This was a massive infowar against the whole country. There are tons of gullible people to 'convince' using their own prejudice, and there were quite a few people who saw it as a quick rise to power -- most of these people did very well with it as well!
The goal was never in doubt really, and it was never the 'good of the country', or its people.
I was living there for the vote. Only one coworker was pro-Brexit and the morning after we asked him to list what it is he thought they gained. Each item (control over immigration, control over trade, control over labor, etc etc) were things the UK already had control over. He said, and I'll never forget his expression, "Oh. I hadn't realized that"
Heh, I am a EU immigrant to the UK, been with my wife 30 years, and both my in-laws were rabbid brexiters of course....
Until I told them they were voting for literally preventing their daughter and me the life we've been living. Their grandkids, everything wouldn't have been possible without her being allowed to work there, and me being able to work here...
They hadn't realized that of course, because you know, as far as immigration goes, they were just fine with the lovely polish lady at the shop, and me of course, what they didn't want is 'them' (not entirely clear who that is).
Did the UK have a legal obligation to allow EU citizens to live and work freely in the UK while in the EU?
Did the UK have the legal right to alter trading regulations? For example, could the UK decide to import chlorine washed chicken from US while in the EU?
Did the UK have a legal right to discriminate against labours from the EU who applied for jobs in the UK?
Please feel free to add context to my questions, because I've had enough of these conversations to know you'll have reasons why although we couldn't control our borders, trade and labour in many circumstances that it doesn't matter. I'll probably agree with you in most cases.
But unless the EU literally does nothing and serves no purpose, obviously there are things that we can do now we are out of the EU which we could not do while in the EU. Please decide whether the EU forces us to do things but those things we are forced to do are good, or the EU does nothing at all, but we should still stay in it. You can't have it both ways.
I'll also note, we've massively reduced the number of migrants coming from Eastern Europe, this is something that we literally could not legally do while in the EU.
Some neighbours voted for Brexit. When questioned, they said, which I will never forget either: “we thought we’d fancy a change”… This kind of stuff makes me doubt democracy sometimes. (But then I look at the alternatives, it cures me of any doubt)
> He said, and I'll never forget his expression, "Oh. I hadn't realized that"
Are you sure he wasn’t just saying what you wanted to hear in order to end the discussion? Most people don’t want to talk politics at work if they’re the single only person who holds a view, and if everyone’s angry that brexit happened and is badgering him to say why he thinks it was a good idea, perhaps he found that the path of least resistance was to say basically “hmm, guess you’re right”.
(Note, I’m not pro-brexit, this is just my experience when talking politics at work. Those who hold minority views don’t often want to litigate them at length with coworkers, and you the ones who do… you probably don’t want to work with.)
Yeah, I have to imagine an expression of disbelief here.
No EU country has control over immigration or trade. EU citizens can move anywhere they want in europe, EU companies can trade anywhere they want in europe. That's the point.
If I were the only person of a certain view, and being told something so absurd by a group of people, in earnest, my face would drop too.
Further, it’s the same infowar that’s run against the Aussie and US populations every election cycle. Conservative media in general and Murdoch media in particular has been knowingly, openly collaborating with Russians for years now. We are talking about a president who asked for collusion on national TV during a presidential debate after all. The Russian collaboration and funding via NRA and Maria Butina, etc. The senators who went to Russia for the 4th of July. Paul Ryan openly commenting “who he thought was on russias payroll”. Etc.
The Russian infowar on the US was no less drastic and no less successful, and that’s just the most recent iteration on it, it’s been openly going on for at least 15 years here too (since the 2008 election at least).
I’d blame the politicians, mostly… taking a <4% margin on a non-binding referendum as an excuse to self-immolate was entirely a decision by the people in charge.
