Bloomberg have spoken to the Danish politicians (HERE) who negotiated Greenland's exit from the EEC as it was then in the early 1980s. Their negotiation took three years but they were just 56,000 people and had one main issue, fish. The EEC was notably smaller, less complicated and Greenland was only a colony of Denmark rather than a full member and they had only six or seven years of lawmaking to undo, having joined in 1973 along with the UK and others.
Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, a former foreign minister of Denmark, handled negotiations on Greenland after its citizens voted to leave the EU in 1982. and said in an interview. “That took three years. Britain will take much longer. It’s impossible to say how long.”
We have 43 years of regulations and laws to unpick so we can separate from a bloc of 27 other countries.
“Basically, the British need to take time to understand what an enormous task they took upon themselves,” Ellemann-Jensen said. “Asking for a Brexit” and expecting it to be “clear-cut” simply “can’t happen,”.
And listen to this: Two years into Greenland’s exit process, havoc broke out at home, Johansen recalls. The exit deal struck by his minority government “was under attack by a broad part of the population who thought we sold ourselves too cheaply on our fishing rights,” he said. The result was that for the first time in Greenland’s history, a government was toppled over an agreement that had already been approved by parliament. The no-confidence vote triggered an election in 1984.
I think we will still be discussing and arguing Brexit in 2020 with no clear date set and with all the uncertainty that is so damaging to business. Perhaps Brexit may yet prove to be impossible or just too expensive to get through.
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