever more distant as the realities of deregulation began to become visible.

Contributory factors to the decline of Britain as a world economic power began quickly after Brexit, with a vote for Scottish independence in 2023, proposals for Irish unification in 2025 and a decision by Wales to seek independence in 2027.?Their economic contributions to the Treasury disappeared too, although Boris Johnson tried to hold back Scottish independence by moving UK public service agencies out of Scotland.?However, Scotland had produced a detailed plan to unite the people and take things forward, profiting from having the best of both worlds; a land border to England and a place in a market of 500 million people.?This would spawn the development of international travel hubs in Edinburgh, financial centres in Glasgow alongside traditional industries and a properly sustainable community in the highlands and islands of Scotland.?Once the contagion began, it was unstoppable, with London seeking to make itself a Crown Dependency and Cornwall, Merseyside, The North-East, Birmingham and Greater Manchester asking for Regional Parliaments.

In other disruptive and unexpected events, cybercurrency became regulated as the Bitcoin economy collapsed in 2025.?Jacob Rees-Mogg lost everything in 2024 in the Sterling Crisis, after overplaying the markets with his financial trading company. The Daily Express headline said ‘How the mighty have fallen’, whereas The Sun ran with ‘Mogged off’.?The Brexit illusion of Singapore on Thames came back to bite people where it hurt most. Never more had bluff, bluster and bust made more sense to the blustering blowhards of Brexit.

Rough Trade

Meanwhile,?Brexit trade deals failed to make up for EU losses.?The widely vaunted ￡39 billion savings paled into insignificance when compared with the costs of doing ‘fire sale’ deals, to save face in the wake of ‘Britastrophe’.?‘The Truss’ talked confidently of conquering the US, China, The Far East and other blocs, but the harsh reality was hard to avoid.?The Australian trade deal whose advantages to the UK amount to 0.02% of GDP after 15 years was not noticeable.?The tariff cuts gained were worth ￡1 per UK household per year.?For comparison the UK Australia deal was worth ￡14 billion as compared with ￡660 billion for the EU.?It became obvious that the Australian deal had the side effect of lowering of UK standards for meat and inflicted lasting and increasing damage to the UK beef industry.

By 2025, Britain had failed to secure trade deals with US, as it became clearer that Northern Ireland had been sacrificed for ‘the greater good’ of keeping up appearances regarding Brexit.?Instead, in 2022, the Foreign Secretary announced trade deals with Moldovia, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines and The Marshall Islands.?Beneath the bluster of the headlines, most of these were ‘cut and paste’ jobs of existing arrangements with no additional value for Britain and considerable upside for participating nations.?The net worth of these trade deals barely registered on UK GDP although they were trumpeted at the Festival of Brexit, now a low-key affair in Bradford comprising a model railway layout of HS2, a few street stalls and some food banks.

Boris Johnson dubbed the new era as ‘adapting to scale’ but it was hard to hide the realities in so far that many of these states wanted market access to UK and freedom of movement as parts of a trade deal.?The immigration ‘problem’, far from being solved, actually became more pronounced with an ageing British population and a growing demand for social services, care and healthcare.

At the same time, the European Union continued to balkanise its structures, accepting Albania into membership in 2027, setting strict conditions on human rights and democracy for Turkey to join five years from 2028, forging major links with China and playing a major role as a bridge between the US and Eastern empires.?They did this whilst maintaining stability amongst the 27 EU partners, against the odds predicted by Nigel Farage et al.?The EU began to emerge as one of the few players with sufficient size to face down mega corporation’s demands to avoid tax and this improved its image in the eyes of those who had seen it as an ‘evil empire’.?Rather The European Union became a force for good in the world and some of its much-criticised decision-making processes a little more nimble in the process.?It was one of the few things it had to thank Brexit for.

Back to the future

The Bank of America’s 2021 prediction about Britain’s financial status was to guide the decade, that the pound was to behave like an emerging-market currency, in terms of volatility.?The pound?had never been a strong currency. For example, it has fallen against the Swiss franc from Fr. 10 to the ￡ in 1969 to around Fr. 1.3 in 2021. The fall against the US $ was similar. The decline however was slow and generally passed unnoticed. The chronic deficit?in the UK trading balance of payments was the main cause.