They painted themselves into a corner because just like the Democrats of 2016 (and even now TBH) they really didn't listen to the "plebs" and honestly believes the vote was going to be a landslide to remain. So yes, blame the politicians, but blame them for staying in their echo chambers instead of learning what people actually want. Which in 2016 was a change from the status quo
This attitude, this contempt for "gullible people to 'convince'" - 'convince' in sneer quotes, as if these people are not really 'convinced', rather ideas grow in them like maggots - this attitude lost the referendum.
Germany is the top dog in the EU. If Britain was still a part of the EU, they would not so easily have been able to support Ukraine and the US in the bombing of Nord Stream 2, and the prospects for the Ukraine War could look much worse than they do
I don't think that's actually true. The EU hasn't been doing anything to stop its member states from going further in military support for Ukraine, so the UK would still have been able to go further than Germany wants to go even if it were still an EU member.
EU control over foreign and military policy has clear limitations. Most decisions in that area are done by unanimity (so Germany has no more power to block them than any other member state), and for those done by a qualified majority, while Germany has the largest vote (having the largest population, 19%, it was smaller pre-Brexit), it can be outvoted (65% of population is the threshold). Generally it involves the EU adopting a consensus position on certain issues, but leaving member states free to adopt their own policies in areas for which no consensus position was been adopted, and (very often) to go beyond the consensus in ways compatible with it.
To be fair, this is the Guardian reporting on their own (by way of The Observer) poll.
Further down the article you can piece together most people seem to have given “I don’t know” answers given the low numbers for both answers on Boolean questions.
I wouldn’t take this seriously as representative of the population at large.
That said, and more concerningly, you could also find that most Brexiteers might agree with this poll entirely and would still do it all over again “to teach Brussels a lesson” whatever they think that means.
Do you have a reason to doubt their methodology? Pollsters working for news organizations with an editorial point of view still produce accurate poll. In the US, Fox News, which I think can be fairly characterized as an arm of the Republican Party, produces high quality polls that are not reflective of their overall orientation.
Unfortunately yes, there are lots of reasons to doubt. Some UK polling firms routinely return results that are clearly impossible, are called out on it publicly, but don't investigate or fix anything. The root causes of their unreliability are known but not well understood outside the polling industry itself.
A good example of that happening recently was with a poll commissioned by the BBC from Savanta via Kings College London. Savanta is a member of the British Polling Council, and the poll supposedly canvassed people about misinformation related topics. The results claimed several things so absurd and implausible that once people noticed, Kings College London attempted to backtrack [1]. The results were very obviously indefensible garbage. Amongst other things, if you assumed the poll was representative you'd be required to believe that:
• 15% of British people get "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of their information from Truth Social.
• A quarter say COVID was a hoax.
• Around 3.7 million people in the UK had attended protests about COVID and central bank digital currencies and "15 minute cities". No protests of any such size have been seen anywhere, needless to say.
• Around 7.4 million people had heard of an obscure hobbyist conspiracy newspaper called The Light, and half of all the people who had heard of it had helped distribute it. In reality The Light has a tiny number of subscribers.
The poll itself is clearly misinformation. Ironically, it was commissioned for the BBC's "Marianna in Conspiracyland" which promoted the poll relentlessly; the BBC has never accepted that the poll's results are nonsensical and simply ignored the problems. The Guardian also jumped all over it [2] without subjecting the results to even basic reality checks.
The actual meaning of these results is that Savanta's panel has become extremely unrepresentative and the company is simply ignoring this problem. This is a problem that has been affecting all panel-polling companies and it's been getting worse with time, albeit Savanta seems to be truly hosed to an extent that maybe YouGov isn't (yet). Panels are deeply unrepresentative, in particular with time they become deeply skewed towards women and people who volunteer for things (for obvious reasons). They attempt to weight the results to make them more realistic, but the models are calibrated only for elections and other moments when they can get ground truth. Ask non-election related questions and you will routinely get absurd results that don't reflect the actual views of the population.
