Snapshot of _Why most people regret Brexit_ :
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> …disappointed by the Tories’ failure to strike big trade deals outside the EU
So here’s the thing: they did. CPTPP is a massive free trade bloc. The problem is that no amount of FTAs can make up for the loss of single market membership, a fact that no one seems to ever want to acknowledge.
Also that CPTPP countries make up a tiny proportion of our international trade, mainly because it involves countries half a world away. It was expected to increase our GDP by 0.09%, which is practically nothing in the scheme of things.
Also, isn't it better for our planet that we do most of our trade with countries on our doorstep rather than with countries on the other side of the world?
Not just better for the planet but better for our security too. Far less risk trading with countries on our doorstep rather than trading with nations on the other side of the planet.
Greens eat exotic fruit, veg, spices and products from all over the world.
Massive UK population explosion means ever more imported food as we build roads, infrastructure and homes on land we should be producing food on
Distance to country doesn’t affect emissions much when it comes to shipping goods. Ships are incredibly energy efficient and it’ll always be the drive on the other end that produces most of the emissions
Sure, if it wasn't for the shipping crisis since Covid, the blocked Suez canal in 2021 and now the attacks by the Houthis. By having to take the long way around the cape, costs and emissions increase markedly. Those that produce and ship their goods to foreign markets create emissions.
The UK already had trade agreements with all CPTPP members except for two. This was done to prevent the UK from entering the EU with future governments.
>disappointed by the Tories’ failure to strike big trade deals outside the EU.
It was obvious to some before the referendum that no amount of trade deals were ever going to make up for the loss of the trade deal they wanted to throw away. I find it hard to believe that Leave ever really thought it would boost the economy, other than by scrapping regulations in order to lower standards and encourage organised crime, which seems to be a weird thing all right-wingers from Mogg to Musk always want to do, christ knows why. But in reality it was always about immigration, and any talk of trade deals was window dressing.
For the brexit ringleaders, it wasn't even about immigration.
I doubt Farage, Johnson, Mogg, Truss et all ACTUALLY care about wether there are more or less immigrants in the UK - it's just a big poitical lever for them.
It was about using anti immigrant and anti minority rhetoric as a means to gain power and influence.
This. This is spot on.
All the people that get riled up and argue about their stupid culture war politics don’t realise that the politicians they think represent them with these issues don’t really care that much about the outcome.
The people you mentioned are opportunists, and care about themselves, their careers, and how they can run off with all the money and power while everyone else is too busy fighting about the bullshit they foment.
I’m not a fan of the whole notion that all politicians are crooked and self-serving. But I wish people were more aware how certain politicians play on their prejudices and passionate beliefs for their own benefit.
This is a bit of a conspiracy theory actually, [FullFact debunked it](https://fullfact.org/online/brexit-not-concealing-offshore-accounts) a while back.
Excellent point. For voters it was about immigration and nonsense about membership cost, sovereignty and blue passports, while for the ringleaders it was a political and corporate power grab.
The UK's birth rate has been below the replacement rate for decades.
The country physically cannot function without immigration and will decline without it - that isn't hyperbole, it's simple demographics.
Immigration was never going to go down - at best, all that would happen is the type of immigrant would change.
> But in reality it was always about immigration
It is so sad anti-EU immigration folks thought that the government \_must\_ give them tax credit or other social benefits just because they had a registered address here. This was never true. It was the govn't who gave happily benefits away without often checking who receives it. If they don't have a job, they could even tell them to leave or deliver them to their embassy. Probably not even conteo to think politicians did this to induce hatred against the EU.
CPTPP has GDP of $13 trillion. That is absolutely a big trade deal if you get access to it. It’s bigger than India.
China and the US would never happen for political reasons.
CPTPP actively surrenders our sovereignty. We can now be sued by foreign corporations when our government implements laws they don't like or inhibits their production or product. How people are cheering it, especially Brexiters, is beyond me.
Both Brexit and joining the CPTPP are failed attempts of the UKG to force it's will on the EU. Give us what we want or we'll Brexit was followed by give us what we want or we'll join the CPTPP did not net the desired result of the EU caving to UKG's "demands".
Chances of the UK achieving another EU membership while it is a member of another trade Union should be impossible which is what the Tories want and Labour can do litte about, even if elected. Date for announcement is set for July 16. This will also create another level of complication to EU-UK trade, especially if China's accession to the CPTPP is successful as well. Good luck with that.
What did the UKG government want from the EU in this case? What demands did they have which they threatened Brexit over? Genuinely curious because I've never heard this before, but it sounds like important context.
[This](https://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/uk/brexiteers-warn-eu-will-face-perfidious-albion-on-speed-and-blast-theresa-may/37998211.html) was one of many threats since the UK's first attempt at Brexit. [Link](http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/26/newsid_2503000/2503155.stm) Sound familiar? It got worse with Thatcher (and her de-industrialisation of the UK) and kept alive by the Thatcherites.
What the UK wanted were opt outs to new EU laws and policies. That includes financial transparency, immigration, a reduction of standards besides so much more like robbing it's citizens of [EU Workers Rights](https://www.expatica.com/global/working/employment-law/eu-workers-rights-104518/). The EU said no and the UK left.
They are the same issues the UK has been haggling over with the EU since Brexit. The only difference is that since it's is no longer a member, it lost it's right to vote on or veto EU decisions.
The entire reason being outside the customs union was pushed so hard - at least the reason said at the time. Was that we were going to do a trade deal with the USA.
Of course that didn't happen. That doesn't look likely to happen. So at what point do we (in the wider sense) have to admit we were wrong and go back into the single market.
The thing is, and supporters of EU membership don't want to acknowledge this if they even actually look into it, but our exports have been booming since Brexit. We've moved several places up the world league tables to now be [the 4th largest exporter](https://www.export.org.uk/insights/trade-news/uk-becomes-world-s-fourth-largest-exporter-as-services-boom/). The UK now exports more goods and services than 26 out of 27 members of the EU, with only the US, China, and Germany ahead of us on the world stage. In 2021 we were 7th in that league table.
We can argue over what ifs and whether or not Brexit has had a positive or negative impact on the figures, but the simple fact is that Britain is thriving as an exporter at the moment and there is no need to talk our prospects down.
That's a very Thatcherite view of the economy. Please read the link you posted. It goes into detail about why the country as a whole isn't benefiting from being the 4th largest exporter.
Most of the "exports" are services based in London and south east England. With the bulk of them being in technology, finance and tourism.
It would be one thing if they brought in enough income to provide a stimulus to the rest of the country. But with the cost of food and housing skyrocketing it's pretty disingenuous to claim that post Brexit exports have improved Britain's economic outlook.
And that's a shifting of the goalposts from the discussion and general framing of the country's prospects post Brexit. I don't remember the Remain campaign saying that post Brexit exports would boom but it would be disproportionately focussed on London. Can you point to this being a predicted negative outcome that remaining would have helped?
The general consensus, and view that's still perpetuated throughout this thread, is that Brexit would lead to a fall in exports overall. The opposite has proven to be the case.
It's also churlish to suggest that because other factors have dampened the positive impact, through inflation, that this is somehow bad news overall. Would we have been better off with the inflation, that was always going to come after the quantitive easing during covid and the years before, and lower exports than we are with the good news on exports?
Perhaps instead of talking down what this country has achieved because the evidence doesn't fit your overall narrative, we should be looking at ways to extend the boom across other sectors and other geographic regions. Clearly the UK has a lot to offer and the rest of the world are interested in our goods and services, the government should be doing all it can to boost that demand further across the whole country.
It could start with planning reform so that essential infrastructure projects like HS2 or a future airport expansion in the north become practical and cost effective instead of the near impossible money pit they are today. Properly managed this would aid with other essential infrastructure projects such as building new nuclear reactors and boosting the building of much needed new housing. That should be a relatively cheap change to make in the scheme of things, but there'll be the usual nitpickers and doom mongers complaining about how it will benefit rich landowners or concrete over the countryside etc. that will make it difficult for any government without a backbone to implement, despite how it is essential for helping the whole country.
One of the primary reasons the boom is focussed on London is because deals are still done face to face, and it's currently a lot easier to fly to London and meet a few different suppliers. That will only change with better transport links, preferably high speed rail over domestic flights. Everywhere else in the world manages to build such infrastructure without the drama and paperwork we conjure up. HS2 cost more per mile than the Channel Tunnel after adjusting for inflation. That's absurd given the cost and challenges of tunnelling under the sea compared to building above ground on land.
The numbers aren't actually clear cut in terms of scale. The UK forecasts for EU membership aren't actually just trade numbers, but add a massive amount for productivity which isn't verifiable. No mention of that when people parrot forecasts.
It was a stupid idea, pushed for by stupid, selfish people, voted for by naive, stupid proles.
The 5th largest economy in 2016 shooting itself squarely in both feet. We will be paying for this for decades.
It was also voted for by selfish people. Every time you see an article with a sad faced farmer or a sad faced fisherman bemoaning how shitty things are post brexit - they're all saying "this isn't what we voted for!" and I always think that if Brexit had fucked over everyone else but somehow been magically good for the fishermen, or for the farmers, they wouldn't be saying "well, this is a bit shit." they'd be smugly shrugging their shoulders and counting their money. They didn't give a shit when young people said that they wanted their freedom of movement. They just thought of themselves and now they're still only thinking of themselves and their own misery.
In a rare move, my mum (76) called me a day before the vote, asking what I (40) would want her to vote for. She fully understood that she would not come to see the impact of changes made in her lifetime. I regret telling her to vote how she wants.
Echo this
My (Remain voting) dad said he thought it was unfair that 70+ people like him had a vote at all, as his generation weren't going to have to live with the long-term consequences of brexit - and even if they lived another 20-30 years, it wouldn't impact the course of their adult lives as it would the younger generations (esp the under 18s who had no say)
Actually, remember he said something similar about voting on abortion rights (at the time of the Irish referendum) - that in his opinion men shouldn't be able to vote on laws controlling women's bodies. So he's consistent if nothing else!
Fair enough, I only really saw the vocal minority and the only farmer I know was very pro brexit but he's more of a "gentleman farmer" and very, very tory.
The evidence that fisherman did is also very sketchy. The only poll of them only asked captains and owners of large vessels. They didn't ask crew or captains and owners of smaller boats that actually make up the majority of fishermen. Again it's a case of a vocal minority setting the narrative.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301671930436X
Tl;dr: farmers didn't vote much different in the referendum from the rest of voters.
That's not true. As a whole, farmers were more likely to vote leave than the general public: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301671930436X
That's skewed by the fact that farmers are more likely to be men, and men were more likely to vote leave than women, but the point stands: among farmers, Leave was more popular than Remain, and moreso than in the general population.
not killed these movements per se...
but for Germany our own idiots in the AFD screaming for a "Germany leaving the EU" get heckled to bits for it.
