The mess/fallout continues ! Goodness knows what the other side of the channel thinks of us now !
Well that is easy to answer. All the political leaders in the rest of the EU want a decisive leader in the UK and they want the UK out now.
I think it's rather more complicated than that. This excerpt from a piece by Timothy Garton Ash in the Grauniad explains it quite well IMHO. (I must say, I do like his potential new name for our country after the Scots leave; FUK - Former UK).
Broadly speaking, there are two positions among our European partners. A minority position, articulated by commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, French president François Hollande and Belgian prime minister Charles Michel, says, in effect, “Goodbye and good riddance. The British people have spoken. The UK should leave as soon as possible and let us move ahead to build Europe around its original Carolingian core.” In Michel’s own words: “Only the Belgian and European interests count for me now – not the British ones. There is no way back.”
At a meeting of the European Council on Foreign Relations in The Hague, I experienced at first hand the anger this neo-Carolingian gambit provoked from many other member states, including most eastern and northern European ones. The former Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb fiercely criticised a meeting of the six founding member states, hastily called as a response to the Brexit vote. Estonia’s gloriously outspoken president Toomas Ilves calls Juncker’s behaviour “abominable”. Finland and Estonia belong to the majority of EU member states, led by Angela Merkel, who want to give Britain some time to try to sort this out.
Broadly speaking, they believe that the strategic objective must be to keep as much as possible of the United Kingdom – or will it be the Former United Kingdom (FUK), like the Former Yugoslavia? – as closely associated as possible with the European Union. This is not only because they value what Britain has to offer, from free-market economics to foreign and security policy, but also because they fear the domino effect of a British withdrawal. At the same time, and precisely to avoid that domino effect, they insist that Britain cannot be offered any special favours in the negotiations, for that would encourage Frexiteers such as Marine Le Pen and Nexiteers such as Geert Wilders to try their luck. So: no access to the single market without free movement of people.
Yet their anger is also directed at Britain and, more specifically, at England. The most devastating comment comes from the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, a great Anglophile and erstwhile ally of David Cameron. “England,” he says, “has collapsed politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically.” Ouch. The reproach of disappointed friends is more painful than the schadenfreude of gloating Belgians.