The polling industry is in deep trouble as panels degrade over time (the rewards for taking part are meaningless), but are currently able to ignore it because people generally accept their results as gospel. There's Advanced Math™ involved so it must be correct, right? Still, I think eventually people will get more savvy about this. I certainly wouldn't take any poll promoted by the Guardian at face value given their disinterest in checking the results.
Yeah, as an expat I am against Brexit as much as any expat could be, but I found the Grauniad's summary of this a bit disingenous. Only 4 of the asked questions had > 50% taking a "Brexit has failed" position.
Still, that's the Grauniad for you these days, and I sort of appreciate it. Spinning up things that are only barely positive news for progressives into actual celebratory takes, in a similar-but-better way to the behavior of right wing/conservative media for several decades.
As a Brit I can not associate a single positive outcome to us leaving the EU. Not saying one doesn't exist but to me, personally, I can't. Many probably feel this way so they blame all the big issues we have like prices and immigration on Brexit. Is there direct causation here? Not sure, maybe. Either way I suspect we will end up joining again just might take a decade or two.
Edit: one positive this year was us becoming part of the Horizon programme.
Brexit gives the government full control over immigration. The bad news (if you voted Brexit to lower immigration) is that the government wants more immigration...
What were you getting out of EU regulations? Rules on the curvature of Cucumbers and bananas passed by unelected unaccountable bureaucrats who do not represent your interests but that of the collective?
Economies of scale. Post-Brexit, we've copy-and-pasted nearly all EU regulations, because it turns out that a) writing and maintaining regulations is really difficult and expensive and b) there are massive advantages to having the same regulations as your most important trade partners. A lot of people didn't like the idea of EU regulations, but very few people have identified anything in those regulations that they actually want to change.
As a conservative, the whole Brexit project strikes me as antithetical to conservative principles - we abandoned the status quo with no clear idea of what we'd replace it with, nor any clear sense of what the advantages might be. The fallout of Brexit is an incredibly strong vindication of Chesterton's Fence. Shortcomings in EU institutions are a valid justification for leaving only if you're confident that you can replace them with something better; it was only after the referendum that we started seriously discussing what the decision to leave actually meant.
No, a standard trade regulations and common way of dealing with businesses with a ton of consumer protection as voted in by a parliament more representative than my own national Parliament and a council comprised of my national government.
That's a very good question using some spurious examples. But broadly speaking: trade. Now we follow those regulations anyway to keep trade with the eu, but we don't help define them.
> [Britons beleave Brexit] has hampered government attempts to control immigration
I'm not very well versed in UK politics but what's the narrative behind this? In what way do Britons believe Brexit has made controlling immigration harder? While the ways it has hurt trade and the economy in general are obvious to me (both on the factual level and what I presume Britons believe) I have a hard time imagining what they could possibly think on this subject.
A lot of Brexit politics was about immigration: how EU rules mean you cannot bar any European from entering and reading, except in extreme circumstances. And indeed, UK is much more international than many European peers.
But what happened post-Brexit is that (legal) immigration numbers are at all time high. There is a high fraction of low skilled immigrants from outside EU, often with questionable English and, well, looking different - which matters to some people. My point isn't to disparage hard working people, but that it's very visible.
So that's a major Brexit pledge gone completely awry. I don't think there is anything Brexit-related that made migration control objectively harder, only that the control failed. Although what also happened, not unrelated, is that high-skilled immigrants from EU largely left, because post-Brexit UK is not very attractive to Europeans. This is very perceptible especially in health care, where shortages of doctors and nurses are now quite scary.
And the immigration is so high in then because UK has always had labour shortages, patched by foreigners. It's only the country of origin that changed.
But if the immigration is legal then the control isn't failing at all, is it?
The few brexitters I talked with shared the same stance, that it was not acceptable for the EU to dictate immigration to the UK. It was not a matter of the influx itself, but about having that control. sovereignty was a big thing.
From my (foreign) point of view, is that now that the UK can no longer benefit even indirectly from what used to be a large transient workforce from the border-free Schengen Area, it instead is forced to actually accept "unsightly more permanent and real immigration" from the rest of the EU and the world at large to keep the economy turning.
