Boris Johnson, Theresa May’s expected successor as Prime Minister, has said Britain must approach Brexit with the same “can-do” spirit as 1960s America.
Harking back to the first moon landing fifty years ago, Johnson recalled how the Apollo 11 mission led by the late Neil Armstrong overcame enormous technical challenges to win the space race with the Soviet Union, contrasting the spirit of the age with “the current debate about actually leaving the EU – which has been going on for so long that we are in danger of believing that we are incapable of finding our way out; like someone who has lost their car in a vast multi-storey car park, and is beginning to despair of ever leaving at all.”
The problems with leaving the European Union, he wrote in his Telegraph column, are primarily “technical and logistical”, referring into particular to the challenges of maintaining “frictionless” trade between the British province of Northern Ireland and EU member-state the Republic of Ireland after Brexit, while still leaving the EU Customs Union and regaining the power to set regulations different from the ones imposed by Brussels.
“It is absurd that we have even allowed ourselves to be momentarily delayed by these technical issues,” Johnson insisted.
“If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a frictionless re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere in 1969, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border,” he added, observing that there is “no task so simple that government cannot overcomplicate if it doesn’t want to do it” — likely an allusion to the fact that much of Britain’s establishment bureaucracy and political class never wanted Brexit in the first place.
Indeed, behind the scenes footage of the Brexit talks show the EU’s top negotiatiors dissuss “using Ireland” and “isolating Ireland and not closing this point” as leverage — suggesting that claims the EU-controlled status quo must be maintained for altruistic reasons related to peace, rather than political advantage, may be less than genuine.
“It is time this country recovered some of its can-do spirit,” Johnson concluded.
“We can come out of the EU on October 31, and yes, we certainly have the technology to do so. What we need now is the will and the drive.”