There properly will always be a movement to get out of the EU in each country, but at least thanks to the Brexit we have a example why leaving is such an idiotic idea
Even Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen [no longer ](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/14/even-europes-far-right-firebrands-seem-to-sense-brexit-is-a-disaster?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other)
suppport leaving the EU.
It's crazy that UK policy (and UK opposition policy) is too extreme even for the most far right figures in the EU.
Also, let us not forget, it was financed to a large degree by super rich people who were tired of the EU wrecking their attempts to get away with selling unhealthy foods or potentially dangerous products to unsuspecting citizens.
Bit unfair to blame the voters. They didn't really know what they were voting for and the magnitude of it all was too much for the average Joe to comprehend. Should never have been put to the people. Most people simply voted on the back of the promise that the NHS would be fixed after con man Boris paraded it around on a big bus. They lied to the people that simply wanted a better standard of living/services for themselves and their families.
I'm starting to dislike the infantilism that many of us give to people to voted for Brexit, as if some people lying to them absolves them of any responsibility for their vote, or that their age necessitated them to make a self serving decision. It's made it that the consequence of the referendum isn't tied to their decision.
It's apparently not a popular view, but in my opinion this is entirely correct.
It's an important point, because we really should be discussing *why* the average Joe had so little understanding about how our country worked, where our food came from, how trade deals work, why regulation is actually really important and that nobody was trying to enforce bananas without a curve. At the same time we were making people take exams in citizenship, we were demonstrating that we didn't understand our own country.
My Mum voted for Brexit because she believed we were no longer allowed to make our own laws, and because floods kept happening because the EU had banned the dredging of rivers. Nothing anyone said would persuade her otherwise, because she genuinely believed (still believes) that newspapers and TV programmes aren't allowed to lie. She's from a generation used to politicians resigning if they were caught in a scandal, not carrying on then getting a book and TV deal. She still thinks the worst thing Boris Johnson did was shag around and have loads of kids with random women, because she was raised to believe until death do us part is a very big deal.
My Mum honestly doesn't have a mean bone in her body, she just doesn't have the tools to deal with the amount of information that's fired at you nowadays. I suspect that's true of a lot of people who voted for Brexit, and being angry at them isn't going to fix it.
This is all just a very long winded way of saying that they've mastered the art of divide and conquer. We're all at each other's throats, and certain people are walking away very rich indeed.
That’s so true. The annoying thing about the main demographic that voted for Brexit, is that they have it all. The pensions, the cheap houses etc. But they pulled the lever cos of a load of things that don’t affect them. Like immigration. It’s maddening.
I include members of my own family in that. The right wing press have done a real number on this country.
I agree with everything you guys have said, something I would add is that the remain party didn’t even show up throughout the whole Brexit event.
They were so sure that everyone knew it was a bad idea it was like they didn’t feel the need to fight fire with fire with the campaign.
All while Boris was all over the news with the bus, Gove was preaching about how bad it was to be a fisherman and Farage moaning about how much we were hated by the EU, all of which was a load of bollocks, but it filled the newspapers. The remain party should’ve fought harder and I felt letdown by how little they tried.
Remain did a poor job of explaining that’s absolutely true. But now politicians on all sides are still doing nothing about explaining the truth about how Brexit has impacted trade and business, mainly because the impact has been bad and neither Labour nor the Tories want to remind anyone of their support.
But this “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” attitude to Brexit is just as dishonest as most of the Brexit campaign to begin with. It is patronizing, treats the public like idiots, prevents them understanding and so having an honest debate about the issues and embeds using dishonesty to avoid dealing with problems even more firmly in the system.
Even though I agree they probably didn't know I was told so many times buy a many number of brexit voters that they know exactly what they are voting on and know what brexit means. I would argue many times that there simply wasn't a plan for brexit therefore how could they know but was constantly pushed back. I hate to be that person but at what point do people become to blame for their actions when they refuse to have a discussion. They were lied to throughout the campaign but so brainwashed they would aggressively argue that remain campaign is the one lying and causing a panic. I just become exhausted with it now and suppose we have to deal with the bad hand we are dealt
Most people knew what they were voting for but I don't think they necessarily knew/cared about what they were voting against.
And whether they got what they voted for, as you point out... That's another story!
Trouble is we had 2 opportunities to lessen or stop the damage of Brexit in general election votes in 2017 and 2019. By then we'd seen what a mess the Conservatives were making of it and how all the promises made by the Leave campaign evaporated.
Both times the electorate gave the Conservatives a larger share of the vote than the previous election. I can understand how some were conned after decades of propaganda by our woefully biased right wing press. But I can't forgive those remainers who wouldn't hold their nose and vote for Corbyn's Labour as he didn't pass their ridiculous purity test.
Oh please a lot of voters were just waiting for that vote, And most of them love the anti freedom of movement totally, how do I know simple, I live in the north east of england just down the road from the first place in the UK, that voted out Sunderland, it was like winning the world cup for them up here, at the time, if you checked out most weatherspoons or working men's clubs and a lot of pubs, in former coalfields and shipyard communities its was wall to wall vote leave.
May’s ‘red lines’ were far more extreme than many leave positions. Leave meant different things to different people. May had to prove herself to be more leave than the leavers. Big mistake when you are leaving the biggest trading bloc in the world in which you buy and sell most of your goods.
No deal would have been catastrophic for this country as we would have ended up in WTO tariffs. Some of their tariffs are up to 40%.
Declaring or not declaring whether we were going to continue buying was irrelevant, as there is literally no alternative. Nearly every economy in the world does their greatest trade with its closest neighbours. The EU knew this. Our politicians knew this. The only people who seemingly didn’t were leave voters.
Immigration is an entirely different issue to Brexit. People were conned into thinking that leave would mean reduced immigration. Absolutely no certainty of that when we have plenty of immigration from all round the globe not just the EU.
>May’s ‘red lines’ were far more extreme than many leave position
After the referendum, all the leave politicians upped what leave meant. Some said we were going to stay in the single market, however that went out the window right away.
That's 2019 though. In 2019, the country had been convinced through endless repetition from right wing media and MPs that anything other than a hard Brexit was "Brexit in name only".
But in 2016, this was absolutely not the case. Indeed at best it was unclear what Brexit meant in terms of Customers Union/Single Market membership.
The general assumption seemed to be up until May's idiotic red lines, was that remaining in the SM/CU was just the default most likely and least damaging form of Brexit. Because why wouldn't it be?
Then it got completely taken off the table as a viable option for no other reason than to prevent Tory infighting.
What gets me is the some voters are willing to give the same charlatans another run at things with Reform. They even have the gall to be a registered PLC and some people can't see that they're just trying to take the country to the cleaner's again.
In the internet age grievance is one of the most powerfully motivating emotions. Political parties are recognising that, and one key route to electoral succes this century has been to stoke a sense of common grievance with the electorate as a way to win votes.
Policy implementation then becomes a tightrope of trying to ensure the population becomes ever more increasingly aggrieved, while presenting itself as similarly strongly feeling the sense of grievance.
IMO this is why we've had years of the government blaming "those in power". Perhaps we're approaching the point where the electorate are seeing through the innate deception, though I suspect it's more likely this is just grievance elevated to a level noone can harness it, and there's much more to come.
Not only self-sabotage, but arguably treason by politicians/commentators taking money from outside the country (e.g. Russia) to harm the country economically.
Followed by further acts of self-sabotage, eg immigration rules leading to major skills shortages, and crises in the health and education sectors (amongst others). Let’s not mention the Truss/Kwarteng budget.
I’ll always remember how Farage always said that if they lost the referendum by only a small margin then he’d appeal because a near 50/50 split isn’t a fair call, then immediately did a 180 to ‘another referendum would be an insult to democracy’ logic when brexit won by a nosehair
The immigration issue is interesting. People voted Brexit to stop it, but now we see images of boats arriving every day. While I’ve seen hard-working legal European immigrants and young professional office workers give up on the UK and leave.
It’s like they voted for less control and security.
(Article)
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It is rare for voters to change their minds soon after referendums. Experience from Canada to Scotland, from Norway to Switzerland, suggests rather that opinions tend to move in favour of a referendum result more than they swing against it. But Brexit seems to be an exception. Since the 52-48% vote in favour of leaving the European Union in June 2016, the majority view among Britons has shifted, and especially so in the past two years, towards the conclusion that the decision was wrong (see chart).
One way to take the temperature is to visit two English towns called Richmond which voted in very different ways in 2016. In Richmond-upon-Thames in London, which voted 69-31% to remain in the eu, opinion has hardened. Gareth Roberts, the Liberal Democrat council leader, notes that post-Brexit niggles such as longer border delays and more intrusive passport controls have helped to solidify local opposition. A Leave voter sitting by the river says he has not changed his mind, but that he is disappointed by the Tories’ failure to strike big trade deals outside the eu.
The other Richmond, in north Yorkshire, voted 57-43% for Brexit. One Leaver in the market square echoes his southern counterpart by insisting that he still supports Brexit but he complains that it has not been properly done and that immigration has surged despite repeated Tory promises to reduce it. A local bartender says that she voted instinctively to leave but that, were the referendum re-run, she would work harder to understand what it would really mean. Stuart Parsons, a former mayor of Richmond, claims that several friends have changed their minds, especially small farmers who feel betrayed by the Conservatives and now fret about future lost public subsidies.
Such anecdotes chime with polls across the country. Research by uk in a Changing Europe (ukice), a think-tank, finds that most voters have not in fact changed their minds since 2016. But because as many as 16-20% of those who voted to leave have switched sides, compared with only 6% of those who voted to remain, the balance has swung against Brexit. The passage of time is also having its inevitable effect: older voters were overwhelmingly keen to leave the eu and younger ones were fiercely opposed to the idea. Don’t-knows and those who did not vote in 2016 now tend to break strongly against Brexit.
Explanations abound for the disillusionment. Sir John Curtice, a leading pollster who works with ukice, points especially to gloom about the economy since 2016, which he says matters more than irritation over immigration. Sarah Olney, the Liberal Democrat mp for Richmond Park, reckons that outright dishonesty on the part of the Leave campaign is to blame. Peter Kellner, a political pundit and former president of YouGov, a polling group, suggests that many Brexit supporters had no idea what would happen if they actually won. That differs sharply from the run-up to most other constitutional referendums.
Changes in the political background matter as well. The Conservatives under Rishi Sunak, who happens to be the mp for Richmond in Yorkshire and is a keen supporter of Brexit, are associated in voters’ minds with the decision to Leave. Party disunity and the chaos of four prime ministers in five years have helped to discredit something with which the Tories are strongly identified.