So it went from "we don't like immigrants" to "pretty please immigrate to the UK even if you're not from the EU or we're toast".
The UK isn't exactly begging people to immigrate. Quite the opposite. Legal immigration has blown through all records since the UK left the EU because the Conservative government set the salary thresholds very low.
This isn't what voters want or were promised at all, but there are currently no established parties in the UK that are willing to actually reduce immigration. They are all committed to allowing in the highest numbers possible.
In theory this behavior should be punished by voters, but if all the parties are the same then there isn't much voters can do except refuse to vote at all. This is what they're telling pollsters they'll do in the next GE. Polls predict a big shift to Labour, but this isn't because Labour is suddenly more popular. It's because the Conservative voters have become so disillusioned with being misled over the immigration issue that they're just refusing to vote at all.
Just speculating here, but one way would be that the UK no longer can take part in EU-wide efforts to control the flow of migrants. The EU is doing quite a bit to keep immigrants out by e.g. paying Turkey to take them in instead.
To the last point, in a few days part of Canada and the UK’s special deal around cheese will expire and UK cheese will become more expensive and the UK’s quota will go to EU countries that will be able to export more to Canada.
Overly beneficial trade deals are harder to come by for the UK than they thought because outside the EU they’re a minor market with little clout.
Brexit really is like the Robot Chicken skit with Darth Vader (“I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further” [1] every piece of news I hear about it involves things inevitably getting worse for the UK. The very personification of Lando’s “this deal is getting worse all the time”.
I joke that the most elegant solution for this is if Scotland votes for independence, separates and joins the EU, the rest of the UK joins Scotland, nothing changes in terms of monarchy or government except titles but they backdoor their way into the EU, and everyone heads down to the pub for a pint to pretend this never happened.
Funding is still way below european levels though, always has been, the crisp is that the money is being spent on agency staff rather than employed ones, meaning not enough staff and a lot of rich people creaming a lot off the top
Whenever I think of Brexit and Britain's imperial legacy, I think of Mechanical Orange. You know, in the end, where Alex's tormentors come back to torment him? I travel the world a lot, and a lot of people /really/ don't like England. Heck, even the Scots and especially the Irish have bones to pick with England. I can't imagine that doesn't translate into passive-aggressive policy on just about everything.
UK, as part of the EU, was shielded from that.
- On one hand, every policy was with Europe and not just the UK, so there wasn't any way to pick on the UK.
- On the other hand, the EU was a major economic block, both as a market and as a source of technology. It has massive negotiating leverage.
You can't really research this sort of thing, since China won't go out and say "Century of Humiliation" and "Opium Wars" in trade policy (at least much). India won't reference the "Eat the Meat" scene in the Gandhi movie, but it sets a lot of the national zeitgeist. Kenya probably won't talk about the Mao Mao rebellion. Ireland isn't going to talk about the potato famine or Bloody Sunday. I simply can't imagine those aren't in the back of everyone's minds as they talk to English diplomats. In terms of friends, they have a few, but not many (although a few, like the US, are disproportionately useful as friends).
I think things will only get worse for the UK from here. That kind of broad-based deep-seated resentment is very rare in diplomacy.
They'd be best off rejoining the EU. If they decide to do that, I think the EU will invite them back, but I really don't think they'll get the same kind of sweetheart deal this time around. I don't know if they will want that, or if they do, if they'll accept a less-than-sweetheart deal.
We did what we did, so I understand (to the extent I am able to, not having lived it). All I would say in our defence (and I'm aware it isn't a great defence and certainly doesn't excuse it) is that:
- That wasn't the current us, it was back then and I'd hope we were more enlightened now (despite the dross of our political machine).
- Pretty much every nation at some time in their past has dealt terribly with others. We are in the position of being the most recent old-fashioned empire, whilst having had the technology (Industrial Revolution, coal, guns, ships) to scale our oppression. Most (all?) nations would have done the same thing if they'd got to that point of power first.