COVID masked the effect of Brexit, including its impact on exchange rates.?The effect was felt as the EU’s economy regained the full impetus generated by the single market whilst the UK’s recovery remained shackled by Brexit bureaucracy imposed by Brexit.?This was aggravated by the ‘stand on our own feet’ policy, enunciated by Grant Shapps, a policy reminiscent to those of communist Albania in the 60s and 70s, and by North Korea?to this day.?Trade relations centring UK on the other side of the world?between the Pacific and Indian oceans did not rectify matters.?Sterling fell below the value of the EUro in 2022, and below the dollar and Swiss franc in 2023.

Britain’s status as an economic international power as measured in GDP was also affected by sterling's exchange rate.?Having been 5th in?the world for some time, we fell to 6th in 2021, having been overtaken by India whose higher growth rate ensured its position.?France also improved due to Brexit stagnation and Eurozone recovery and meant that Britain reached 7th place in 2022.?Italy took over 7th place before 2024 and we eventually fell to 11th place by 2031.

As the exchange rate fell, familiar scenes from the 1960’s/70’s alike returned.?Mounting inflation, particularly on food prices, increases in the cost of living, civil discord and disorder, strikes. Whilst these were not general, they touched everyone’s lives in different ways.?The Government resorted to exchange controls to stem the outflow of currency reserves as in the past which presented a further complication for industry. British holidaymakers, keen to party after COVID, found that they were rationed on the amount of money they were allowed to take abroad.

I fought the law

The 2020’s was characterised by a number of removals of freedom in Britain, the very thing that was promised to people in the 2016 referendum.?‘Take Back Control’ was missing the object of that control i.e. Government and not the people.?In 2022, the Government moved to cripple judicial review, to reduce the power of the law to interfere in its affairs.?Additionally, they took further steps to remove power away from MPs by asking them to sign their rights away to object to policy decisions.?The collective actions were dubbed as a ‘Zombie Government’ by Jess Phillips, Shadow Home Secretary in 2023.

Further anti-democratic moves followed in 2022 when Priti Patel introduced a bill that required protestors to apply for licences to protest three months in advance of any actions and required them to pay for policing of any actions.?This effectively closed down most protests but encouraged others to act spontaneously under cover.?In 2024, Voter id was used for the first time to discourage young voters.?This was a major factor in allowing the Conservatives to regain power even through general antipathy towards them was at a high point.

Meanwhile the Conservatives continued to give their political cronies lucrative contracts without any scrutiny or competition.?In some cases, they were quite unqualified to deliver the contracts and this caused great strain / amusement, depending on which way you look at the issue.?For example, new contracts for rail were awarded to a Conservative farmer who had become bankrupt after food shortages had broken his business resilience.?Despite his enthusiasm in naming the new TOC “The Brocolli Line”, it turned out that competence in planting seeds did not transfer to industrial plant and equipment.

The eye of the Irish tiger

The situation in Northern Ireland and Ireland was reminiscent of the 1920’s when the Irish National debt was written off in return for no opposition as to where the land border was drawn in the division of the spoils of war, leading to worse wars for 30 years from 1969 to the turn of the new Millennium.?The people of Ireland decided in the end to reject a repeat performance.?In the end, the Northern Ireland Protocol meant that food and fuel supplies continued to flow on the island of Ireland.?Fuel Shortages only ever reared their heads only in local ASDA branches in two counties, particularly because the Asda Fuel Supply Chain could not differentiate between deliveries to the Home Counties vs those on the Possessed Counties.?This presented the people of Ireland with a stark benefit of Brexit as compared with the mainland and drew Northern Ireland and Ireland closer together.?Julian Smith (NI secretary) was more inclined to act than drift and took decisive actions to unify people and politicians.?The rise of the Irish tiger was also spurred on by what happened in Scotland.

