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News Analysis

The clock tower at the Houses of Parliament. Credit... Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

BRUSSELS - Many Britons see their country as a brave galleon, banners waving, cannons firing, trumpets blaring. That is how the country's voluble foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, likes to describe it.

But Britain is now but a modest-size ship on the global ocean. Having voted to leave the European Union, it is unmoored, heading to nowhere, while on deck, fire has broken out and the captain - poor Theresa May - is lashed to the mast, without the authority to decide whether to turn to port or to starboard, let alone do what one imagines she knows would be best, which is to turn around and head back to shore.

I've lived and worked for nine years in Britain, first during the Thatcher years and then again for the last four politically chaotic ones. While much poorer in the 1980s, Britain mattered internationally. Now, with Brexit, it seems to be embracing an introverted irrelevance.

The ambitious Mr. Johnson was crucial to the victory of Brexit in the June 2016 referendum. But for many, the blusterings of Boris have lost their charm. The "great ship" he loves to cite is a nationalist fantasy, a remnant of Britain's persistent post-imperial confusion about its proper place in the world, hanging on to expensive symbols like a nuclear deterrent while its once glorious navy is often incapable of patrolling its own coastline.

Britain - renowned for its pragmatism, its common sense, its political stability and its unabashed devotion to small business ("a nation of shopkeepers") - has become nearly unrecognizable to its European allies.

"People need to look again at Britain," said Daniel Brössler, a correspondent for the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. "It's no longer the country they understood it to be their whole lives."

The divorce negotiations with the European Union start another round this week, but they are not going well, to say the least. The most visible fight is over the cost of the divorce. But other difficult and essentially political issues about the authority of the European Court of Justice and a customs border with Ireland must also be clarified before the other 27 member states agree to move on to the next stage, Britain's future relationship with the bloc. That decision next month once seemed pro forma, but no longer, with some even predicting a breakdown in the talks.

Mrs. May's Conservative government is now so split that some Brexit supporters are calling on her to simply quit the bloc with no deal at all - probably the worst alternative for the country, but just the kind of populist, tub-thumping gesture favored by the Brexit elite and the right-wing tabloids.

Meanwhile, with the Conservative government so riven and rudderless, the old hard lefty Jeremy Corbyn is leading the opposition Labour Party back into an equally fantastical socialist past.

Britain is undergoing a full-blown identity crisis. It is a "hollowed-out country," "ill at ease with itself," "deeply provincial," engaged in a "controlled suicide," say puzzled experts. And these are Britain's friends.

"The sense in the rest of Europe is bewilderment; how much worse can it get?" said Tomas Valasek, a former Slovak diplomat who lived in Britain for many years and now directs Carnegie Europe, a Brussels-based research institution. "After Brexit, no one is trying to help now. They've given up. Nobody on the Continent really cares that much about Britain anymore. Even worse, people feel the country will fall into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn and that will do more damage than Brexit itself."

More chilling, perhaps, is the impact on countries less rooted than Britain once appeared to be. "Britain is an example for all of us, as a longstanding democracy, with centuries of the rule of law and traditional institutions," said Guntram Wolff, a German economist who runs the Bruegel research institution here. "And if such a country has such difficulties, most of us wonder how our own countries would handle such political upheaval - whether we, too, are so vulnerable."

Some make the comparison to that other great Anglo-Saxon country, the United States, under President Trump, who saw Brexit as a harbinger of his own election. But however politically divided the United States seems now, Europeans have never considered it a touchstone of stability the way they have Britain.

Jan Techau, a German who has traveled extensively in England and ran Carnegie Europe, sees Britain as a tragedy. The European country considered the most outward-looking and globalized is fractured by the backlash against the very model that made Britain strong. "It's very sad, but Brexit is a controlled suicide," he said.

There are many who see Britain as having suffered a sudden nervous breakdown, said Simon Tilford, an economist and deputy director of the Center for European Reform. But he believes that Britain's political culture and economic stability have been eroding for some time, hidden by the longstanding willingness of others to give it the benefit of the doubt as a pragmatic democracy with a strong civil society and civil service.

He too blames the Conservatives and the right-wing tabloids that support them for much of the erosion. "The readiness of the political right in particular to lie and peddle obvious untruths, to place their party politics and party unity over and above the national interest, has been going on for a long time," he said. "The harrumphing nationalism masks a country ill at ease with itself."