I'm not my ancestors. I wouldn't choose the paths they did. But the above points are both true and also excuses, so to the extent that any current citizen is representative of their national history I apologise.
As for the lack of sweetheart deals for re-joining the EU, again I agree but with the added comment that I think that's a good thing. Only by going all in could we ever truly be a part of the EU.
As long as we demanded exclusion from, or preference in, so much we put our national interest first whilst ignoring the wider supranational interest that comes from a united whole. To be part of a union of equals we ought to go in as equals in the first place, thus forcing upon ourselves the incentives to do it properly and build a shared future.
That would carry more weight if, for example, loot stolen from other nations were being returned, rather than sitting in your museums. England also still comes off as profoundly arrogant in its diplomacy and other international dealings. The English accent is sometimes used in American movies as a shortcut for "pretentious" or "smug."
Perhaps this worked okay when there was something to back it up, but there's less and less there.
See also: Post-imperial Spain a few hundred years ago (same problem). Current Russia (same problem). France had a bit of that too, although not nearly as bad as Spain / Russia / UK.
> Most (all?) nations would have done the same thing if they'd got to that point of power first.
This is absolutely not true. There are plenty of non-imperial nations both now and throughout history.
It also absolutely doesn't matter. For my argument, what matters are impressions.
Mao Mao Rebellion in Kenya was 1952-1960. Most of the people who participated are alive today, and it's such a major part of the national identity. Opium Wars are ancient history, but again, it's the narrative that counts.
There are few nations whose name carries as much baggage as the UK. Even Germany -- post Nazi -- made an effort to dump all that baggage by in the form of anti-Nazi laws, apologies, and in some cases, even reparations.
> Only by going all in could we ever truly be a part of the EU.
I agree. I think the key thing, though, is that unless the England does something like this (or something analogous), I think it will eventually be in a pretty bad place.
I'm not optimistic for England coming to the same conclusion.
I'm not passing an opinion on Brexit (that's rather dangerous as a Brit). I went to NZ back in 2019, and yes, we met a bunch of Kiwis and Aussis that didn't like the UK. (Now this could be a side effect of who we met/their age etc) What was interesting was that their dislike generally centred on the UK _joining_ the EU in the '70s, as we dramatically decreased trade via the old trade routes and they felt "abandoned". I haven't checked how true that is, but it was an interesting perspective that we weren't hearing from within the UK at the time.
The absolute most batshit crazy thing about brexit is all it took was one simple 50% majority vote and the work of 50 years was undone.
Surely there should have been something in place that meant it could only be undone progressively or required supermajority or best of three or something.
Surely there was a better way to trial be separate but default back to being together.
I don't know there must be other ideas. A simple 50% vote and out is way too fragile.
And an off topic comment on democracy:
Everyone should start with 100 votes and you lose one for each year you are alive.
The older you are, the less say you should have in the future.
Readit News
The goal was never in doubt really, and it was never the 'good of the country', or its people.
Until I told them they were voting for literally preventing their daughter and me the life we've been living. Their grandkids, everything wouldn't have been possible without her being allowed to work there, and me being able to work here...
They hadn't realized that of course, because you know, as far as immigration goes, they were just fine with the lovely polish lady at the shop, and me of course, what they didn't want is 'them' (not entirely clear who that is).
Did the UK have the legal right to alter trading regulations? For example, could the UK decide to import chlorine washed chicken from US while in the EU?
Did the UK have a legal right to discriminate against labours from the EU who applied for jobs in the UK?
Please feel free to add context to my questions, because I've had enough of these conversations to know you'll have reasons why although we couldn't control our borders, trade and labour in many circumstances that it doesn't matter. I'll probably agree with you in most cases.
