Plans to celebrate UK’s exit from the EU with Big Ben chimes divide country
- Organisers are promising music, songs, speeches, a light show and a New Year’s Eve-style countdown in the shadow of Parliament’s clock tower
- For pro-Europeans however, departure at 11pm on January 31 will be a melancholy moment
With Brexit just days away, Britons are fighting over the chimes of Big Ben. And the White Cliffs of Dover are a battleground.
As the United Kingdom prepares to leave the European Union on Friday, people are divided over how to mark a historic moment that some are relishing but others are dreading.
Britain’s 2016 referendum on EU membership split the country: 52 per cent opted to leave the 28-nation bloc, 48 per cent voted to remain. The intervening years of political wrangling over the departure terms have not healed the divide.
For pro-Europeans, departure at 11pm on January 31 will be the melancholy moment that Britain abandons a project that brought once-warring nations together, created a vast free-trading zone of half a billion people and let Europeans study, work and live across the continent.
For Brexit supporters, it will be the instant the UK once again becomes a sovereign nation after 47 years of membership in the bloated, bureaucratic EU club.
“It’s a momentous occasion,” said Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice, who plans to join party leader Nigel Farage and thousands of supporters for a party outside Parliament on Friday night. “It’s a great celebration of the democratic will. And it’s right to celebrate it.”