Rather than a vote for a global Britain and economic liberalism, Mr. Tilford said, Brexit was a vote for protectionism, and its political system now "is deeply provincial and introverted at a time when Britain is supposed to be heading out into the world."

The divisions in the society - over Brexit, over politics - are both a function and a result of Britain's confusion about its identity and global importance. The 19th-century myth of Britain as the "workshop of the world," a doughty Protestant nation surrounded by Catholics with an empire on which the sun never set, confronted a post-World War II reality, when a lot of these tales stopped being true, suggests Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Britain became a service economy, the empire disappeared and people stopped identifying with the Church of England. Then Margaret Thatcher arrived, and with her, Mr. Leonard said, "there was a last gasp of this old identity - an ethnic, exclusively white and backward-looking version of Englishness."

However successful, it also excluded an increasingly large number of Britons - black, Asian and Muslim - who felt disenfranchised from "the national story." Tony Blair and New Labour moved toward more inclusiveness and cosmopolitanism and openness to Europe, too.

But those validated by the old identity then felt like strangers in their own land, Mr. Leonard said. "Their revenge was Brexit."

Confused and divided, Britain no longer has an agreed-upon national narrative, said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. "In the 2012 Olympics we had one," he said. "Global Britain, open Britain, generous Britain." But now there is a competition between that narrative and the nativist one.

Mr. Grant, like others who have spent their careers watching British and European politics, predicts rough seas for Britain as it casts off nearly 45 years of intimate trade and legal ties with those annoying Europeans.

"Everywhere I go," he said, "people are asking me, 'What's wrong with your country?' "

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News Analysis BRUSSELS - Many Britons see their country as a brave galleon, banners waving, cannons firing, trumpets blaring. That is how the country's voluble foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, likes to describe it. But Britain is now but a modest-size ship on the global ocean.

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Over 25 years now no British Prime Minister ever explained to the British people what your update what are the benefits and why it matters they never defended against the untruths which was spoken and they never took ownership of the decisions that they took in Council and because of that the British press run a 20 year campaign based on populist mysterious Lies and deceit And the consequence of that we see today in Britain is a sad nation divided like never before in the House of commons in crisis so let breck sit stand as a caution retail to the people of Europe to the people of Europe say this you are the generation who have For the longest period of peace and the greatest level of prosperity ever never take it for granted value it fight for it defend it every day thank you

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Today, one of our British MEPs, Richard... - EPP Group in the European Parliament

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Over 25 years now no British Prime Minister ever explained to the British people what your update what are the benefits and why it matters they never defended against the untruths which was spoken and they never took ownership of the decisions that they took in Council and because of

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Post by EPPGroup.

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It's here. The day the United Kingdom leaves the European Union. The Brexiteers' long-awaited "Independence Day".

Apart from a few government-sponsored "celebrations" in Westminster this evening, and the gloating triumphalism of our pernicious tabloids, I detect no great outpouring of national joy over this rupture. Why would there be? The latest opinion polls show half the country still opposes Brexit. Moreover the "will of the people" manifestly excludes the peoples of Scotland, Northern Ireland, London and most of the rest of metropolitan England.

The myth that has taken hold since last December's general election is that Boris Johnson was swept into Downing Street on a riptide of popular enthusiasm for him and for Brexit. That is simply not true.

Johnson won the election, but only because he faced a deeply divided opposition and a spectacularly unelectable Labour leader in Jeremy Corbyn. He won because the first-past-the-post system meant he could do so with a Conservative vote share of 43.6 per cent of the vote - barely a percentage point more than the hapless Theresa May won in 2017 and less than the combined vote for the pro-Remain parties. He won not because the electorate was gagging for Brexit, but because exhausted voters were seduced by his latest lie - "Get Brexit Done". He won by running a vacuous campaign of gimmicky photo-ops and studiously avoiding tough interrogations. In that mission he was aided and abetted by a disgracefully sycophantic press.

And so a small band of fanatical right-wing ideologues, once confined to the wilder fringes of British politics, successfully completed their hijacking of our country. Tonight, thanks to them, the UK will leave the most successful experiment in multi-national collaboration the world has ever seen. We will withdraw from the biggest free-trade area ever created. We will walk away from institutions in which, contrary to the Brexiteers' lies, Britain was a big, powerful member with plenty of allies and a long record of winning big strategic arguments.