But unless the EU literally does nothing and serves no purpose, obviously there are things that we can do now we are out of the EU which we could not do while in the EU. Please decide whether the EU forces us to do things but those things we are forced to do are good, or the EU does nothing at all, but we should still stay in it. You can't have it both ways.
I'll also note, we've massively reduced the number of migrants coming from Eastern Europe, this is something that we literally could not legally do while in the EU.
Are you sure he wasn’t just saying what you wanted to hear in order to end the discussion? Most people don’t want to talk politics at work if they’re the single only person who holds a view, and if everyone’s angry that brexit happened and is badgering him to say why he thinks it was a good idea, perhaps he found that the path of least resistance was to say basically “hmm, guess you’re right”.
(Note, I’m not pro-brexit, this is just my experience when talking politics at work. Those who hold minority views don’t often want to litigate them at length with coworkers, and you the ones who do… you probably don’t want to work with.)
No EU country has control over immigration or trade. EU citizens can move anywhere they want in europe, EU companies can trade anywhere they want in europe. That's the point.
If I were the only person of a certain view, and being told something so absurd by a group of people, in earnest, my face would drop too.
The Russian infowar on the US was no less drastic and no less successful, and that’s just the most recent iteration on it, it’s been openly going on for at least 15 years here too (since the 2008 election at least).
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Brexit is exactly what the high-class brits wanted. Look at where the campaign funding came from. The people who lost out were working class.
EU control over foreign and military policy has clear limitations. Most decisions in that area are done by unanimity (so Germany has no more power to block them than any other member state), and for those done by a qualified majority, while Germany has the largest vote (having the largest population, 19%, it was smaller pre-Brexit), it can be outvoted (65% of population is the threshold). Generally it involves the EU adopting a consensus position on certain issues, but leaving member states free to adopt their own policies in areas for which no consensus position was been adopted, and (very often) to go beyond the consensus in ways compatible with it.
Further down the article you can piece together most people seem to have given “I don’t know” answers given the low numbers for both answers on Boolean questions.
I wouldn’t take this seriously as representative of the population at large.
That said, and more concerningly, you could also find that most Brexiteers might agree with this poll entirely and would still do it all over again “to teach Brussels a lesson” whatever they think that means.
The interpretation of the tables is always a separate thing of course
A good example of that happening recently was with a poll commissioned by the BBC from Savanta via Kings College London. Savanta is a member of the British Polling Council, and the poll supposedly canvassed people about misinformation related topics. The results claimed several things so absurd and implausible that once people noticed, Kings College London attempted to backtrack [1]. The results were very obviously indefensible garbage. Amongst other things, if you assumed the poll was representative you'd be required to believe that:
• 15% of British people get "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of their information from Truth Social.
• A quarter say COVID was a hoax.
• Around 3.7 million people in the UK had attended protests about COVID and central bank digital currencies and "15 minute cities". No protests of any such size have been seen anywhere, needless to say.
• Around 7.4 million people had heard of an obscure hobbyist conspiracy newspaper called The Light, and half of all the people who had heard of it had helped distribute it. In reality The Light has a tiny number of subscribers.
The poll itself is clearly misinformation. Ironically, it was commissioned for the BBC's "Marianna in Conspiracyland" which promoted the poll relentlessly; the BBC has never accepted that the poll's results are nonsensical and simply ignored the problems. The Guardian also jumped all over it [2] without subjecting the results to even basic reality checks.
The actual meaning of these results is that Savanta's panel has become extremely unrepresentative and the company is simply ignoring this problem. This is a problem that has been affecting all panel-polling companies and it's been getting worse with time, albeit Savanta seems to be truly hosed to an extent that maybe YouGov isn't (yet). Panels are deeply unrepresentative, in particular with time they become deeply skewed towards women and people who volunteer for things (for obvious reasons). They attempt to weight the results to make them more realistic, but the models are calibrated only for elections and other moments when they can get ground truth. Ask non-election related questions and you will routinely get absurd results that don't reflect the actual views of the population.