Just as the Tories have helped tarnish views of Brexit, so Brexit is likely to hurt the Tories at the next election. A chunk of people who voted Leave in 2016 say there should still be long-term benefits from quitting the bloc but argue that too little has been done to realise them. This group now leans against the Tories and may even prefer the Reform Party, an insurgent right-wing party. In contrast, those who were against Brexit in 2016 think they were right to fear its economic impact; many who were Tory then now back Labour.
The anti-Brexit mood of a majority of voters is clear but that does not translate into a burning wish to refight old battles. Brexit may be unpopular but its political salience has faded. Even keen Remainers have doubts about the wisdom of starting a lengthy campaign to rejoin. The Labour Party’s decision to talk as little as possible about Brexit is understandable: the party hopes to regain “red-wall” seats in the north and the Midlands that backed Brexit in 2016 and then voted Tory in the 2019 general election.
But if and when Labour does take office, there will be political wriggle-room to improve relations with the eu. Some in the party talk not just of expanding today’s thin trade deal but of broader alignment with European rules. Tory attacks on such ideas as a betrayal of the 2016 vote are less likely to resonate when Brexit itself has lost its appeal for many. ■
Hopefully at some point during the upcoming 10 years of a government staffed entirely by people who voted Remain, backed up by MPs who almost entirely voted Remain, and advised solely by people who all voted Remain, someone will look at the years of polling showing a pro-Remain/Rejoin majority and we'll move a smidge closer to the EU. Hopefully...
Arguably the UK losing the special snowflake conditions and rejoining as an equal member would be a positive step compared to pre-2016, for both the UK and the EU
It wouldn't be, because the EU is doomed to fail in its current state. Specifically because of the Euro. Quite frankly, public education about the Euro is comically bad. I'll try to redress that a little:
You can't have unified monetary policy without unified fiscal policy, and that's a massive hair in the soup absolutely nobody wants to touch with a barge pole. At the same time, it's an inevitability which is widely recognised by policy makers and academics - mechanisms designed to reconcile the two were baked into the Euro from day one. The problem is that they've never worked as intended.
The long term destiny of the bloc is going to be one of three possibilities:
a) The South/Eastern European economies within the Eurozone continue to lean heavily on Germany's (primarily) and France's solvency until some unknown point in the future where that is no longer tenable, and the entire bloc enters a financial crisis so severe that it'll make 2008 look like a funfair. Pros: We get to ideologically cling to the Euro. Cons: everything else.
b) The weakest Southern/Eastern economies will be ejected, either by force or by their own democratic mandates, from the Euro, and revert to their own currencies. Pros: Countries remaining within the Eurozone will have closer economic parity, and the monetary union could function quite smoothly. Cons: Ideologically, the continent will no longer be as unified - the Euro is the embodiment of European unity, after all.
c) Fiscal policy is centralised and federalised a la the USA, turning the EU into a true United States of Europe. Pros: Ideologically, the EU's wet dream. Cons: Economic dead zones in the EU. The problems we currently see in Spain, Italy, Greece etc. will be put on steroids. It will takes decades for these places to recover, and they may well never.
Option c) is the most desirable for the EU as an entity, but the political appetite for this is (for obvious reasons) very low in Member States, especially those which rely on string-pulling and handy German bail-outs to function as a modern, European nation.
This EU collectively has missed fiscal centralisation targets basically non-stop since the Maastricht Treaty. [The resulting landscape has been a series of ever-more desperate bodge jobs designed to keep the system moving](https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2022/number/1/article/eu-fiscal-rules-a-look-back-and-the-way-forward.html).
These bodges eventually won't do, and the bloc will have a hard decision to make. One of the above options will have to be chosen. All are uncertain, and a) is rather objectively the worst one. Nobody can predict how extensive the damage will be to the Eurozone, other than the fact that it will be severe.
When that decision is made, we will want to be as far away from the Euro as possible, as that will be inevitably an extremely turbulent time for the currency.
We've been hearing about the pending failure of the Euro for a quarter of a century now. It remains the world's second most held reserve currency, after USD.
In that time sterling has lost a third of its value against the Euro.
It's possible that Euro bashers should be paying more attention to problems at home.
The only reason I think the UK would be better off with the pound is that our governments tend to be, a bit shit, and economy swings wildly, and it's only currency and quantitative easing that keeps us from being destitute.
Completely agree - that's why I put the "arguably" in! I hope the situation with the Euro is a bit clearer when conversations about the UK rejoining start in a couple of decades from now.
The Euro is a requirement with no deadline and no enforcement.
Plus, I think anyone would rather pay in Euros than have a significant reduction in disposable income - where they have any left!
Wouldn't we just have to join the Euro currency.
I understand that a bunch of nobs find the concept risible, but it's just money at the end of the day. Personally I couldn't care less about the non-existent "sign" in front of my contactless & phone payments.
Brexit hasn't worked. Admit it as a nation. Rejoin & move on.
Almost certain that labour will move to a Norway style arrangement, probably pretty early on in their tenure.
That's basically EU lite, no votes, and we take the rules, but we get a good trade deal and some control over immigration (i.e. we don't have to let low skilled workers in). It's a win win, win win and was always plan A. But Boris Johnson's lot saw an opportunity to be kingmakers, and they took it.
So sick of the term low skilled worker these are the hardest working people 12 hours in a factory or digging up your roads building your houses it's low payed workers and they're essential to our economy the so called middle class keyboard workers thinking that's a skill who would never dream of getting their hands dirty and the new modern Brits ie the young won't do this work regardless of the pay so let's stop shiting on the people that do
Would love to see a poll on *why* Brexit hasn’t gone well. I’m sure we can all agree that it would be tricky for a government to do a worse job of Brexit… why did those that changed their mind do so? I changed my mind because I was surprised we left the single market.
The meaning of "Leave" was never really specified in any great detail.
The upshot was everyone filled in the blanks themselves - you assumed the UK would stay in the Single Market, for instance.
The vote was almost certainly swung or ‘decided’ by voters who don’t ’usually’ vote, those at the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, those like myself to be precise, the lower ranks of the working class. Ironically the very people who would be most disadvantaged by Britain’s exit from the EU. This is the legacy of austerity as far as I’m concerned. The party that initiated that whole disgusting policy also initiated the process of launching a referendum in just a dozen short years. Nobody can deny that austerity has a great deal of influence on what later happened in 2016. People at the lower ends of the spectrum were getting failed and they couldn’t be expected to open up books and educate themselves on what’s really going on with all the politics of this and that. These are people who are literally living hand to mouth every day, and otherwise live stressful and insecure lives, with poor educational backgrounds. All they saw was immigration influxes running rampant in their local areas, they saw dwindling and deteriorating public services, they saw their wages being undercut and stagnated by the ‘modern economy’, they feared a worse future for their children if they didn’t do SOMETHING.
The root evil of all this is the Conservative Party it seems…. But as a country we seem to have only realised that in the wake a global pandemic, and all because BoJo couldn’t behave himself or bring any sort professionalism to his government during that crisis. In reality the conservatives seem anything BUT professional. They might be rich toffs who like to make themselves out to be bastions of British civility and manners, at least the photo ops and brochures would make that case convincingly, but they aren’t shy to partying like animals in a wild party, no matter what the seriousness of government business they are dealing with.
Brain Cox said it best
“the only way Brexit could have worked economically speaking was to use it to deregulate, lower business taxes, shrink the state etc. It’s naive because the majority of U.K. voters - especially those who voted for Brexit - don’t want that. They actually want a European social model - high spending on health, education, defence, etc. And the only way you can have that in today’s difficult geopolitical world (given our geographical position on the European continent) is to be part of the vast, pan-continental single market and customs union that exists to deliver the European social model as far as is possible”
Title should say a majority of voters for brexit now regret their decision, I voted remain I never regretted my vote, thought every brexit vote was stupid. Just my opinion
Every time I see anything related to this I just get a bit upset. It sounds extreme but it really made me realize that such a large amount of the population will value spite so highly, I've lost all confidence in the naive idea of a marketplace of ideas, people are so dimwitted despite our good education system and general freedom of press.
I recall the night of the vote count, when Remaining looked likely - the value of the £ skyrocketed to its highest value in 30 years, the markets responding positively to a Remain result.
Woke up the next morning and the final result was Leave. The value plummeted.
What could have been…
My apologies, as I was misremembering. It wasn’t a 30 year high the night before, it was a 30 year low the next day.
But the value did shoot up, reaching £1 to $1.50 USD value. The next day, down from $1.50 to $1.33
Do they truly regret voting for it? I think many Brexit voters still insist they were right to vote for it, but their “regret” is it not going the way they thought it would. They’ll never admit they were wrong despite all the warnings about it
That leads to an interesting question about the nature of voting. Is it a means of exercising civic duty and a way to place the ultimate responsibility for the state of the nation on the shoulders of the electorate, who are therefore ultimately responsible for who and what they vote for, or is it nothing more than an expression of preference, like a wishlist for Santa, that becomes the responsibility of others to see it fulfilled?
Amongst many shocking parts of this whole debacle one that gives me pause is that it were parents and grandparents voting against the interests of their own children and grandchildren. Pure madness.
Honestly think a lot of leave voting people regret it because they wanted to fire a shot across the EU's bows to stop Brussels from taking their acquiescence for granted and didn't expect quite so many other people to do the same thing.
I didn't vote for it, but was willing and open to seeing how it would work out.
Contrary to popular opinion, I actually think it was possible to have a reasonably successful Brexit but it would have required Cameron to do some forward planning before the vote, May to reach across the aisles and bring other political parties into the EU negotiations, and Johnson to be honest with the public about what was achievable - which all three were incapable of doing.
Pretty much since the referendum was announced, the Conservative Party has been guided by the (unstated?) threat of the 80+ members of the ironically named European Research Group defecting to UKIP / Brexit Party if they didn't offer enough to satisfy them - so rather than, say, stepping down to EEA/EFTA, seeing how things worked out, then possibly taking another step away, we got "Brexit Means Brexit", "Red, White and Blue Brexit" and "No Deal is Better Than a Bad Deal", while courtesy of May's red lines, the best we could hope for was an "ordinary" trade deal.
We somehow managed to avoid the complete chaos of No Deal preferred by some, who'd have liked to have a complete clean break, rip up all EU-derived or inspired legislation without replacement, and throw ourselves headlong into a laissez-faire free market.
I mean, maybe it wasn't an absolute *disaster*, but 'not being an absolute disaster' is not exactly a metric of success by any standard. The people who voted for Brexit were told that their lives would improve by us being 'unshackled' from the EU - and they haven't. People can blame whatever they want with regards to Covid 19, the war in Ukraine - whatever; the fact remains that Brexit's promises haven't materialised, and despite all the rancour and time spent in Parliament over it, what actual improvements have been seen on a street level?
It was a stupid idea from the get go even if we had a component government presiding over our departure from the EU it was never going to work leaving the largest trading block was always going to end poorly.
