The Original Brexit - by Liam Gavin
Hard Brexit, Soft Brexit, Backstop, Norway Option… It’s all happened before, long long ago
Eventually, the North Sea piled up on one side of the strip of land connecting Britain to Europe, while the Atlantic piled up on the southern flank. The Brexit side won the day, and the sea burst through from the north. Brexit had happened, and Britain was an island. Muddy connection to Europe Or was it ? After the mega-flood, things settled back to something approaching normal. The connection to Europe just got a bit muddy, and the backstop was a strip of land roughly extending from just north of the Thames estuary to the Netherlands. If Boris had been around at the “it became possible to go on holidays to Europe without getting the old feet wet” time, he would have been horrified, because this backstop prevented a clean break for a full 250,000 years. But the difficulty of travel, which entailed trudging through a quagmire, made Britain less attractive to Europeans, and the rest of Europe basically just left them to themselves. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it ? Through this 250,000 years, there were various half-hearted mini- Brexits, where the sea defences were breached, but 180,000 years ago, a second mega-flood happened, and the hippos that were contentedly wallowing in the swamps around Westminster
A t the time of writing, the whole Brexit fiasco is still in the lap of the Gods. The newspapers and TV reports still bandy about terms like the Hard or Soft Brexit, the famous Backstop, and the Norway Option, as if this was all something new. In fact, it all happened before, and the last time Britain and Europe parted Freedom of movement Half a million years ago, where the white cliffs of Dover are today, a series of undulating chalk hills joined England to France. There were no borders, and there was freedom of movement all around Europe. Nearer home, you wouldn’t have needed a boat to get to Lambay, which only became an island much more recently. But scientists now believe that Ireland was never actually connected by land to Britain, something that might ruffle a few orange feathers in and around East Belfast. Mess dragging on interminably But back to the mark one version of Brexit. You might think that the current mess is dragging on interminably, but the original version was even more indecisive. Through various periods of global warming and cooling, the sea levels in the North Sea fluctuated greatly. During the colder periods, so much water was locked up as ice that the sea levels dropped dramatically, while in periods of warming, the ice melted, and the sea levels rose. company was even more dramatic than the current situation.
were swept away. Virtually overnight, Britain had become a “proper” island. Then climate change took control. The ice ages once again dropped sea levels, and once again, it became possible to go on holidays to Europe without getting the old feet wet. A huge, low lying area called Doggerland, in the present North Sea, about the size of England, ensured a Europe “sans frontiers” as they say in France. original “Norway Option” resulted in an overnight hard Brexit, which has lasted until now. A massive undersea earthquake off the coast of Norway triggered huge submarine landslides, dislodging around 3,000 cubic kilometres of material. That’s about the same amount of soil as a stretch of coast, 10 metres wide and 10 metres deep, running from Rush to Dundalk. The earthquake unleashed a phenomenal tsunami, that raced across the North Sea, obliterating Doggerland, carving out the English Channel for once and for The “Norway Option” Then, 8,200 years ago, the
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