The Agonising Brexit Process
Dr Gill Shepherd*
What a year, crowned – if that’s the word – by us finally getting some sort of deal with the EU today. To my surprise I found myself in tears this afternoon when the deal was finally announced. I suppose it’s all the sadness and fury of the last four years since the referendum, brought to a head at a precise moment. Looking back at all we’ve lost.
I remember how frustrated my civil service father was in the days when de Gaulle was blocking our entry; the pleasure with which we watched Rupert Davies as Maigret on our television screens in the 60s with its wonderful locations filmed all over Paris; the relief of our entry in 1973.
Later, in the 1980s and 1990s being part of the British team going to European Forestry Group meetings annually and meeting each time in another country: France, Sweden, Finland, Italy and discussing our countries’ plans for support to tropical forests. In France we met just outside Paris, watching red squirrels in the pine trees outside the windows of the Forestry Department offices. In Sweden we were entertained one evening in the building where Nobel prizes are awarded, and watched Swedish foresters toasting and singing traditional forestry drinking songs over dinner.
In Finland of course we all had saunas. It was a pleasure too, to go and give the odd lecture in Danish or Dutch universities, and to become well acquainted with academics and government officials all over Europe who cared about the environment. I became a deeply committed European in the process: frustrated at times – especially when going through the torturous process of negotiating grants at the European Commission for my research Institute in London (done in French in the early days) - but so happy all the same to belong at last to that wider world, which I’d viewed, nose pressed against the glass, when at school. This afternoon brought sharply back into relief the whole agonising Brexit process.
* An extract from her Christmas letter written on 24-12-20 just after the Brexit announcement. My friendship with Gill goes back to when I worked with her and her late husband, Peter Loizos, in East Africa in the early 1980s.