Tomorrow, January 31, the United Kingdom leaves the European Union.

I’ve been fascinating by Brexit since the vote. There was a streak of things in a row that weren’t “supposed” to be happen. The UK votes to leave the EU in June 2016. The Cubs win the World Series. Trump beats Clinton. The envelope snafu at the Oscars a few months later. And Brexit was what kicked it off.

My interest in Brexit picked up after the 2017 election, when Theresa May’s conservative majority fell enough that she needed to rely on Irish unionists to keep her majority. It set up a two year period where, simply, Parliament was broken. The people had voted for Brexit by a thin margin. But Parliament didn’t quite reflect that. And what did Brexit mean?

The hardest people in May’s government thought it meant securing their own trade deals with the US. Liberal Leave voters hoped it meant the opportunity for higher standards on workers issues and public ownership and such. No one agreed except that whatever May was putting forward was not what they wanted.

The weaknesses in the plan were evident as early in December 2017, when she was in Ireland ready to announce an Irish border plan and the DUP (the Irish unionists) scuttled it. She had to walk out of the ceremony without the deal she’d gone there expecting to sign. The next 18 months (until she stepped down in June 2019) were just sorting through that same issue over and over. It was a perfect storm.

The thorniest issue of Brexit was (and is) reconciling the Good Friday agreement for no Irish border on the one hand with the UK’s desire to move away from the EU’s regulations on the other. Squaring that circle is nigh impossible, but it’s harder when your government is relying on a group of Irish unionists who will balk at any perceived difference between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK

Add to that perfect storm, Jeremy Corbyn’s historic skepticism of the EU (sorry, I should say scepticism since I’m writing about the UK) and his attempts to get Labour to straddle the fence, and you have a broken system. All the makings for a constitutional crisis.

For a while, Boris Johnson appeared to be doing even worse than May. Early on, he’d lost every vote he put before Parliament. But eventually he did get things a little further and got something close to a deal accepted by Parliament. It was far enough that he could show his base that he was committed to Brexit, and successfully got an election called. Labour got terribly trounced. The Lib Dems who had seemed like they were rising got trounced too. And Johnson and the conservatives emerged with a big majority.

It was clear then: Brexit was going to happen and he had the margins to ensure it. Parliament was no longer broken. Parliament took control of things under May—not under Johnson. Johnson asked Parliament to vote to turn over everything to him and they did. The UK is leaving the EU.

Which brings us to now.

What’s next

Starting February 1, the UK will no longer be in the EU. But you won’t know it immediately. They will enter a period where they will no longer have a seat at the table in the EU but they will have to accept all EU laws. This transition period is currently set to last until the end of 2020. The idea of it is that the UK will use the time to negotiate a new plan with the EU. So they’ll plan out new treaties around fishing, technology, goods and services across the Irish border finance out of the City of London, and a huge list of other things. In the meantime, they’ll abide by current EU rules so that the planes keep flying.

Johnson insists that these trade negotiations all have to be complete by the end of the year. It’s a shockingly short period of time and it creates (again) another potential cliff edge. If the UK can’t come up with a deal with the EU, they will default to “WTO rules” and basically everything will be checked at the borders. In other words, there is (again) a chance that the UK may leave the EU with “no deal.”

So that’s the first thing to be watching for this year.

What about Scotland?

The other thing to be watching for is the Scottish response. David Cameron gave Scotland the chance to vote for their independence in 2014. (He really liked playing Russian Roulette with these big votes, given his authorization of the 2016 Brexit vote as well). Scotland voted to stay.

But now, the polls suggest that, if given the chance, Scotland would vote to leave the UK and join the EU on their own. Johnson says he won’t authorize the vote. Will Scotland go rogue and hold an independence vote on their own? It’s not necessarily working out so well for Catalonia… And if they were successful, would they plunge themselves into a recession by end up creating a border between themselves and the UK?

And Ireland?

Ireland is the other wildcard. The Good Friday Agreement calls for no border on the island of Ireland. Both the UK and the EU say that they are committed to that. But how can the UK diverge from the EU if they actually are? I’ve said before that it creates a situation where someone will lose and, based on history, it’s probably the Irish.

But does that create conditions for a unified Ireland? A majority of Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU in the 2016 referendum. And support for some form of unification has ticked up. One poll I saw last fall puts it at 46% (but a lot has changed since September of 2019).

There won’t be a border on the island of Ireland this year. So this might not be as pressing as the Scottish question.

So that’s Brexit at this moment. Johnson got past the biggest of the constitutional crises, but there is still plenty that can go wrong this year with Scotland or the trade deal with the EU. I tweet about Brexit more than I blog about it, so if you’d like more of “An American Blogs (or Tweets) about Brexit,” here’s my Twitter account.