Scottish independence was a hard-fought battle and was emboldened by the move to celebrate 100 years of British rule in the 6 Counties of Ireland that constitute Northern Ireland back in 2021.?It galvanised Northern Ireland and Ireland to consider ways in which the social and economic benefits of unification could mitigate or even overwhelm traditional tensions between unionists and republicans.?Scotland gave everyone some surprises about Boris Johnson’s assumptions that Britannia could rule the waves.?But it became clear that Johnson’s notion of having your cake and eat it too could become a reality in Scotland’s case, having the benefits of a land border with England and being able to profit from EU membership.?The European Union received Scotland’s bid for membership sympathetically and assisted by supporting various development programmes around sustainability, e-commerce, fisheries, shipping, infrastructure and business support in cities and remote areas in a digital world.?This should have been obvious to anyone that watched the Irish miracle some decades ago as the EU supported improved transport networks and other areas of the Irish economy.?However, it was not obvious to the Brexit ultras.?As Halloween 2021 approached, a lot of things began happening behind the scenes to try and derail the Northern Ireland Protocol.?They failed and eventually Sir David Frost was thrown under a bus

The antipathy towards Brexit outside England escalated rapidly after Liz Truss broke the Irish Protocol in the summer of 2022 and, in doing so, broke international law and the remnants of trust with the Biden administration.?The US preferentially chose to develop trading and political relationships with the EU, based on size and political similarities.?The atmosphere in Northern Ireland was tense for many months alongside movements in Stormont by the DUP.

On the upside, there was a net flow of international companies coming to Northern Ireland and Ireland to set up operations.?In 2022 Ryanair pulled out of all Northern Ireland airports.?This was followed by a gradual drift of shipping routes to circumvent mainland Britain.?Once customs checks were factored in, it turned out that driving through Britain to reach Europe was incredibly tiring and costly on time.?Onboard ships drivers could rest and recuperate and, of course the destinations in France offered much better access to Southern European destinations.

The plan ‘Best of Both’ for Scottish independence was a detailed document and there was a concerted attempt to reach all communities to unite the people.?This would pay various dividends later on, as people were united and committed to the various losses that would inevitably be taken from Westminster’s intervention in areas such as public service jobs.?Unlike Brexit, Nicola Sturgeon’s approach was honest, direct and showed the people what they would lose but also how they would gain from the proposal.?The slogan ‘Together but Separate’ conveyed the notion of continued collaboration with England but yet having greater independence in a much larger market.?Increasingly, as England declined, it was Scotland that called the shots regarding trade and co-operation and not Westminster.

In particular, Scotland became an attractive place to locate for people wishing to sell services in the wake of the Lugano Convention remaining unsigned in Britain.?COVID had finally put an end to the illusion that people had to work in cities and this spurred a desire to return to the country.?Scotland offered attractive incentives for businesses and individuals to set up service-based businesses in Scotland. This magnetised skilled people away from England.

Although there was a fight between Westminster and Holyrood about national debt and various other pieces of sabre rattling, the EU were helpful in ensuring the Scotland could be given fair treatment as a smaller country, in return for various trade-offs around borders, just as Ireland had done in the 1920’s.

Tensions eventually spilled over after PM Truss broke the Irish Protocol several times from 2022 to 2024, in order to deflect attention from Brexit carnage.?This resulted in President Biden and then President Harris refusing to sign a US / UK trade deal.

In the intervening period from 2022 to 2026, trade links between Northern Ireland and Ireland were strengthened to the point that the idea of removing borders became a no-brainer.?This was facilitated by improved transportation links between Europe and the island of Ireland and eventually GB became an irrelevance in terms of trade, save for exports from the island of Ireland.

Events in Stormont also eventually moved in favour of accepting the idea of Northern Ireland and Ireland having their cake and eat it too through unification and full alignment with the EU, leaving England and Wales as rule takers.

The empire strikes back

Brexit was predicated on a form of English exceptionalism that expected the Commonwealth to become natural partners in post-Brexit Britain.?The reality was rather shocking.?In 2028 Cyprus decided to leave the Commonwealth, after some surprising departures by others around the world.?It was spurred on by Gibraltar’s gradual separation from the UK, initially via its application to join Schengen in 2022, which had not even been noticed by most people.

Further afield, the empire behaved in ways that were perfectly understandable to the people but not to the Government.?Canada, South Africa, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand left the Commonwealth in 2030 after the Royal Family descended into farce, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.?This would be followed by other nations into the 2030’s as the notion of a Commonwealth run by a weakened nation became an increasing national embarrassment.?In 2028, a delegation of The African Union offered to send observers to UK General Elections to detect and eliminate corruption.

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