The Beatles cut two versions of the song Revolution: one a simple melody in which Lennon rejects violent revolutionary politics while still wanting to change the world; the second version is a complex mix of music that wanders across the spectrum and experiments with different sounds and the techniques of making sounds.
Brexit set out to be a simple song: let’s do it on our own. But it is clear that it cannot avoid becoming more like the complex sounds of Revolution No 9. Revolution No 9 was the father of much good music in subsequent years but it was not easy to listen to or understand when it first came out.
In this issue of Across the EUniverse, an in-house magazine that takes its inspiration from the Beatles, we try to look at some of the complexities of Brexit. We do not claim to be able to tell the future. We do not even claim to be able to tell what will happen in those areas of our legal expertise. What we can do is to examine what the current rules and obligations are, to look at the key fundamentals of a particular sector, and then make educated guesses as to possible outcomes.
Two of the Articles are institutional. In essence the question comes down to whether the EU and the UK are going to have to negotiate two agreements: a leave agreement under Article 50 TUE and a new future trade relations agreement under the TFEU. Our guess is that we are going to end up with more than one agreement and maybe a series of agreements.
The other articles then look at the impact of Brexit on specific sectors: energy, tax, dispute settlement, data protection, insurance, public procurement, insolvency, banking and finance. We hope that in reading these articles you find ideas that will help you manage your responses to the revolutionary changes that are about to happen.