The polling industry is in deep trouble as panels degrade over time (the rewards for taking part are meaningless), but are currently able to ignore it because people generally accept their results as gospel. There's Advanced Math™ involved so it must be correct, right? Still, I think eventually people will get more savvy about this. I certainly wouldn't take any poll promoted by the Guardian at face value given their disinterest in checking the results.
[1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/conspiracy-theory-research
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/13/quarter-in-u...
Still, that's the Grauniad for you these days, and I sort of appreciate it. Spinning up things that are only barely positive news for progressives into actual celebratory takes, in a similar-but-better way to the behavior of right wing/conservative media for several decades.
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Edit: one positive this year was us becoming part of the Horizon programme.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_23_...
Economies of scale. Post-Brexit, we've copy-and-pasted nearly all EU regulations, because it turns out that a) writing and maintaining regulations is really difficult and expensive and b) there are massive advantages to having the same regulations as your most important trade partners. A lot of people didn't like the idea of EU regulations, but very few people have identified anything in those regulations that they actually want to change.
As a conservative, the whole Brexit project strikes me as antithetical to conservative principles - we abandoned the status quo with no clear idea of what we'd replace it with, nor any clear sense of what the advantages might be. The fallout of Brexit is an incredibly strong vindication of Chesterton's Fence. Shortcomings in EU institutions are a valid justification for leaving only if you're confident that you can replace them with something better; it was only after the referendum that we started seriously discussing what the decision to leave actually meant.
They still apply to us. The only thing the EU rules added were exceptions for undersize bananas which otherwise would not have been allowed.
I'm not very well versed in UK politics but what's the narrative behind this? In what way do Britons believe Brexit has made controlling immigration harder? While the ways it has hurt trade and the economy in general are obvious to me (both on the factual level and what I presume Britons believe) I have a hard time imagining what they could possibly think on this subject.
But what happened post-Brexit is that (legal) immigration numbers are at all time high. There is a high fraction of low skilled immigrants from outside EU, often with questionable English and, well, looking different - which matters to some people. My point isn't to disparage hard working people, but that it's very visible.
So that's a major Brexit pledge gone completely awry. I don't think there is anything Brexit-related that made migration control objectively harder, only that the control failed. Although what also happened, not unrelated, is that high-skilled immigrants from EU largely left, because post-Brexit UK is not very attractive to Europeans. This is very perceptible especially in health care, where shortages of doctors and nurses are now quite scary.
And the immigration is so high in then because UK has always had labour shortages, patched by foreigners. It's only the country of origin that changed.
The few brexitters I talked with shared the same stance, that it was not acceptable for the EU to dictate immigration to the UK. It was not a matter of the influx itself, but about having that control. sovereignty was a big thing.
The government is using immigration to prop up the (overall) economy while keeping wages down.
So it went from "we don't like immigrants" to "pretty please immigrate to the UK even if you're not from the EU or we're toast".
This isn't what voters want or were promised at all, but there are currently no established parties in the UK that are willing to actually reduce immigration. They are all committed to allowing in the highest numbers possible.
In theory this behavior should be punished by voters, but if all the parties are the same then there isn't much voters can do except refuse to vote at all. This is what they're telling pollsters they'll do in the next GE. Polls predict a big shift to Labour, but this isn't because Labour is suddenly more popular. It's because the Conservative voters have become so disillusioned with being misled over the immigration issue that they're just refusing to vote at all.
However that didn't constrain EU workers, as the 4 freedoms are distinct from, and predate Schengen.
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Overly beneficial trade deals are harder to come by for the UK than they thought because outside the EU they’re a minor market with little clout.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/british-cheese-in-canad...
1: https://youtu.be/WpE_xMRiCLE
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-67828648
Funding is still way below european levels though, always has been, the crisp is that the money is being spent on agency staff rather than employed ones, meaning not enough staff and a lot of rich people creaming a lot off the top
Brexit is one key cause of that staff shortage.