Instead of seeking to lead Europe and to shape it in our image as a genuinely great country would do, we will be cutting and running. After 47 years of overwhelmingly beneficial - if sometimes fractious - EU membership, we will be turning our backs on loyal friends and allies. We will be undermining a pan-European construct which, for all its faults, has brought peace to the continent after centuries of war. It will be a moment not of pride, but of profound national shame.

It will also be an act of epic self-harm. The economy will not suddenly implode tomorrow morning, but it will gradually deflate as we prepare to leave a single market of 500 million people with no alternative or remotely comparable trade arrangements in sight, and as foreign investors understandably choose to go elsewhere. Our car industry is shrinking already.

Far from Brexit being "done", the truly hard negotiations to secure a trade deal with the EU have yet to start and the spectre of a disastrous no-deal Brexit will return with a vengeance as the end of the transition period nears this December. Our "liberation" from the EU will mean growing subservience to Donald Trump's America. It will impair our freedom to live, work, study and travel anywhere in Europe. It will mean the loss of any say in EU decision-making although decisions made in Brussels will inevitably continue to affect us.

The ability of Johnson's "Global Britain" to rally the rest of Europe around initiatives to fight climate change, counter Russian aggression or halt Iran's nuclear programme will be diminished. But our influence in Washington will also diminish because we will no longer provide a "transatlantic bridge" into the heart of Europe.

The Brexiteers will claim that Britain has regained its sovereignty, though in truth we never lost it: we joined the EU because it was in our interests to do so, just as it was in our interests to join the UN, Nato, the WTO, FIFA, the International Olympic Committee and a host of other multinational organisations. But the price could well be the break up of Britain if Scotland is allowed to exert its own sovereignty and secede.

No matter that the ugly reality of Brexit bears no relation to the sunny promises made during the 2016 EU referendum. With characteristic bombast, Johnson still predicts a new "golden age" for the slumbering British giant as it pings off the guy ropes that have held it down. I sincerely hope that the Prime Minister is right, but the truth is that he and his fellow Brexiteers have taken a huge and reckless gamble with the country's future. And if it fails those self-styled "champions of the people" will not be the ones who suffer. The victims will be the disgruntled blue-collar workers from the "left-behind" North and Midlands whom the Brexiteers misled with their lies and jingoistic, xenophobic populism.

So forgive me. I will not be out celebrating in Parliament Square tonight. I will stay at home, turn off the television, and mourn our divorce from the rest of Europe and what I fear will prove this nation's greatest mistake.

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Brexit Day is no cause for celebration - this is a moment of profound national shame

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It's here. The day the United Kingdom leaves the European Union. The Brexiteers' long-awaited "Independence Day". Apart from a few government-sponsored "celebrations" in Westminster this evening, and the gloating triumphalism of our pernicious tabloids, I detect no great outpouring of national joy over this rupture. Why would there be?

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Fintan O'Toole: Brexit: Ireland and the English Question

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Fintan O'Toole: Brexit: Ireland and the English Question

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Fintan O'Toole: Brexit: Ireland and the English Question

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Nigel Farage's  final speech at the European Parliament ahead of the Brexit vote

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Nigel Farage's  final speech at the European Parliament ahead of the Brexit vote

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Nigel Farage's dramatic final speech at the European Parliament ahead of the Brexit vote | LBC

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Stop Brexit

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It's time we came to to our senses. Brexit is a disaster and must be stopped. Leave campaigners promised our exit from the European Union would herald a glorious new era - the sunlit uplands of 'global Britain', with new trade deals signed in a matter of months and an extra £350 million per week for the NHS. But what do we have today? Sterling has collapsed, Boris has been busy bungling in Brussels, and the government's own leaked economic assessments show that leaving the EU will harm every single region of the country, especially 'left behind' areas that voted to Leave. The public was misled, and as David Davis once said, 'If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy'. Let's end this madness and call the whole thing off.

That's the reasoning of the Remoaners. But can you imagine the damage we'd do to our politics if we overturned the democratic expression of 17 million people - the single biggest mandate in British history? If these sneering liberals had their way, the masses would be forced to vote in referendum after referendum until they gave the 'correct' answer. What part of 'take back control' don't they understand? And spare us the whingeing over economic forecasts. We all remember Project Fear and the phoney establishment warnings that the sky would fall in once we voted to Leave.

