Throughout the turbulent years that Michel Barnier spent dealing with Brexit, the former EU negotiator's endless talks with to failed to help him British counterparts failed to help him answer the simplest of questions what did they want Brexit to achieve? "For me, for many of us, Brexit remains a nonsense," he told the Observer. "Taking into account British national interest, there is no added value to being outside the single market and the customs union. Throughout this process, I asked British leaders every day-from all the parties, [Nigel] Farage, trade unions or the business community - to give me proof for the added value of Brexit. Nobody was able to do this."
Barnier took to the UK airwaves last week to promote his diaries of those fractious talks, in which he repeatedly used his "ticking clock" metaphor to highlight the position Britain found itself in as it prepared for life outside the EU.
The clock has now ticked on three years. Barnier is struck by the difference in the debate between the UK and the rest of the continent. "To be frank, coming back to London, I see that Brexit is always on the front page," he said. "There are many questions and many polls, but it's not the case in the EU. Brexit is no longer a problem for us. We have turned the page." Sure enough, the third Brexit anniversary last week did see a resurgence of discussion about that momentous, iconoclastic decision. Yet there are signs that it is a different debate to the one that engulfed the UK before Brexit took place. Radio phone-ins once dominated by shrill, entrenched campaigners contained case studies of Brexit’s banal complications. BBC Radio 5 Live’s breakfast programme heard from a nursery owner, a sheep farmer, a transport company boss and a pet food company about the complexities of cross-border trade.
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