Remember when Nigel Farage said he’d leave if Brexit was a failure?…
To the surprise of no one with half a brain.
…so most were surprised.
Gee, if only we could’ve seen this coming.
Devastating, entirely predictable, incredibly obvious, and repeatedly pointed out as such, to no avail.
Yeah, anybody with eyes and a working brain back during the Leave Referendum saw this coming.
Wow, this is an awful submission.
It’s a very short article that is essentially restating a tweet but in paragraphs instead of bullet points. That tweet simply has a picture of something that looks like it might be an article published in a journal, or something?
If you actually want to see the source, you have to read the words on the picture in the tweet and search for them. That will eventually lead you to this working paper.
I’m not saying that the article didn’t summarize the tweet properly, or that the tweet didn’t summarize the working paper well. But, surely we can do better than articles which summarize tweets.
Do we, EU citizens, allow the UK to return like nothing happened? I would vote yes, with one stipulation. Nigel is sent on a one-way trip to Moscow.
The main point would be: UK would need to follow the same rules everyone else has to.
Because when the UK was still a member they had a shitton of special rules which they basically blackmailed the other members into. (E.g. London would have never gotten that big as a financial market without them ) They basically took all the benefits and only gave back as little as possible.
So. Sure,the UK can apply to become a member. But no more special rules.
Oh,that ends the privacy nightmare the UK has become? Well… Oh,that means you have to follow the same (very lenient and basic) rules in terms of taxation and tax evasion? Well… Oh,that means you have to take part in shared duties of ALL EU countries? Well…
Romania can do it, Portugal can do it, Poland can do it.
Well…
I lived in Britain as an EU immigrant until the actual Brexit and saw the whole shitshow from the inside.
I say NO to EU membership for Britain - we don’t need another Fascist country in the EU with voting and even veto rights on things that affect all 470 million of non-Britons in it, especially when 1/3 of the population there were very clear about how much they detest the rest of Europeans (the Racism against other Europeans became very overt there when the Leave Referendum started).
Britain should never have the rights of an EU member until that country has a serious cultural, political and social revolution.
Britain becoming a member of the European Free Trade Area in some way might be alright (though they’re highly likely to try and abuse such a position, as they already did abuse free trade access as EU members, for example by de facto being an uncontrolled gateway for importing non-compliant products into the EU market).
British elites having a saying on how the EU is run by using their country’s votes and veto would not be alright, especially in light of all the authoritarian shit coming out over there - from insane civil society surveillance, mandatory online ID and even treating those implementing end-to-end encryption as anti-state actors to anti-Demonstration legislation and imprisonment of people demonstrating against the Gaza Genocide as “Terrorist Supporters” - which manages to beat even Hungary.
It’s bad enough to have EU countries turning Fascist, but bringing into the EU the country in Europe which after Russia and Belarus is the most de facto authoritarian and most similar to present day MAGA America (though their Fascism is painted in “posh” rather than in “strongman”) would be insane.
Like the person below you, citizens got fuck all to say on the matter.
I’m from EU living in UK, I would like for it to happen… But even with Brexit, our life here is A LOT better than it was in Ireland.
Fuck no!! They are allowed in without ANY concessions. Also, Canada joins first.
Conservatives making people poorer, dumber, and less free, classic!
it’s an interesting case study of a fine idea gone horribly wrong. shoring up the domestic market is good, making sure people don’t lose their jobs because of foreign labor is good. but when you’ve got the history of an empire, that stuff was already taken care of, so they platformed on hate.
Edit: thanks for the good replies on this. valuable discussion to have.
In no way was it a fine idea. The very concept was bound to fail. Isolationism destroys trade.
of brexit, absolutely. it was insane. and of course you need to export stuff to keep your economy going. but the basic idea that countries should be self-reliant so that the entire market is more robust is good. they were just blinded by imperialism.
Edit: i want to hear alternative perspectives on this, because it seems i’m in a minority here and i’ve always taken it as self-evident. so if anyone feels like it, please explain.
I think the problem is that Brexit was never about becoming ‘self-reliant’. As you said, Brexit cut the UK off from their single biggest export market, which is the exact opposite of what you need to do if you want to build up your industry. These days no country is completely self-reliant, and trying to be so, while it sounds good, just ends up meaning that you generalise, becoming mediocre at everything and exceptional at nothing.
If the Brexiteers truly wanted to make Britain great again they should have chosen a domain to be great in and lobbied for investment in it. Britain was already punching well above its weight in financial services, they could have invested further in that, for example, and become a true world leader… but only from within the single market, where they had unrestricted access to the talent and economies of the EU.
okay fair, brexit as presented was always a lie and their numbers were not only wrong, but about things that didn’t actually affect anyone. but i’ve talked to people in england who are still pro. not because of what was promised, but because what they saw was an opportunity to get stuff made locally again. and i get that.
maybe it’s a background thing. i grew up surrounded by old shuttered industry that used to make genuinely useful stuff only to be out-priced by imports, and that has continued into the 2020’s. i used to live close to the world’s most advanced paper mill of its type, but it closed and production was moved to a worse mill with lower output in another country as an economic decision. that place had been there for 200 years, the company owned its own hydro power dam and all the forests used for the pulp, the mill had its own rail connection… it was basically printing money, but dismantling it meant being able to sell the machinery for a quick buck.
like, sweden is exceptional at iron and steel. but we used to be exceptional at a lot more. turbines and jet engines. high-voltage transformers. copper. grains. cheap but safe cars. textiles. power tools. wood products. all very useful stuff that could be made entirely “in-house”. now most of that (or the constituent parts) is made elsewhere, and almost purely for economic reasons. there was no need to close that paper mill, but it was done to get the numbers to look good. when the economy goes international it feels like the people get left behind.
the way i see it is, if you black-box a country to just look at imports and exports, the lower the ratio between the two the more money the country makes. yes the salary and living situation may differ from place to place but that’s all internal, funded by those exports in some way or another. moving towards that is, in my mind, a laudable goal. and doing so in a free trade union is obviously better.
the problem is of course that it was never the goal of brexit.
It was never a good idea. Mark Carney tried to warn the public, but his criticisms were discarded as “political”.
Now everyone is blaming everyone for the outcome of a public vote.
It was xeonphobia driven by Boomer jingoism against Europe.
The day after the vote, the top Google search was “what is brexit”? They fucked over everyone under 40.