UK, as part of the EU, was shielded from that.
- On one hand, every policy was with Europe and not just the UK, so there wasn't any way to pick on the UK.
- On the other hand, the EU was a major economic block, both as a market and as a source of technology. It has massive negotiating leverage.
You can't really research this sort of thing, since China won't go out and say "Century of Humiliation" and "Opium Wars" in trade policy (at least much). India won't reference the "Eat the Meat" scene in the Gandhi movie, but it sets a lot of the national zeitgeist. Kenya probably won't talk about the Mao Mao rebellion. Ireland isn't going to talk about the potato famine or Bloody Sunday. I simply can't imagine those aren't in the back of everyone's minds as they talk to English diplomats. In terms of friends, they have a few, but not many (although a few, like the US, are disproportionately useful as friends).
I think things will only get worse for the UK from here. That kind of broad-based deep-seated resentment is very rare in diplomacy.
They'd be best off rejoining the EU. If they decide to do that, I think the EU will invite them back, but I really don't think they'll get the same kind of sweetheart deal this time around. I don't know if they will want that, or if they do, if they'll accept a less-than-sweetheart deal.
We did what we did, so I understand (to the extent I am able to, not having lived it). All I would say in our defence (and I'm aware it isn't a great defence and certainly doesn't excuse it) is that:
- That wasn't the current us, it was back then and I'd hope we were more enlightened now (despite the dross of our political machine).
- Pretty much every nation at some time in their past has dealt terribly with others. We are in the position of being the most recent old-fashioned empire, whilst having had the technology (Industrial Revolution, coal, guns, ships) to scale our oppression. Most (all?) nations would have done the same thing if they'd got to that point of power first.
I'm not my ancestors. I wouldn't choose the paths they did. But the above points are both true and also excuses, so to the extent that any current citizen is representative of their national history I apologise.
As for the lack of sweetheart deals for re-joining the EU, again I agree but with the added comment that I think that's a good thing. Only by going all in could we ever truly be a part of the EU.
As long as we demanded exclusion from, or preference in, so much we put our national interest first whilst ignoring the wider supranational interest that comes from a united whole. To be part of a union of equals we ought to go in as equals in the first place, thus forcing upon ourselves the incentives to do it properly and build a shared future.
That would carry more weight if, for example, loot stolen from other nations were being returned, rather than sitting in your museums. England also still comes off as profoundly arrogant in its diplomacy and other international dealings. The English accent is sometimes used in American movies as a shortcut for "pretentious" or "smug."
Perhaps this worked okay when there was something to back it up, but there's less and less there.
See also: Post-imperial Spain a few hundred years ago (same problem). Current Russia (same problem). France had a bit of that too, although not nearly as bad as Spain / Russia / UK.
> Most (all?) nations would have done the same thing if they'd got to that point of power first.
This is absolutely not true. There are plenty of non-imperial nations both now and throughout history.
It also absolutely doesn't matter. For my argument, what matters are impressions.
Mao Mao Rebellion in Kenya was 1952-1960. Most of the people who participated are alive today, and it's such a major part of the national identity. Opium Wars are ancient history, but again, it's the narrative that counts.
There are few nations whose name carries as much baggage as the UK. Even Germany -- post Nazi -- made an effort to dump all that baggage by in the form of anti-Nazi laws, apologies, and in some cases, even reparations.
> Only by going all in could we ever truly be a part of the EU.
I agree. I think the key thing, though, is that unless the England does something like this (or something analogous), I think it will eventually be in a pretty bad place.
I'm not optimistic for England coming to the same conclusion.
Good luck!
Surely there should have been something in place that meant it could only be undone progressively or required supermajority or best of three or something.
Surely there was a better way to trial be separate but default back to being together.
I don't know there must be other ideas. A simple 50% vote and out is way too fragile.
And an off topic comment on democracy:
Everyone should start with 100 votes and you lose one for each year you are alive.
The older you are, the less say you should have in the future.