Who is whistling now?

Brexit was the promised land of milk and honey. We were going to control immigration (despite the needs of the economy), we were going to take control of our borders, we were going to divert all that money going to the EU to the NHS instead. The Brexiteers tell us that Europe needs us more than we need them. Brexit would be a walk in the park.

And then reality kicked in. We are told that our only land border, with the Irish Republic, far from being under our "control", is to be open. The NHS is not to get a penny extra of diverted cash as we have a £40 billion plus divorce bill to pay, something the Brexiteers failed to tell anyone about during the referendum. Remember Boris Johnson telling the EU to "go whistle"? Who is whistling now Johnson? And of course we haven't yet heard what the new immigration system will look like but the chances are that the arrival of people to the UK to work being in "tens of thousands" will only be achieved if we strangle the economy and make all of us poorer. Now we are hearing rumours that the European Court of Justice is to have a role in policing the rights of EU citizens resident in the UK. In other words, another Brexit red line has been ignored.

Given that the UK now looks set to agree all the EU demands on divorce, we can expect negotiations to start on trade. If the last few months are anything to go by, the negotiations will be a case of the dominant EU setting out its terms and the relatively weak UK agreeing to them. And as time goes by, the EU will take decisions on trade, the UK will have no say on them (after all we will no longer be a member of the club) but the UK will adopt them anyway to retain access to the Single Market. Quite what we have achieved as a nation from Brexit is unclear.