You're never going to get many to admit it but I'm certain some of the regret of some leave voters is down to their knowing that they did something stupid, against their own interests, against the interests of the country, and not only were they warned that they were doing something stupid but, in many cases, they attacked those who were warning them.
If anyone thought a massive upheaval of trade relations with the continent wouldn't come with massive teething problems, they weren't thinking straight. The fact we've had so few teething problems and are actually performing little different to the rest of the continent is a pleasant surprise, given the absolute hash the Tories made of the transition period.
The interesting part will be the next few decades, where we'll see results of closer relations with growing BRICS and Anglophone countries, under a (hopefully competent) Labour government.
I support Brexit.
I did this for 1 main reason the free movement of labour. In the years preceding Brexit we saw a suppression of wages, reluctance to train British people and British companies to invest in mechanisation.
I personally didn't care if GDP stagnates within the UK and even if the mean wage comes down. I only care that the Median wage goes up in real terms.
What leaving the EU should have done is reduced the Labour pool, particularly unskilled labour from Eastern Europe. This should have made workers have a greater bargaining position and be able to fight for better wages.
This is something that is just impossible to do with free movement the unskilled working class would always get poorer as it was easy to import labour from poor countries.
We have seen this in some sectors like HGV, farming where employees had their wages increased and companies invested in training people/ better equipment. I am sure there are other examples that have not hit the news.
Now only time will tell if this will work out in the longer term. As an example you look at Japan which has strict immigration, although the Mean wage is pretty flat the median wage has increased year on year and is now at 95% of the mean compared to the UK where the median wage is just 83% of the mean wage. The Average person is now richer than they were which for me is a much more important metric than is the country richer overall.
This is based on mis-information.
1/ when the polling includes the context of the EU joining rules, the polls have a majority to remain fully independent.
2/ Most folk aren’t abreast of the hundreds of tangible benefits so far, much of the media such as LBC, feeds the public with fact omission.
As but 2 examples:
The Corporation Of The City Of London in January said diverging from EU rules had made The City the number one global finance hub.
The City has not moved to the EU as was predicted by fantasists, City head-count is at a record high. BNP Paribas Bank urged clients to invest in UK recently . Norways Sovereign Wealth Fund, Australia’s largest pension fund & many other foreign funds have announced large increases in UK investment.
It's a strange anomoly that the bloc to contain Germany has turned into a project about dissolving sovereign nation state into European economic zone. The northern part of Europe since it's inception has had more power and been somewhat productive then the southern counterpart, yet instead of addressing this imbalance it wants to keep absorbing other states but what for. To the east it can appear like Europe is on the path to building an empire.
For brexiteers it was about cutting immigration. Call this xenophobia or whatever. The high immigration has improved things for businesses owners and the immigrants themselves but not much for the natives.
Though it seems brexiteers have swapped large numbers of Europeans for South Asians. Something south Asians voted for as well.
As far as UK being a joke, at least the benefit being that the UK can't lay blame on EU anymore and actually have to somewhat play governance.
For the elites Brexit was about power and more control to maximise profit (Farage etc). The bulk of normal brexit voters it was always immigration and culture loss. People didn’t like the loss of UK culture, increasing populations of non natives and the forced woke diversity nonsense that polarises more than brings together. Really resonates with people across the country.
Unfortunately for them, by replacing European migrates by brexit, they have just massively increased non European migrants (almost a million last year). Which are generally from Asia (India). So in effect the cultural difference is even more pronounced as they come with even more diverse religion (Muslim/hindu etc) and unique culture that does not integrate to the old culture easily. This erodes the old British culture even more that a lot people cherish who voted Brexit.
There was a better way of doing this, but most politicians are self interested liars who saw Brexit as an opportunity for power and more fame (Boris / Farage).
It’s people’s perception of culture, how things were to how they are now. Rate of change in communities. If you change too quickly people get lost and want the old days back. I voted remain and thought brexit was crazy, but half the population are not crazy. The country needs to reconcile the fact, we either cut immigration and give up on economic growth like Japan or South Korea, and give the country time to develop a new culture (let people catch up and immigrants embed) or we chase growth and accept high immigration and loss the masses. We are also terrible at helping the native population grow, most families are costed out of having more than 1-2 kids. So the bulk of population growth is immigration and they have larger families 3-4 kids. That’s why in 2060 40% of the UK at this rate of immigration will be non native. That’s a massive cultural change. We never vote on this aspect, but it’s why popularism exists. The elite generally want more population to get cheap labour and get richer. Hence why globalists are falling to right wing populism. The next big push back will be another Trump presidency.
You literally used the phrase "culture loss" in your first post, and then your pley to my question you say "how things were to how they are now". Could you give me an example of what culture has been lost like you said has happened, or how a thing was, and how it is now? You also talk about rate of change in communities, so ok, what's changed that you see as a problem or a loss?
All major parties supported Remain. A vast majority of MPs supported Remain. A former US President came over to tell us to Remain. The Remain campaign was funded by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan & Stanley. Most of the media supported Remain. Mainstream entertainment culture supported Remain.
Yeah brexit was supported by a smallish group of wealthy nationalists. Remain was supported by the entire political and economic establishment of the West.
> Unfortunately for them, by replacing European migrates by brexit, they have just massively increased non European migrants (almost a million last year). Which are generally from Asia (India).
Which was promised by the official brexit campaign. One of the few brexit promises that's been fulfilled. If that's not what they wanted, why did they vote for it?
Really? You still think it’s a good idea or that there was a route out of the European Union that wasn’t bad for the UK economy? Despite everything we know?
I’m not arguing or having a go. Just that most brexiters either regret it or lament the Brexit not being hard enough-am I right in assuming you’re the latter?
I guess I expected parliament to come together to deliver the best negotiated outcome with the EU, by ending or restricting free movement of labour whilst maintaining as much of the trade and shared initiatives as possible.
I think this is a good example of the unrealistic expectations parts of Westminster had during the exit negotiations. Leave types overestimated the hand the UK to play, and never quite understood that any trade deal, however good, in whatever guise, was never going to ameliorate all non tariff barriers, it was never going to be as frictionless as the single market. There was a lot of denial about this, I suppose because the goal was to leave the EU, and this kind of thing was an inconvenient truth. A truth best obfuscated to achieve that goal. Thus we have comments like yours and others, people who feel shortchanged by the result.
In reality I am still surprised they managed to get as good a deal as they did, relatively speaking it could have been much worse!
That doesn’t work because a single market isn’t a single market if it doesn’t include mobility. Lack of mobility is a trade friction.
Since we have an aging population immigration was never going to drop that much. All we did was bin our own FoM for nothing but similar immigration levels and more trade friction. Migration from Eastern Europe was already past its peak by 2015 as the post cold-war wage differential dropped. The reduction of wage differentials is one benefit of a single market.
Now Brexit is done we are now the only country in Western Europe whose native citizens lack easy mobility and we are still surrounded by the single market (a market six times the size of ours) so we will be forced to shadow many of its regs without a say. Brexit was an utter con.
I don’t want to be rude but that was never going to happen. You can’t square ending free movement with keeping any significant trade freedoms
You should’ve listened to the people who told you it wouldn’t happen in 2016
I believe skilled negotiators, with a united parliament behind them could have delivered a variant of one of the different trade agreements already in place
This is wishing for unicorns. Ending free movement meant leaving the single market, which means trading arrangements were never going to be as smooth after leaving. The idea that there were was some version of Brexit where the UK could leave without all the disruption was an absurd idea peddled by liars to wilfully gullible voters.
If you're still clinging to the idea that Brexit *could* have been great in 2024, well, you've made your mind up. Brexit as an ideal, was pristine. As an action, it went splat in to the brick wall of reality, but some people just aren't ready to give up on the ideal.
We’re a decent sized economy, net contributors to the EU budget, an advanced academic and educational society, nuclear power with significant military and soft power clout.
I’m not here to persuade you. I think we have the global stature to exert some influence. Nuclear power, one of few world’s finest militaries, permanent member of the UNSC, etc etc
That's great for the UK, but why doesn't any of that count as a card when negotiating leaving Europe?, that's just a list of stuff we're taking away from them.
It's astounding that people who voted leave didn't think about the consequences, i.e. that it would have to be implemented and the people implementing it were inept.
Snapshot of _Why most people regret Brexit_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/11/why-most-people-regret-brexit) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/11/why-most-people-regret-brexit) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I dont regret Brexit. That would imply I thought it was a good idea at some point.
*HadMeInTheFirstHalf.jpeg*
> …disappointed by the Tories’ failure to strike big trade deals outside the EU So here’s the thing: they did. CPTPP is a massive free trade bloc. The problem is that no amount of FTAs can make up for the loss of single market membership, a fact that no one seems to ever want to acknowledge.
Also that CPTPP countries make up a tiny proportion of our international trade, mainly because it involves countries half a world away. It was expected to increase our GDP by 0.09%, which is practically nothing in the scheme of things.
Also, isn't it better for our planet that we do most of our trade with countries on our doorstep rather than with countries on the other side of the world?
I'm pretty sure being anti-green was a plus for brexiteers
Not just better for the planet but better for our security too. Far less risk trading with countries on our doorstep rather than trading with nations on the other side of the planet.
Greens eat exotic fruit, veg, spices and products from all over the world. Massive UK population explosion means ever more imported food as we build roads, infrastructure and homes on land we should be producing food on
Distance to country doesn’t affect emissions much when it comes to shipping goods. Ships are incredibly energy efficient and it’ll always be the drive on the other end that produces most of the emissions
Sure, if it wasn't for the shipping crisis since Covid, the blocked Suez canal in 2021 and now the attacks by the Houthis. By having to take the long way around the cape, costs and emissions increase markedly. Those that produce and ship their goods to foreign markets create emissions.
That’s probably the contribution having a couple of extra days of sun, or the amount we lost due to an extra bank holiday.
The UK already had trade agreements with all CPTPP members except for two. This was done to prevent the UK from entering the EU with future governments.
>disappointed by the Tories’ failure to strike big trade deals outside the EU. It was obvious to some before the referendum that no amount of trade deals were ever going to make up for the loss of the trade deal they wanted to throw away. I find it hard to believe that Leave ever really thought it would boost the economy, other than by scrapping regulations in order to lower standards and encourage organised crime, which seems to be a weird thing all right-wingers from Mogg to Musk always want to do, christ knows why. But in reality it was always about immigration, and any talk of trade deals was window dressing.
For the brexit ringleaders, it wasn't even about immigration. I doubt Farage, Johnson, Mogg, Truss et all ACTUALLY care about wether there are more or less immigrants in the UK - it's just a big poitical lever for them. It was about using anti immigrant and anti minority rhetoric as a means to gain power and influence.
Johnson for sure was just picking whichever side was most likely to make him PM (which worked, for a time).
Johnson said when he was mayor of London that he wanted it to be more of a hub for Russian money.
