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14th July, 2020

Brexit: Where next?

Only a year ago, British politics was dominated by the debate about Brexit. It says a lot for the impact of COVID-19 that since early March the virus and its huge economic, health and social impacts have relegated Brexit news to a few paragraphs on the inside pages of one or two Brexit-focused newspapers. But Brexit has in no sense gone away. The end of the transition period on 31st December 2020 looms ever closer, and Boris Johnson has made clear that in spite of COVID, he is not willing to contemplate an extension of this transition period. Boris Johnson may not wish to disappoint the Eurosceptic voters he was able to win over in the December 2019 election, and he may also be calculating that pushing Brexit through during this period of extraordinary economic turbulence will both mask any negative impacts and also put pressure on other EU member states (more nervous than ever about the state of their economies) to strike a pragmatic deal

To download the paper click here: Brexit Where next