COMMENT.

Who remembers the Millennium Bug? It was a suspected computer glitch which, at the start of this millennium, was expected to cause planes to fall from the sky, and so on and so forth.

It is likely that fears over the impact of Brexit are similarly groundless. Businesses have to trade and this fact alone puts pressure on politicians to sort things out, in both sides of the Channel. Fears over the ailing environment, one suspects, are far more valid and should worry us far more.

However, whichever side of the fence one sits on, concerning Brexit, many people did not feel like celebrating last Friday. For many, I suspect, the day brought in a sense of loss and failure; loss, because human beings should be able to accommodate each other, especially on the same continent, with so much shared history and values – and failure, because this did not happen. Brexit may well turn out very well for the British economy after all.

Already some German pundits are, at long last, casting envious glances at the positive aspects which Brexit may bring to the UK . But that’s the bigger picture.

How all this may affect individuals – especially the poor – remains to be seen. Both the EU and the UK have let us all down, because of degrees of intransigence. However, it is heartening to reflect that the last UK students at the EU in Brussels were from the John Masefield High School. No matter the political picture, bridges are still so important. In ten or twenty years time, the UK may have broken up into component parts, or the EU might have crumbled.

It is friendship which endures.