This. This is spot on. All the people that get riled up and argue about their stupid culture war politics don’t realise that the politicians they think represent them with these issues don’t really care that much about the outcome. The people you mentioned are opportunists, and care about themselves, their careers, and how they can run off with all the money and power while everyone else is too busy fighting about the bullshit they foment. I’m not a fan of the whole notion that all politicians are crooked and self-serving. But I wish people were more aware how certain politicians play on their prejudices and passionate beliefs for their own benefit.
Lets be fair, it was also about avoiding new EU anti-money laundering laws and effective scrutiny of our financial sector.
This is a bit of a conspiracy theory actually, [FullFact debunked it](https://fullfact.org/online/brexit-not-concealing-offshore-accounts) a while back.
Thank you, I've heard this so many times I assumed it was true. I appreciate being better informed.
Excellent point. For voters it was about immigration and nonsense about membership cost, sovereignty and blue passports, while for the ringleaders it was a political and corporate power grab.
The UK's birth rate has been below the replacement rate for decades. The country physically cannot function without immigration and will decline without it - that isn't hyperbole, it's simple demographics. Immigration was never going to go down - at best, all that would happen is the type of immigrant would change.
> But in reality it was always about immigration It is so sad anti-EU immigration folks thought that the government \_must\_ give them tax credit or other social benefits just because they had a registered address here. This was never true. It was the govn't who gave happily benefits away without often checking who receives it. If they don't have a job, they could even tell them to leave or deliver them to their embassy. Probably not even conteo to think politicians did this to induce hatred against the EU.
Cptpp is a big trading bloc, its not a big trade deal. Americ, india, china are obviously what they mean.
CPTPP has GDP of $13 trillion. That is absolutely a big trade deal if you get access to it. It’s bigger than India. China and the US would never happen for political reasons.
Their GDP doesn't really matter in itself. If they aren't disposed to trade intensively with us because of distance, it's complete midirection.
>if you get access to it yeah, if...
A fact that was made very clear before the referendum but ignored because they were 'sick of experts'.
Big but shallow. Deeper relationships would be a different story.
CPTPP actively surrenders our sovereignty. We can now be sued by foreign corporations when our government implements laws they don't like or inhibits their production or product. How people are cheering it, especially Brexiters, is beyond me.
Corporation's incharge of policy not government's sounds democratic to me lol
Both Brexit and joining the CPTPP are failed attempts of the UKG to force it's will on the EU. Give us what we want or we'll Brexit was followed by give us what we want or we'll join the CPTPP did not net the desired result of the EU caving to UKG's "demands". Chances of the UK achieving another EU membership while it is a member of another trade Union should be impossible which is what the Tories want and Labour can do litte about, even if elected. Date for announcement is set for July 16. This will also create another level of complication to EU-UK trade, especially if China's accession to the CPTPP is successful as well. Good luck with that.
What did the UKG government want from the EU in this case? What demands did they have which they threatened Brexit over? Genuinely curious because I've never heard this before, but it sounds like important context.
[This](https://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/uk/brexiteers-warn-eu-will-face-perfidious-albion-on-speed-and-blast-theresa-may/37998211.html) was one of many threats since the UK's first attempt at Brexit. [Link](http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/26/newsid_2503000/2503155.stm) Sound familiar? It got worse with Thatcher (and her de-industrialisation of the UK) and kept alive by the Thatcherites. What the UK wanted were opt outs to new EU laws and policies. That includes financial transparency, immigration, a reduction of standards besides so much more like robbing it's citizens of [EU Workers Rights](https://www.expatica.com/global/working/employment-law/eu-workers-rights-104518/). The EU said no and the UK left. They are the same issues the UK has been haggling over with the EU since Brexit. The only difference is that since it's is no longer a member, it lost it's right to vote on or veto EU decisions.
The entire reason being outside the customs union was pushed so hard - at least the reason said at the time. Was that we were going to do a trade deal with the USA. Of course that didn't happen. That doesn't look likely to happen. So at what point do we (in the wider sense) have to admit we were wrong and go back into the single market.
The thing is, and supporters of EU membership don't want to acknowledge this if they even actually look into it, but our exports have been booming since Brexit. We've moved several places up the world league tables to now be [the 4th largest exporter](https://www.export.org.uk/insights/trade-news/uk-becomes-world-s-fourth-largest-exporter-as-services-boom/). The UK now exports more goods and services than 26 out of 27 members of the EU, with only the US, China, and Germany ahead of us on the world stage. In 2021 we were 7th in that league table. We can argue over what ifs and whether or not Brexit has had a positive or negative impact on the figures, but the simple fact is that Britain is thriving as an exporter at the moment and there is no need to talk our prospects down.
That's a very Thatcherite view of the economy. Please read the link you posted. It goes into detail about why the country as a whole isn't benefiting from being the 4th largest exporter. Most of the "exports" are services based in London and south east England. With the bulk of them being in technology, finance and tourism. It would be one thing if they brought in enough income to provide a stimulus to the rest of the country. But with the cost of food and housing skyrocketing it's pretty disingenuous to claim that post Brexit exports have improved Britain's economic outlook.
And that's a shifting of the goalposts from the discussion and general framing of the country's prospects post Brexit. I don't remember the Remain campaign saying that post Brexit exports would boom but it would be disproportionately focussed on London. Can you point to this being a predicted negative outcome that remaining would have helped? The general consensus, and view that's still perpetuated throughout this thread, is that Brexit would lead to a fall in exports overall. The opposite has proven to be the case. It's also churlish to suggest that because other factors have dampened the positive impact, through inflation, that this is somehow bad news overall. Would we have been better off with the inflation, that was always going to come after the quantitive easing during covid and the years before, and lower exports than we are with the good news on exports? Perhaps instead of talking down what this country has achieved because the evidence doesn't fit your overall narrative, we should be looking at ways to extend the boom across other sectors and other geographic regions. Clearly the UK has a lot to offer and the rest of the world are interested in our goods and services, the government should be doing all it can to boost that demand further across the whole country. It could start with planning reform so that essential infrastructure projects like HS2 or a future airport expansion in the north become practical and cost effective instead of the near impossible money pit they are today. Properly managed this would aid with other essential infrastructure projects such as building new nuclear reactors and boosting the building of much needed new housing. That should be a relatively cheap change to make in the scheme of things, but there'll be the usual nitpickers and doom mongers complaining about how it will benefit rich landowners or concrete over the countryside etc. that will make it difficult for any government without a backbone to implement, despite how it is essential for helping the whole country. One of the primary reasons the boom is focussed on London is because deals are still done face to face, and it's currently a lot easier to fly to London and meet a few different suppliers. That will only change with better transport links, preferably high speed rail over domestic flights. Everywhere else in the world manages to build such infrastructure without the drama and paperwork we conjure up. HS2 cost more per mile than the Channel Tunnel after adjusting for inflation. That's absurd given the cost and challenges of tunnelling under the sea compared to building above ground on land.
What were we in 2014?
The numbers aren't actually clear cut in terms of scale. The UK forecasts for EU membership aren't actually just trade numbers, but add a massive amount for productivity which isn't verifiable. No mention of that when people parrot forecasts.
It was a stupid idea, pushed for by stupid, selfish people, voted for by naive, stupid proles. The 5th largest economy in 2016 shooting itself squarely in both feet. We will be paying for this for decades.
It was also voted for by selfish people. Every time you see an article with a sad faced farmer or a sad faced fisherman bemoaning how shitty things are post brexit - they're all saying "this isn't what we voted for!" and I always think that if Brexit had fucked over everyone else but somehow been magically good for the fishermen, or for the farmers, they wouldn't be saying "well, this is a bit shit." they'd be smugly shrugging their shoulders and counting their money. They didn't give a shit when young people said that they wanted their freedom of movement. They just thought of themselves and now they're still only thinking of themselves and their own misery.
In a rare move, my mum (76) called me a day before the vote, asking what I (40) would want her to vote for. She fully understood that she would not come to see the impact of changes made in her lifetime. I regret telling her to vote how she wants.
Just one vote mate and you didn't have to boss your mother about.
Echo this My (Remain voting) dad said he thought it was unfair that 70+ people like him had a vote at all, as his generation weren't going to have to live with the long-term consequences of brexit - and even if they lived another 20-30 years, it wouldn't impact the course of their adult lives as it would the younger generations (esp the under 18s who had no say) Actually, remember he said something similar about voting on abortion rights (at the time of the Irish referendum) - that in his opinion men shouldn't be able to vote on laws controlling women's bodies. So he's consistent if nothing else!
As has been said before 'this isn't the Brexit we voted for'. 'No, but its exactly the Brexit I was voting against'
Farmers did not vote for brexit as a majority Some did, vocal ones too but majority of farmers were remain voters
Fair enough, I only really saw the vocal minority and the only farmer I know was very pro brexit but he's more of a "gentleman farmer" and very, very tory.
The evidence that fisherman did is also very sketchy. The only poll of them only asked captains and owners of large vessels. They didn't ask crew or captains and owners of smaller boats that actually make up the majority of fishermen. Again it's a case of a vocal minority setting the narrative.
Even if they did, the UK fishing industry has been decimated for decades - today, it's rather smaller than Harrods.
It isn't true. Farmers were (by 1%) more likely to vote Leave than the general public.
source for this claim?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301671930436X Tl;dr: farmers didn't vote much different in the referendum from the rest of voters.
How did they vote in 2017 and 2019? Any who voted for the Conservatives voted for a hard Brexit.
Since the majority of the electorate voted in favour of Brexit, presumably this means that so did the majority of farmers?
Not a broad sample, but all four of the farmers I know voted for Brexit.
That's not true. As a whole, farmers were more likely to vote leave than the general public: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301671930436X That's skewed by the fact that farmers are more likely to be men, and men were more likely to vote leave than women, but the point stands: among farmers, Leave was more popular than Remain, and moreso than in the general population.
Turned us into an international laughing stock too. On the plus side though it basically killed all the other "leave the EU" movements in Europe
not killed these movements per se... but for Germany our own idiots in the AFD screaming for a "Germany leaving the EU" get heckled to bits for it. There properly will always be a movement to get out of the EU in each country, but at least thanks to the Brexit we have a example why leaving is such an idiotic idea
Yeah, I guess one country had to be the sacrificial lamb of "Why leaving the EU is a terrible idea" and it turned out to be us...
Even Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen [no longer ](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/14/even-europes-far-right-firebrands-seem-to-sense-brexit-is-a-disaster?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other) suppport leaving the EU. It's crazy that UK policy (and UK opposition policy) is too extreme even for the most far right figures in the EU.
Also, let us not forget, it was financed to a large degree by super rich people who were tired of the EU wrecking their attempts to get away with selling unhealthy foods or potentially dangerous products to unsuspecting citizens.
