5min chapter

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When one door closes: Brexit day

Economist Podcasts

CHAPTER

Britain's Post-Brexit Identity

This chapter examines the evolving identity of Britain as it navigates its future outside the EU, contemplating potential relationships and social divisions. It also reflects on the impeachment trial of a key political figure, highlighting conflicting testimonies and the ongoing debate among lawmakers.

00:00
Speaker 3
If I could ask you to get your crystal ball
Speaker 1
out and imagine a time when all of these things are resolved and things have settled and Brexit is very much in the rearview mirror, how will Britain look then, do you think? I
Speaker 3
think Britain will still look like a European country because much of the sort of structure of the British economy, a welfare state, fairly high levels of taxation and public spending, concern about climate change and so on makes Britain look European more than like Singapore or even the United States. But clearly it will not be in the European Union. There are other European countries not in the European Union. We will be one of them. The big uncertainty really is how close a relationship will Britain still have with the European Union when it's not a member. Norway has a very close relationship with the European Union, but a country like Ukraine does not have such a close relationship. We'll probably be somewhere in the middle. There
Speaker 1
will be a relationship, but it won't be as close as Norway's. And what about all of the angst and rancor that this has caused among the people? I mean, this has caused rifts across political divides, even within households. Do you think that finally getting Brexit done, so it's said, actually will start a healing process? I think
Speaker 3
one of the sort of sad things, if you like, about Brexit has been the strong division between those who favoured remaining at the time of the referendum and those who wanted to leave at the time of the referendum. And we spent three and a half years or four years really arguing about that. Now that Britain is definitely leaving and Boris Johnson's government has a large majority to, in effect, do what it likes, I think those who think it's all a mistake are not going to keep quiet, but I think they will probably accept that that's just the decision that's taken and we have to make the best of it. Probably a group of those people will say, actually, we should reopen the whole question and consider rejoining the European Union. But I think many of them feel it's not worth raising that issue now. So probably for the next few years, we will seem less divided than we were. John, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. AI is rewriting the business playbook with productivity boosts and faster decision-making coming to every industry. If you're not thinking about AI, you can bet your competition is. This is not where you want to drop the ball, but AI requires a lot of compute power. And with most cloud platforms, the cost for your AI workloads can spiral. That is, unless you're running on OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This was the cloud built for AI, a blazing fast enterprise-grade platform for your infrastructure, database, apps, and all your AI workloads. OCI costs 50% less than other major hyperscalers for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking. Thousands of businesses have already scored with OCI, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters, and Suno AI. Now the ball's
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Speaker 3
The fact that President Zelensky himself felt no pressure on the call and did not perceive there
Speaker 1
to be any connection between security assistance and investigations would, in any ordinary case, in any court, totally fatal to the prosecution. We know there was no quid pro quo on the call. We know that from the transcript. Democrats, of course, disagreed.

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