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It's time we came to to our senses. Brexit is a disaster and must be stopped. Leave campaigners promised our exit from the European Union would herald a glorious new era - the sunlit uplands of 'global Britain', with new trade deals signed in a matter of months and an extra £350 million per week for the NHS.

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Richard Wilson in 'Brexit Special' Comedy Sketch

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Richard Wilson in 'Brexit Special' Comedy Sketch

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Richard Wilson in 'Brexit Special' Comedy Sketch for Second Referendum Support | SWNS TV

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Brexit Has Happened And Here Are The 30 Funniest Memes

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Brexit Has Happened And Here Are The 30 Funniest Memes

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The United Kingdom has been in quite a pickle for the last couple of years. Since the June 2016 referendum, in which 52% of the country voted to leave the European Union, the UK had been stuck in an endless conflict as well as a political nightmare while the government tried to negotiate the terms with the EU. Even though the government officially announced the country's withdrawal in March 2017, the process was delayed due to deadlock in the UK parliament.

After many failed negotiations, several changes in the parliament and general uproar from the people, the UK left the EU at 11 p.m. GMT on 31 January 2020. And while many people rejoiced, others couldn't hide their shame and disappointment. Oh, and as always, there was a third group of people. The ones who made dozens of memes to make fun of the situation. And that's exactly what we're going to focus on. So scroll down below and check out the spiciest memes and don't forget to vote for your favorites!

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Brexit Has Happened And Here Are The 30 Funniest Memes

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The United Kingdom has been in quite a pickle for the last couple of years. Since the June 2016 referendum, in which 52% of the country voted to leave the European Union, the UK had been stuck in an endless conflict as well as a political nightmare while the government tried to negotiate the terms with the EU.

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The new British passports will be made in Poland :)

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The new British passports will be made in Poland :)

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Just when we thought we were done with the many ironies of Brexit another whopper comes along and stops us in our tracks.

If you voted for Brexit you'll probably be looking forward to receiving a brand spanking new blue passport, void of the burgundy red of the old EU passport.

However, you might be dismayed to learn that these new passports won't be made in Britain at all. In fact, they are coming straight from Poland.

In a report published on Saturday by , it has been revealed that the passports will be made in a factory in Tczew, Poland by a Franco/Dutch company thanks to EU procurement rules.

This was after the British company who were competing for the contract, De La Rue, lost out on the £260 million 11-year-contract which was handed to the French multinational group Thales.

The passports will begin to be distributed in March, 2020 but the irony of them coming from Europe, an institution that the UK has just voluntarily left did not escape many.

Home secretary, Priti Patel said of the new passports:

By returning to the iconic blue and gold design, the British passport will once again be entwined with our national identity and I cannot wait to travel on one. Leaving the European Union gave us a unique opportunity to restore our national identity and forge a new path in the world.

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The new British passports will be made in Poland and the jokes are writing themselves

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Just when we thought we were done with the many ironies of Brexit another whopper comes along and stops us in our tracks. If you voted for Brexit you'll probably be looking forward to receiving a brand spanking new blue passport, void of the burgundy red of the old EU passport.

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Adam Ruins Everything - Why Rigging Elections Is Completely Legal

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Adam Ruins Everything - Why the Electoral College Ruins Democracy

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY92gr2Fudk

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Bill Moyers On Donald Trump, NFL: 'This Is An Alien In The White House' | The Last Word | MSNBC

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Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper | The Daily Social Distancing Show

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George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper | The Daily Social Distancing Show

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George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper | The Daily Social Distancing Show

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AMY COOPER: You Can Keep That Apology..... 

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AMY COOPER: You Can Keep That Apology..... 

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AMY COOPER: You Can Keep That Apology..... WAY Over There ---}}}

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NYC Woman Fired After Falsely Accusing Black Man of 'Attacking' Her | NowThis

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY92gr2Fudk

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-f4sDQn4Ck

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK0-Rqeb7Mo

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-american-tragedy-2

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https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/11/aaron-sorkin-donald-trump-president-letter-daughter

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http://billmoyers.com/story/farewell-america/