Disintegration of EU will benefit only xenophobes: Martin Wolf

Concerned about the possible repercussions of this exit, he said that some EU nations like Ireland may plunge into recession and some more members may follow Britain’s lead. Germany’s response to Brexit will set the tone for EU’s response and prosperity of the European continent depends upon the survival of the union.

Providing an outlook for Britain’s future, Wolf said that the next step for the nation is to get the government back in place and UK will now have to engage in new trade relations with the European Union going forward.Below is the verbatim transcript of Martin Wolf's interview with Latha Venkatesh and Reema Tendulkar on CNBC-TV18. Latha: What happens for next week for instance? Is it going to be life as usual or are we going to see the European political class huddle together and give us a reply? Wolf: There will certainly be a response from Europe next week. There is going to be summit early next week. They are going to have to say something about the implications, how they are going to handle it. It will presumably fairly anodyne. It is very early days in terms of any negotiations that is going to take a long time. Meanwhile, back here in London the prime minister has resigned. He will be a caretaker but won’t be able to decide anything. There will be a new leader of conservative party will emerge probably in early October, so we got a long interregnum of basically three months. The Scottish premier has already announced the probability of another referendum on Scottish independence since Scotland voted to stay in and the rest of the country England main is voted to leave, so there is an enormous amount of political uncertainty with these are going to last years. The markets of course have been shocked because it changed their view of what is possible, not only in the UK, but of course more broadly they think what are the imitation effects possibly in another countries, where there are strong populist movements not only in Europe, but also of course in North America look at Donald Trump. This is a rejection of the establishment by the math of the people or large swathe of people. Their results is not a surprise, it is within the poll era, but it nonetheless the shock and that’s where we are. Reema: You have touted this event as the most significant one since World War II. Britain maybe the first to leave the EU, but it perhaps may not be the last as you pointed out. Do you think this is slowly the start of EU disintegration? Wolf: I hope not because I believe despite mistakes the EU has been an enormous success in knitting together the continent and underpinning its security and above of it prosperity, the Euro zone was a big era, but they are beginning to manage it better, so the disintegration of Europe in my view would benefit nobody, but populists and xenophobes, the dangerous consequences are enormous. The only person who really delighted by this is Vladimir Putin, but of course it is obvious that there are populist movements, not so different to this in France where Marine Le Pen, the pro national leader is likely to be the winner in the first round of the presidential election in the Netherlands, in Germany even there is a populist party. In Scandinavia there are populist parties and they are all going to be encouraged by this and they are going to say we should have referendum too. I hope they won’t be given them, but maybe they will and therefore there might be more disintegration and that’s what the European leaders now have to fight against.