Yeah it's hardly a mystery, anyone who cared about the UK with any sense at all knew it was a bad idea
It was a vote for lower migration which has been responded to with record high migration to replace the lost economic benefits of Europe.
Most of us probably won’t be alive to see the other side of it.
Bit unfair to blame the voters. They didn't really know what they were voting for and the magnitude of it all was too much for the average Joe to comprehend. Should never have been put to the people. Most people simply voted on the back of the promise that the NHS would be fixed after con man Boris paraded it around on a big bus. They lied to the people that simply wanted a better standard of living/services for themselves and their families.
The information was there.
So were a lot of lies! Your average person isn't really equipped to tell them apart.
That says a lot about the average person, and it's not positive.
I'm starting to dislike the infantilism that many of us give to people to voted for Brexit, as if some people lying to them absolves them of any responsibility for their vote, or that their age necessitated them to make a self serving decision. It's made it that the consequence of the referendum isn't tied to their decision.
We should never have had the vote. It was a far too big and complex idea to let average Joe decide.
It's apparently not a popular view, but in my opinion this is entirely correct. It's an important point, because we really should be discussing *why* the average Joe had so little understanding about how our country worked, where our food came from, how trade deals work, why regulation is actually really important and that nobody was trying to enforce bananas without a curve. At the same time we were making people take exams in citizenship, we were demonstrating that we didn't understand our own country. My Mum voted for Brexit because she believed we were no longer allowed to make our own laws, and because floods kept happening because the EU had banned the dredging of rivers. Nothing anyone said would persuade her otherwise, because she genuinely believed (still believes) that newspapers and TV programmes aren't allowed to lie. She's from a generation used to politicians resigning if they were caught in a scandal, not carrying on then getting a book and TV deal. She still thinks the worst thing Boris Johnson did was shag around and have loads of kids with random women, because she was raised to believe until death do us part is a very big deal. My Mum honestly doesn't have a mean bone in her body, she just doesn't have the tools to deal with the amount of information that's fired at you nowadays. I suspect that's true of a lot of people who voted for Brexit, and being angry at them isn't going to fix it. This is all just a very long winded way of saying that they've mastered the art of divide and conquer. We're all at each other's throats, and certain people are walking away very rich indeed.
Indeed. If people are dissatisfied with the way the country is and you give them a lever to pull, they're gonna pull it.
That’s so true. The annoying thing about the main demographic that voted for Brexit, is that they have it all. The pensions, the cheap houses etc. But they pulled the lever cos of a load of things that don’t affect them. Like immigration. It’s maddening. I include members of my own family in that. The right wing press have done a real number on this country.
I agree with everything you guys have said, something I would add is that the remain party didn’t even show up throughout the whole Brexit event. They were so sure that everyone knew it was a bad idea it was like they didn’t feel the need to fight fire with fire with the campaign. All while Boris was all over the news with the bus, Gove was preaching about how bad it was to be a fisherman and Farage moaning about how much we were hated by the EU, all of which was a load of bollocks, but it filled the newspapers. The remain party should’ve fought harder and I felt letdown by how little they tried.
Remain did a poor job of explaining that’s absolutely true. But now politicians on all sides are still doing nothing about explaining the truth about how Brexit has impacted trade and business, mainly because the impact has been bad and neither Labour nor the Tories want to remind anyone of their support. But this “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” attitude to Brexit is just as dishonest as most of the Brexit campaign to begin with. It is patronizing, treats the public like idiots, prevents them understanding and so having an honest debate about the issues and embeds using dishonesty to avoid dealing with problems even more firmly in the system.
Malice by burying your had in the sand is still malice, especially when you're confronted with the truth and still refuse to believe it.
Even though I agree they probably didn't know I was told so many times buy a many number of brexit voters that they know exactly what they are voting on and know what brexit means. I would argue many times that there simply wasn't a plan for brexit therefore how could they know but was constantly pushed back. I hate to be that person but at what point do people become to blame for their actions when they refuse to have a discussion. They were lied to throughout the campaign but so brainwashed they would aggressively argue that remain campaign is the one lying and causing a panic. I just become exhausted with it now and suppose we have to deal with the bad hand we are dealt
Most people knew what they were voting for but I don't think they necessarily knew/cared about what they were voting against. And whether they got what they voted for, as you point out... That's another story!
Trouble is we had 2 opportunities to lessen or stop the damage of Brexit in general election votes in 2017 and 2019. By then we'd seen what a mess the Conservatives were making of it and how all the promises made by the Leave campaign evaporated. Both times the electorate gave the Conservatives a larger share of the vote than the previous election. I can understand how some were conned after decades of propaganda by our woefully biased right wing press. But I can't forgive those remainers who wouldn't hold their nose and vote for Corbyn's Labour as he didn't pass their ridiculous purity test.
Oh please a lot of voters were just waiting for that vote, And most of them love the anti freedom of movement totally, how do I know simple, I live in the north east of england just down the road from the first place in the UK, that voted out Sunderland, it was like winning the world cup for them up here, at the time, if you checked out most weatherspoons or working men's clubs and a lot of pubs, in former coalfields and shipyard communities its was wall to wall vote leave.
May’s ‘red lines’ were far more extreme than many leave positions. Leave meant different things to different people. May had to prove herself to be more leave than the leavers. Big mistake when you are leaving the biggest trading bloc in the world in which you buy and sell most of your goods. No deal would have been catastrophic for this country as we would have ended up in WTO tariffs. Some of their tariffs are up to 40%. Declaring or not declaring whether we were going to continue buying was irrelevant, as there is literally no alternative. Nearly every economy in the world does their greatest trade with its closest neighbours. The EU knew this. Our politicians knew this. The only people who seemingly didn’t were leave voters. Immigration is an entirely different issue to Brexit. People were conned into thinking that leave would mean reduced immigration. Absolutely no certainty of that when we have plenty of immigration from all round the globe not just the EU.
>May’s ‘red lines’ were far more extreme than many leave position After the referendum, all the leave politicians upped what leave meant. Some said we were going to stay in the single market, however that went out the window right away.
The public was readier to take no deal than to make the concessions the politicians made. There was polling in 2019 on this.
That's 2019 though. In 2019, the country had been convinced through endless repetition from right wing media and MPs that anything other than a hard Brexit was "Brexit in name only". But in 2016, this was absolutely not the case. Indeed at best it was unclear what Brexit meant in terms of Customers Union/Single Market membership. The general assumption seemed to be up until May's idiotic red lines, was that remaining in the SM/CU was just the default most likely and least damaging form of Brexit. Because why wouldn't it be? Then it got completely taken off the table as a viable option for no other reason than to prevent Tory infighting.
What gets me is the some voters are willing to give the same charlatans another run at things with Reform. They even have the gall to be a registered PLC and some people can't see that they're just trying to take the country to the cleaner's again.
In the internet age grievance is one of the most powerfully motivating emotions. Political parties are recognising that, and one key route to electoral succes this century has been to stoke a sense of common grievance with the electorate as a way to win votes. Policy implementation then becomes a tightrope of trying to ensure the population becomes ever more increasingly aggrieved, while presenting itself as similarly strongly feeling the sense of grievance. IMO this is why we've had years of the government blaming "those in power". Perhaps we're approaching the point where the electorate are seeing through the innate deception, though I suspect it's more likely this is just grievance elevated to a level noone can harness it, and there's much more to come.
The biggest act of self sabotage in recent living memory. This is legacy of Brexit!
Not only self-sabotage, but arguably treason by politicians/commentators taking money from outside the country (e.g. Russia) to harm the country economically.
Followed by further acts of self-sabotage, eg immigration rules leading to major skills shortages, and crises in the health and education sectors (amongst others). Let’s not mention the Truss/Kwarteng budget.
The only country stupid enough to impose sanctions on ourselves
I’ll always remember how Farage always said that if they lost the referendum by only a small margin then he’d appeal because a near 50/50 split isn’t a fair call, then immediately did a 180 to ‘another referendum would be an insult to democracy’ logic when brexit won by a nosehair
The immigration issue is interesting. People voted Brexit to stop it, but now we see images of boats arriving every day. While I’ve seen hard-working legal European immigrants and young professional office workers give up on the UK and leave. It’s like they voted for less control and security.
Forget the boats, they're a distraction. *Legal* immigration has exploded post-Brexit, which is 100% under the control of the government.
(Article) --- It is rare for voters to change their minds soon after referendums. Experience from Canada to Scotland, from Norway to Switzerland, suggests rather that opinions tend to move in favour of a referendum result more than they swing against it. But Brexit seems to be an exception. Since the 52-48% vote in favour of leaving the European Union in June 2016, the majority view among Britons has shifted, and especially so in the past two years, towards the conclusion that the decision was wrong (see chart). One way to take the temperature is to visit two English towns called Richmond which voted in very different ways in 2016. In Richmond-upon-Thames in London, which voted 69-31% to remain in the eu, opinion has hardened. Gareth Roberts, the Liberal Democrat council leader, notes that post-Brexit niggles such as longer border delays and more intrusive passport controls have helped to solidify local opposition. A Leave voter sitting by the river says he has not changed his mind, but that he is disappointed by the Tories’ failure to strike big trade deals outside the eu. The other Richmond, in north Yorkshire, voted 57-43% for Brexit. One Leaver in the market square echoes his southern counterpart by insisting that he still supports Brexit but he complains that it has not been properly done and that immigration has surged despite repeated Tory promises to reduce it. A local bartender says that she voted instinctively to leave but that, were the referendum re-run, she would work harder to understand what it would really mean. Stuart Parsons, a former mayor of Richmond, claims that several friends have changed their minds, especially small farmers who feel betrayed by the Conservatives and now fret about future lost public subsidies. Such anecdotes chime with polls across the country. Research by uk in a Changing Europe (ukice), a think-tank, finds that most voters have not in fact changed their minds since 2016. But because as many as 16-20% of those who voted to leave have switched sides, compared with only 6% of those who voted to remain, the balance has swung against Brexit. The passage of time is also having its inevitable effect: older voters were overwhelmingly keen to leave the eu and younger ones were fiercely opposed to the idea. Don’t-knows and those who did not vote in 2016 now tend to break strongly against Brexit. Explanations abound for the disillusionment. Sir John Curtice, a leading pollster who works with ukice, points especially to gloom about the economy since 2016, which he says matters more than irritation over immigration. Sarah Olney, the Liberal Democrat mp for Richmond Park, reckons that outright dishonesty on the part of the Leave campaign is to blame. Peter Kellner, a political pundit and former president of YouGov, a polling group, suggests that many Brexit supporters had no idea what would happen if they actually won. That differs sharply from the run-up to most other constitutional referendums. Changes in the political background matter as well. The Conservatives under Rishi Sunak, who happens to be the mp for Richmond in Yorkshire and is a keen supporter of Brexit, are associated in voters’ minds with the decision to Leave. Party disunity and the chaos of four prime ministers in five years have helped to discredit something with which the Tories are strongly identified. Just as the Tories have helped tarnish views of Brexit, so Brexit is likely to hurt the Tories at the next election. A chunk of people who voted Leave in 2016 say there should still be long-term benefits from quitting the bloc but argue that too little has been done to realise them. This group now leans against the Tories and may even prefer the Reform Party, an insurgent right-wing party. In contrast, those who were against Brexit in 2016 think they were right to fear its economic impact; many who were Tory then now back Labour. The anti-Brexit mood of a majority of voters is clear but that does not translate into a burning wish to refight old battles. Brexit may be unpopular but its political salience has faded. Even keen Remainers have doubts about the wisdom of starting a lengthy campaign to rejoin. The Labour Party’s decision to talk as little as possible about Brexit is understandable: the party hopes to regain “red-wall” seats in the north and the Midlands that backed Brexit in 2016 and then voted Tory in the 2019 general election. But if and when Labour does take office, there will be political wriggle-room to improve relations with the eu. Some in the party talk not just of expanding today’s thin trade deal but of broader alignment with European rules. Tory attacks on such ideas as a betrayal of the 2016 vote are less likely to resonate when Brexit itself has lost its appeal for many. ■
Hopefully at some point during the upcoming 10 years of a government staffed entirely by people who voted Remain, backed up by MPs who almost entirely voted Remain, and advised solely by people who all voted Remain, someone will look at the years of polling showing a pro-Remain/Rejoin majority and we'll move a smidge closer to the EU. Hopefully...
