On 23 June 2016 the British people voted narrowly but decisively in favour of leaving the European Union. In the three and a half years since, the UK has been plunged into its most profound political crisis in living memory. While Brexit supporters tried to figure out what leaving the European Union actually meant, Remain activists sought any and every means available to overturn the result. For many, Brexit has come to be seen as the crisis of our age, but "Three E's" - energy, environment and economy -author Tim Watkins argues that Brexit is merely the latest, doomed, "solution" to the inherent contradiction of attempting to have infinite growth on a finite planet.Decline and Fall: The Brexit years is a commentary and compilation of contemporary essays and articles written throughout the Brexit years which sets the Brexit crisis within its proper context. In this wider predicament, Britain is unique in being the cradle of industrial civilisation from the mid-eighteenth century; the first country to experience relative industrial decline from the 1880s; the first to experience absolute decline in the aftermath of the Second World War; and very likely the first to collapse into some new grouping of post-industrial localised economies - beginning with the independence of Scotland and the semi-independence of Northern Ireland - As a very likely consequence of Britain's withdrawal from the European Union.Rooted in this materialist understanding of the economy, and drawing on the emerging energy-based economics, the essays and articles contained in Decline and Fall: The Brexit years proved to be prophetic. Essays and articles from 2015 warned that the pro-Remain left was complacent in assuming they would win the referendum. And in the weeks before the vote, the essays and articles pointed to a vote to leave the EU. In the years since, the essays and articles have tracked the tragi-comical antics of a political class that was desperate to deliver the impossible - a Brexit in which the UK left the EU but continued to operate as if nothing had changed. In 2019, as the Tory Party morphed into a version of UKIP 2.0, the essays and articles began to warn that the pro-Remain camp had become delusional and that Boris Johnson's Tories were on course for a huge electoral victory. As author Tim Watkins was to say on the day after the election - inauspiciously, Friday the thirteenth - "I take no delight in saying 'I told you so'."Britain officially left the European Union on 1 January 2020. Nothing much has changed because it is now in a 12-month "withdrawal period." There is, though, no going back. A year from now we will find out whether Brexit will be a manifestation of "the easiest trade deal in history" or the kind of economic collapse envisaged in "project fear." Either way - Decline and Fall: The Brexit Years argues - in the absence of a viable alternative to Britain's fast depleting North Sea oil and gas fields, the very best we can hope for is a manged re-localisation of the economy. This will very likely have accidental environmental benefits. But the Brexiteer's dream of restoring Great Britain to its former glory is no more than an old man's pipe dream.
