A near-deserted Princes Street in Edinburgh is pictured as the time passes midnight, shown on the Balmoral Hotel clock early on January 1, 2021 in Edinburgh, Britain.
He vowed that post-Brexit Britain, despite being battered by a surge in coronavirus cases, would be an "open, generous, outward-looking, internationalist and free-trading" country.Legally, Britain left the European Union on January 31 but has been in a standstill transition period during fractious talks to secure a free-trade agreement with Brussels, which was finally clinched on Christmas Eve.
Matt Smith, managing director of HSF Logistics, which ships mainly fresh meat and chilled goods between Britain and Europe, said he was sending around 15 truckloads to the EU on New Year's Eve ahead of the changes. A parliamentary debate on Wednesday to ratify the trade deal was marked by elegiac farewells from pro-EU lawmakers, and warnings of disruption as Britain dismantles the intricate network of ties built since it joined the EU's forerunner in 1973.While the EU tariff- and quota-free trade deal averted potential business chaos in the immediate future, the divorce will play out in many practical ways.
The key financial services sector also faces an anxious wait to learn on what basis it can keep dealing with Europe, after being largely omitted from the trade agreement. But opinion polls indicate that most Britons, on both sides of the referendum divide, want to move on and are far more worried about the worsening coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed 73,500 lives.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Britain will remain "our friend and ally" but lamented that Brexit was the fruit of "a lot of lies and false promises." "When all the bluster dies down... it will become depressingly clear that this trade deal is... the beginning of a new trading relationship built on permanent negotiation, disputes and recriminations," he warned., where Johnson made his name as a Brussels-bashing Europe correspondent, said the government faced a new reality shorn of the EU bogeyman.
Supporters cast Brexit as the dawn of a newly independent "global Britain", but it has weakened the bonds that bind England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland into a $3 trillion economy. His 80-year-old father, Stanley Johnson, who voted to remain in 2016, said he is in the process of applying for a French passport.In the June 23, 2016, referendum, 17.4 million voters, or 52 percent, backed Brexit while 16.1 million, or 48 percent, backed staying in the bloc. Few have changed their minds since. England and Wales voted out but Scotland and Northern Ireland voted in.