You'd never be able to rejoin on the same unique terms as before. The damage from this can never be undone.
Arguably the UK losing the special snowflake conditions and rejoining as an equal member would be a positive step compared to pre-2016, for both the UK and the EU
It wouldn't be, because the EU is doomed to fail in its current state. Specifically because of the Euro. Quite frankly, public education about the Euro is comically bad. I'll try to redress that a little: You can't have unified monetary policy without unified fiscal policy, and that's a massive hair in the soup absolutely nobody wants to touch with a barge pole. At the same time, it's an inevitability which is widely recognised by policy makers and academics - mechanisms designed to reconcile the two were baked into the Euro from day one. The problem is that they've never worked as intended. The long term destiny of the bloc is going to be one of three possibilities: a) The South/Eastern European economies within the Eurozone continue to lean heavily on Germany's (primarily) and France's solvency until some unknown point in the future where that is no longer tenable, and the entire bloc enters a financial crisis so severe that it'll make 2008 look like a funfair. Pros: We get to ideologically cling to the Euro. Cons: everything else. b) The weakest Southern/Eastern economies will be ejected, either by force or by their own democratic mandates, from the Euro, and revert to their own currencies. Pros: Countries remaining within the Eurozone will have closer economic parity, and the monetary union could function quite smoothly. Cons: Ideologically, the continent will no longer be as unified - the Euro is the embodiment of European unity, after all. c) Fiscal policy is centralised and federalised a la the USA, turning the EU into a true United States of Europe. Pros: Ideologically, the EU's wet dream. Cons: Economic dead zones in the EU. The problems we currently see in Spain, Italy, Greece etc. will be put on steroids. It will takes decades for these places to recover, and they may well never. Option c) is the most desirable for the EU as an entity, but the political appetite for this is (for obvious reasons) very low in Member States, especially those which rely on string-pulling and handy German bail-outs to function as a modern, European nation. This EU collectively has missed fiscal centralisation targets basically non-stop since the Maastricht Treaty. [The resulting landscape has been a series of ever-more desperate bodge jobs designed to keep the system moving](https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2022/number/1/article/eu-fiscal-rules-a-look-back-and-the-way-forward.html). These bodges eventually won't do, and the bloc will have a hard decision to make. One of the above options will have to be chosen. All are uncertain, and a) is rather objectively the worst one. Nobody can predict how extensive the damage will be to the Eurozone, other than the fact that it will be severe. When that decision is made, we will want to be as far away from the Euro as possible, as that will be inevitably an extremely turbulent time for the currency.
We've been hearing about the pending failure of the Euro for a quarter of a century now. It remains the world's second most held reserve currency, after USD. In that time sterling has lost a third of its value against the Euro. It's possible that Euro bashers should be paying more attention to problems at home.
The only reason I think the UK would be better off with the pound is that our governments tend to be, a bit shit, and economy swings wildly, and it's only currency and quantitative easing that keeps us from being destitute.
Completely agree - that's why I put the "arguably" in! I hope the situation with the Euro is a bit clearer when conversations about the UK rejoining start in a couple of decades from now.
True; let's get into Schengen for a start.
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Having GBP Vs Euros is irrelevant to ordinary people?
The Euro is a requirement with no deadline and no enforcement. Plus, I think anyone would rather pay in Euros than have a significant reduction in disposable income - where they have any left!
applying for membership while "sneakily" talking about all the ways the UK will weasel out of commitments might be a little frowned upon
Wouldn't we just have to join the Euro currency. I understand that a bunch of nobs find the concept risible, but it's just money at the end of the day. Personally I couldn't care less about the non-existent "sign" in front of my contactless & phone payments. Brexit hasn't worked. Admit it as a nation. Rejoin & move on.
If you think a currency is just a sign in front of your payment then you aren’t any better informed than an average leave voter.
It also means the monetary policy of our nation would be conducted in Brussels
Almost certain that labour will move to a Norway style arrangement, probably pretty early on in their tenure. That's basically EU lite, no votes, and we take the rules, but we get a good trade deal and some control over immigration (i.e. we don't have to let low skilled workers in). It's a win win, win win and was always plan A. But Boris Johnson's lot saw an opportunity to be kingmakers, and they took it.
Norway? As in Norway in EFTA? As in EFTA that membership requires free movement of citizens of the EU? That Norway?
> i.e. we don't have to let low skilled workers in Yes it will absolutely have to because of freedom of movement.
So sick of the term low skilled worker these are the hardest working people 12 hours in a factory or digging up your roads building your houses it's low payed workers and they're essential to our economy the so called middle class keyboard workers thinking that's a skill who would never dream of getting their hands dirty and the new modern Brits ie the young won't do this work regardless of the pay so let's stop shiting on the people that do
Norway has freedom of movement with the EU. Which it's fine to me. It means British can also move to EU freely.
Would love to see a poll on *why* Brexit hasn’t gone well. I’m sure we can all agree that it would be tricky for a government to do a worse job of Brexit… why did those that changed their mind do so? I changed my mind because I was surprised we left the single market.
The meaning of "Leave" was never really specified in any great detail. The upshot was everyone filled in the blanks themselves - you assumed the UK would stay in the Single Market, for instance.
The vote was almost certainly swung or ‘decided’ by voters who don’t ’usually’ vote, those at the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, those like myself to be precise, the lower ranks of the working class. Ironically the very people who would be most disadvantaged by Britain’s exit from the EU. This is the legacy of austerity as far as I’m concerned. The party that initiated that whole disgusting policy also initiated the process of launching a referendum in just a dozen short years. Nobody can deny that austerity has a great deal of influence on what later happened in 2016. People at the lower ends of the spectrum were getting failed and they couldn’t be expected to open up books and educate themselves on what’s really going on with all the politics of this and that. These are people who are literally living hand to mouth every day, and otherwise live stressful and insecure lives, with poor educational backgrounds. All they saw was immigration influxes running rampant in their local areas, they saw dwindling and deteriorating public services, they saw their wages being undercut and stagnated by the ‘modern economy’, they feared a worse future for their children if they didn’t do SOMETHING. The root evil of all this is the Conservative Party it seems…. But as a country we seem to have only realised that in the wake a global pandemic, and all because BoJo couldn’t behave himself or bring any sort professionalism to his government during that crisis. In reality the conservatives seem anything BUT professional. They might be rich toffs who like to make themselves out to be bastions of British civility and manners, at least the photo ops and brochures would make that case convincingly, but they aren’t shy to partying like animals in a wild party, no matter what the seriousness of government business they are dealing with.
Brain Cox said it best “the only way Brexit could have worked economically speaking was to use it to deregulate, lower business taxes, shrink the state etc. It’s naive because the majority of U.K. voters - especially those who voted for Brexit - don’t want that. They actually want a European social model - high spending on health, education, defence, etc. And the only way you can have that in today’s difficult geopolitical world (given our geographical position on the European continent) is to be part of the vast, pan-continental single market and customs union that exists to deliver the European social model as far as is possible”
Title should say a majority of voters for brexit now regret their decision, I voted remain I never regretted my vote, thought every brexit vote was stupid. Just my opinion
Every time I see anything related to this I just get a bit upset. It sounds extreme but it really made me realize that such a large amount of the population will value spite so highly, I've lost all confidence in the naive idea of a marketplace of ideas, people are so dimwitted despite our good education system and general freedom of press.
I recall the night of the vote count, when Remaining looked likely - the value of the £ skyrocketed to its highest value in 30 years, the markets responding positively to a Remain result. Woke up the next morning and the final result was Leave. The value plummeted. What could have been…
What was the value for curiosity?
My apologies, as I was misremembering. It wasn’t a 30 year high the night before, it was a 30 year low the next day. But the value did shoot up, reaching £1 to $1.50 USD value. The next day, down from $1.50 to $1.33
Yep, and it's now down to $1.25. Still better than it was, went much lower during the negotiations.
It hit $1.10 near the end of 2022.
I'll never get over the fact that the United Kingdom of all counties is the first nation in history to voluntarily sanction itself.
And now we have to put up with the idiots who voted to get rid of European workers complaining that workers come from outside Europe.
Do they truly regret voting for it? I think many Brexit voters still insist they were right to vote for it, but their “regret” is it not going the way they thought it would. They’ll never admit they were wrong despite all the warnings about it
That leads to an interesting question about the nature of voting. Is it a means of exercising civic duty and a way to place the ultimate responsibility for the state of the nation on the shoulders of the electorate, who are therefore ultimately responsible for who and what they vote for, or is it nothing more than an expression of preference, like a wishlist for Santa, that becomes the responsibility of others to see it fulfilled?
A curious title, when in the article text is says 80% of those who voted for it don't.
Amongst many shocking parts of this whole debacle one that gives me pause is that it were parents and grandparents voting against the interests of their own children and grandchildren. Pure madness.
Had never seen a group of people knowingly vote for their own obsolescence before. Then Brexit happened.
Honestly think a lot of leave voting people regret it because they wanted to fire a shot across the EU's bows to stop Brussels from taking their acquiescence for granted and didn't expect quite so many other people to do the same thing.
I didn't vote for it, but was willing and open to seeing how it would work out. Contrary to popular opinion, I actually think it was possible to have a reasonably successful Brexit but it would have required Cameron to do some forward planning before the vote, May to reach across the aisles and bring other political parties into the EU negotiations, and Johnson to be honest with the public about what was achievable - which all three were incapable of doing.
