U.K.’s May: Brexit Pain Lies Ahead

With every breakup comes some pain. But in the case of Brexit, it’s hard to gauge just how much pain may lie ahead for Britain as it looks to exit the European Union.

As CNN noted over the weekend, Prime Minister Theresa May said that the wrangling (and the logistics) of getting the country out of the EU will likely prove to be “exceptionally painful.”

And amid that painful landscape, said the news site, there’s one overarching priority detailed by the prime minister, which focuses on limiting migration. That means, according to CNN, that U.K. firms will also face restriction on selling their wares — be they goods or services — into and through the exceedingly large market in Europe, marked as it is with hundreds of millions of consumers.

In an interview with Sky News, May said that “we will outside the European Union be able to have control of immigration and be able to set our rules for people coming to the U.K. from member states of the European Union.”

That, as CNN notes, would be a departure from the rules that are in place that allow for Europe’s trading markets to people to move freely across all borders. Yet May did not definitively answer whether Britain would in fact be leaving that single market, stating that “anybody who looks at this question of free movement and trade as a sort of zero sum game is looking at it in the wrong way,” adding that “often people talk in terms as if somehow we are leaving the EU, but we still want to keep bits of membership of the EU.”

Beyond that, Scotland’s government head, Nicola Sturgeon, has said that there will be a referendum on her country’s independence from the U.K. if Britain does in fact leave that single market (Scotland voted last June to remain in the EU).