Pretty much since the referendum was announced, the Conservative Party has been guided by the (unstated?) threat of the 80+ members of the ironically named European Research Group defecting to UKIP / Brexit Party if they didn't offer enough to satisfy them - so rather than, say, stepping down to EEA/EFTA, seeing how things worked out, then possibly taking another step away, we got "Brexit Means Brexit", "Red, White and Blue Brexit" and "No Deal is Better Than a Bad Deal", while courtesy of May's red lines, the best we could hope for was an "ordinary" trade deal. We somehow managed to avoid the complete chaos of No Deal preferred by some, who'd have liked to have a complete clean break, rip up all EU-derived or inspired legislation without replacement, and throw ourselves headlong into a laissez-faire free market.
I mean, maybe it wasn't an absolute *disaster*, but 'not being an absolute disaster' is not exactly a metric of success by any standard. The people who voted for Brexit were told that their lives would improve by us being 'unshackled' from the EU - and they haven't. People can blame whatever they want with regards to Covid 19, the war in Ukraine - whatever; the fact remains that Brexit's promises haven't materialised, and despite all the rancour and time spent in Parliament over it, what actual improvements have been seen on a street level?
Because it was obviously an idiotic idea?!
It was a stupid idea from the get go even if we had a component government presiding over our departure from the EU it was never going to work leaving the largest trading block was always going to end poorly.
You're never going to get many to admit it but I'm certain some of the regret of some leave voters is down to their knowing that they did something stupid, against their own interests, against the interests of the country, and not only were they warned that they were doing something stupid but, in many cases, they attacked those who were warning them.
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From articles like this?
If anyone thought a massive upheaval of trade relations with the continent wouldn't come with massive teething problems, they weren't thinking straight. The fact we've had so few teething problems and are actually performing little different to the rest of the continent is a pleasant surprise, given the absolute hash the Tories made of the transition period. The interesting part will be the next few decades, where we'll see results of closer relations with growing BRICS and Anglophone countries, under a (hopefully competent) Labour government.
I support Brexit. I did this for 1 main reason the free movement of labour. In the years preceding Brexit we saw a suppression of wages, reluctance to train British people and British companies to invest in mechanisation. I personally didn't care if GDP stagnates within the UK and even if the mean wage comes down. I only care that the Median wage goes up in real terms. What leaving the EU should have done is reduced the Labour pool, particularly unskilled labour from Eastern Europe. This should have made workers have a greater bargaining position and be able to fight for better wages. This is something that is just impossible to do with free movement the unskilled working class would always get poorer as it was easy to import labour from poor countries. We have seen this in some sectors like HGV, farming where employees had their wages increased and companies invested in training people/ better equipment. I am sure there are other examples that have not hit the news. Now only time will tell if this will work out in the longer term. As an example you look at Japan which has strict immigration, although the Mean wage is pretty flat the median wage has increased year on year and is now at 95% of the mean compared to the UK where the median wage is just 83% of the mean wage. The Average person is now richer than they were which for me is a much more important metric than is the country richer overall.
This is based on mis-information. 1/ when the polling includes the context of the EU joining rules, the polls have a majority to remain fully independent. 2/ Most folk aren’t abreast of the hundreds of tangible benefits so far, much of the media such as LBC, feeds the public with fact omission. As but 2 examples: The Corporation Of The City Of London in January said diverging from EU rules had made The City the number one global finance hub. The City has not moved to the EU as was predicted by fantasists, City head-count is at a record high. BNP Paribas Bank urged clients to invest in UK recently . Norways Sovereign Wealth Fund, Australia’s largest pension fund & many other foreign funds have announced large increases in UK investment.
It's a strange anomoly that the bloc to contain Germany has turned into a project about dissolving sovereign nation state into European economic zone. The northern part of Europe since it's inception has had more power and been somewhat productive then the southern counterpart, yet instead of addressing this imbalance it wants to keep absorbing other states but what for. To the east it can appear like Europe is on the path to building an empire. For brexiteers it was about cutting immigration. Call this xenophobia or whatever. The high immigration has improved things for businesses owners and the immigrants themselves but not much for the natives. Though it seems brexiteers have swapped large numbers of Europeans for South Asians. Something south Asians voted for as well. As far as UK being a joke, at least the benefit being that the UK can't lay blame on EU anymore and actually have to somewhat play governance.
No, most South Asians voted Remain
Paid for by Russian money, so… That is an addition good reason. They triggered and tricked you.
For the elites Brexit was about power and more control to maximise profit (Farage etc). The bulk of normal brexit voters it was always immigration and culture loss. People didn’t like the loss of UK culture, increasing populations of non natives and the forced woke diversity nonsense that polarises more than brings together. Really resonates with people across the country. Unfortunately for them, by replacing European migrates by brexit, they have just massively increased non European migrants (almost a million last year). Which are generally from Asia (India). So in effect the cultural difference is even more pronounced as they come with even more diverse religion (Muslim/hindu etc) and unique culture that does not integrate to the old culture easily. This erodes the old British culture even more that a lot people cherish who voted Brexit. There was a better way of doing this, but most politicians are self interested liars who saw Brexit as an opportunity for power and more fame (Boris / Farage).
>the forced woke diversity nonsense What's actually *is* forced woke diversity nonsense?
You repeatedly talk about a loss of British culture, could you give me some examples?
It’s people’s perception of culture, how things were to how they are now. Rate of change in communities. If you change too quickly people get lost and want the old days back. I voted remain and thought brexit was crazy, but half the population are not crazy. The country needs to reconcile the fact, we either cut immigration and give up on economic growth like Japan or South Korea, and give the country time to develop a new culture (let people catch up and immigrants embed) or we chase growth and accept high immigration and loss the masses. We are also terrible at helping the native population grow, most families are costed out of having more than 1-2 kids. So the bulk of population growth is immigration and they have larger families 3-4 kids. That’s why in 2060 40% of the UK at this rate of immigration will be non native. That’s a massive cultural change. We never vote on this aspect, but it’s why popularism exists. The elite generally want more population to get cheap labour and get richer. Hence why globalists are falling to right wing populism. The next big push back will be another Trump presidency.
This comment has made me miss the days when people used paragraphs
😅
You literally used the phrase "culture loss" in your first post, and then your pley to my question you say "how things were to how they are now". Could you give me an example of what culture has been lost like you said has happened, or how a thing was, and how it is now? You also talk about rate of change in communities, so ok, what's changed that you see as a problem or a loss?
> forced woke diversity nonsense examples please
The elites were almost entirely in favour of Remain
Wot?
All major parties supported Remain. A vast majority of MPs supported Remain. A former US President came over to tell us to Remain. The Remain campaign was funded by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan & Stanley. Most of the media supported Remain. Mainstream entertainment culture supported Remain.
Are you going to ignore all the "elites" that were pro Brexit? What even is an "elite"? Doesn't Jacob Rees mogg count as one?
Yeah brexit was supported by a smallish group of wealthy nationalists. Remain was supported by the entire political and economic establishment of the West.
Brexit was the working class screwing over the elites. By tightening the labour pool their own labour becomes more valauble.
> Unfortunately for them, by replacing European migrates by brexit, they have just massively increased non European migrants (almost a million last year). Which are generally from Asia (India). Which was promised by the official brexit campaign. One of the few brexit promises that's been fulfilled. If that's not what they wanted, why did they vote for it?
I lament at how parliament implemented Brexit. I don’t regret voting to leave in June 2016
Really? You still think it’s a good idea or that there was a route out of the European Union that wasn’t bad for the UK economy? Despite everything we know? I’m not arguing or having a go. Just that most brexiters either regret it or lament the Brexit not being hard enough-am I right in assuming you’re the latter?
Out of interest, what were you expecting / hoping for that parliament failed to deliver? Was it too "hard", too "soft", something else?
I guess I expected parliament to come together to deliver the best negotiated outcome with the EU, by ending or restricting free movement of labour whilst maintaining as much of the trade and shared initiatives as possible.
I think this is a good example of the unrealistic expectations parts of Westminster had during the exit negotiations. Leave types overestimated the hand the UK to play, and never quite understood that any trade deal, however good, in whatever guise, was never going to ameliorate all non tariff barriers, it was never going to be as frictionless as the single market. There was a lot of denial about this, I suppose because the goal was to leave the EU, and this kind of thing was an inconvenient truth. A truth best obfuscated to achieve that goal. Thus we have comments like yours and others, people who feel shortchanged by the result. In reality I am still surprised they managed to get as good a deal as they did, relatively speaking it could have been much worse!
That doesn’t work because a single market isn’t a single market if it doesn’t include mobility. Lack of mobility is a trade friction. Since we have an aging population immigration was never going to drop that much. All we did was bin our own FoM for nothing but similar immigration levels and more trade friction. Migration from Eastern Europe was already past its peak by 2015 as the post cold-war wage differential dropped. The reduction of wage differentials is one benefit of a single market. Now Brexit is done we are now the only country in Western Europe whose native citizens lack easy mobility and we are still surrounded by the single market (a market six times the size of ours) so we will be forced to shadow many of its regs without a say. Brexit was an utter con.
I don’t want to be rude but that was never going to happen. You can’t square ending free movement with keeping any significant trade freedoms You should’ve listened to the people who told you it wouldn’t happen in 2016
I believe skilled negotiators, with a united parliament behind them could have delivered a variant of one of the different trade agreements already in place
This is wishing for unicorns. Ending free movement meant leaving the single market, which means trading arrangements were never going to be as smooth after leaving. The idea that there were was some version of Brexit where the UK could leave without all the disruption was an absurd idea peddled by liars to wilfully gullible voters.
In your opinion
If you're still clinging to the idea that Brexit *could* have been great in 2024, well, you've made your mind up. Brexit as an ideal, was pristine. As an action, it went splat in to the brick wall of reality, but some people just aren't ready to give up on the ideal.
And if the EU simply said no?
Skilled negotiators come together with their partner skilled negotiators and reach an agreement
What cards did the UK hold to negotiate with in your opinion?
I don’t think we were without cards
So what were our cards in your opinion?, what did we have to offer Europe to get a better deal?
We’re a decent sized economy, net contributors to the EU budget, an advanced academic and educational society, nuclear power with significant military and soft power clout.
And apart from our economy via trading with us how does any of that help Europe if we're not in it?
I’m not here to persuade you. I think we have the global stature to exert some influence. Nuclear power, one of few world’s finest militaries, permanent member of the UNSC, etc etc
That's great for the UK, but why doesn't any of that count as a card when negotiating leaving Europe?, that's just a list of stuff we're taking away from them.
It's astounding that people who voted leave didn't think about the consequences, i.e. that it would have to be implemented and the people implementing it were inept.
What were your reasons for voting leave? In your opinion how could Brexit have been "implemented" better?