Five years since Brexit
It is five years since we left the EU. How do we think it has gone. Myself I think it has gone badly, particularly for businesses of small and medium size. Not being in the EU has not brought strong connections with other countries. It has made travel harder. Soon we will be paying to get into the EU in the same way we do for the US. The new government is starting to re negotiate the agreement. What do we think the next five years will hold.
Comments
You can read it here: https://www.reaction.life/p/britain-looks-like-brexit
The unspoken contrast between that fantasy piece and reality perfectly encapsulates where we are.
Of course, we should also note that Mr Hannan is now in the Lords.
AFZ
One speech and he ended up with a totally underserved reputation as an intellectual.
Yes, that possibility was (presumably) not considered when the Brexit lunacy was feverishly dreamt up.
If the US throws a nuke or two our way, it'll all soon be over, though.
Yep, only the nukes will come in the way of tariffs. Trump is saying you have to play the game his way or else.
Maybe not, but it looks as though he's at least going to try...
Indeed. In the medium to long term I'm not worried about his Tariff policies. I note today he's introducing Tariffs on Canada that will harm the cross-border North American car industry. Much like Brexit, did to the UK, this hurts the US manufacturing as well as US consumers massively. Which is why I don't see him winning any sort of trade-war with Europe or anyone else. One of the key reasons he won the election was because of his mythical economics. As he makes things worse for ordinary Americans, this all begins to unravel. Whilst he'll never admit fault, he'll back down in some form, I suspect.
In the longer term, this harms the US. 2017-2021 and 2025- has shown the US to be entirely unreliable. The world economically will reorientate itself and the economic power of the US will shrink as a consequence. The savage irony is that he is making China stronger.
Britain is more vulnerable to the lunacy because of Brexit but also it helps the UK draw closer to Europe. This is currently happening at a snail's pace but it is basically inevitable. Unlike predecessors, the current government knows that pandering to Trump to get positive noises from Washington is not a winning strategy. They will try to play it clever and not go out of their way to annoy the Orange One but they are under no illusions that Trump and therefore America cannot be trusted.
AFZ
My hope is that economic harm will force him to back down. My fear is that it will lead him to double down on scapegoating. The supposedly liberal press are hard at work sanewashing his administrative vandalism and performative cruelty, and the guard rails that haven't been obliterated are paper thin. When things go wrong will he try to provoke a war? Blame Democratic governors and use the military to occupy blue states?
This is true. The US media were so complicit in Trump 1 and are worse now. I suspect some sort of quietly backing down whilst claiming not to and blaming everyone else is what will happen.
Yes, although I'd question how useful a theoretical understanding is, when practically most of their moves are around appeasing and kow-towing to Trump. Not to mention the currently ascendant Blue Labour faction (Glasman got an invite to the inauguration which Farage didn't) who plan to fight Reform on 'anti woke' grounds.
Whenever I hear "anti-woke", I hear the arseholes complaining about being stopped from going after the queers and the weirdos, the nerds and the fatties, the different and the neuro-diverse. Of course, objecting to not being able to move around without shouts of "fucking weirdo" is just a sign of having lost our sense of humour.
A supposed Labour politician courting people upset that they can't mock, belittle, oppress or rip the piss mercilessly out of the people they despise ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Well quite. "Socially conservative on which values exactly?" "Well .. you know .. "
I suppose, in theory, you could have a social conservatism that recognised the value of strong, stable families for raising children, and therefore sought to help people build better relationships and address behaviours that could become abusive so that parents are more likely to stay together. You could have a social conservatism that considered British traditions and values so important that it went out of its way to include immigrants in those traditions and demonstrate those values in an appealing way. In theory.
However, I accept that I may well be in a minority. I do not import or export. I have found that all the regular medicines I need are available I do not travel abroad.
However, you do purchase foodstuffs, clothing and household items occasionally. Have you noticed any changes in prices or supply as a result of Brexit? This American would like to know.
So just looking at actual economic performance, for example, is less helpful - you have to look at predictions as to what the economy would have done sans COVID vs hypothetical future in the EU. And then we were seriously impacted by rising fuel prices after Russia invaded Ukraine.
[understatement]I think it fair to say though, it does not appear to have helped[/understatement]
However, there are a lot of other Brexit impacts that tend to be ignored. The impact on our democratic processes is a big one. First, the whole thing has boosted the confidence of the far right, who managed to get their xenophobic policies of hate enacted without getting even a single MP for one of the parties openly promoting those policies being elected to Parliament in 2015. Then we had politicians who thought that they had carte blanche rights to run rough shod over Parliament and make major policy decisions without consulting Parliament - fortunately the courts ruled against those specific decisions, but the result has been a shift to more power for the executive over Parliament which isn't good (IMO). That rule by executive has been exercised several times since - including the government in Westminster blocking the will of the people expressed through democratically elected Parliament in Scotland to organise another referendum on independence, minor tweaks to gender recognition and introduce a deposit return scheme for drink bottles. And, of course as many here might expect from me, the whole process of holding a referendum upended the conventions and precedents for how Parliamentary processes work, and therefore as our constitution is largely built on precedence and convention probably unconstitutional. By taking a glorified opinion poll without even the status of "advisory" to be instruction to leave the EU the government from 2016 drove a cart and horses through British democracy, something that Parliament colluded in.
There are various ways in which you can account for these confounding variables; including comparing it with the situation in other countries during COVID and how well they've recovered after COVID (as most of them will also be negatively impacted by commodity price rises post COVID and post Ukraine). The general picture is that the UK suffered a larger drop in real GDP during COVID than all but the worst performing comparable economies and its recovery was correspondingly slower.
Furthermore, looking at the UK economy sector by sector there's no real clear winner from Brexit itself.
Quite so. COVID and Ukraine, with their massive impacts on economies and the cost of living all across the world, have meant that Brexit impacts simply cannot be assessed. It may even be that if neither of them had happened then we could indeed be looking back at it now as a success.
And yes, this is the effect of Brexit. Own it, if you supported it.
I disagree with this assertion.
Well, actually I can believe that it’s impossible that the majority of posters here would ever have said Brexit was a success.
That's not true. While you cannot run a counterfactual you can see how those events impacted other similar economies.
Also, reality is a dictatorship, and functional democracy can only ever be a matter of choosing among options that exist. Brexit, on any kind of reasonable basis, never existed, and it has created the childish fantasy that votes can disarm reality by rendering destructive actions constructive. This is not true, and it is this sort of childish fantasy that is turning younger generations off democracy.
That is deeply misleading.
This is from the Financial Times, based on OECD data. Covid was a huge economic hit to everyone but a completely reversible one. That's not surprising - The Bank of England and Treasury have been modelling the effect of a major pandemic (presumed to be influenza) for a long time before Covid hit. A sharp V recession is exactly what they predicted.
This chart is useful as it shows in very simple terms that the malaise in the UK economy is mostly* due Brexit and for our purposes here, Covid and Ukraine etc. are irrelevant. Note, just to make the point, For much of the Eurozone, Ukraine was a much bigger hit than for the UK as a larger share of their gas came from Russia pre-invasion. This is just one chart but there's a lot of other evidence as well but the chart summarises it nicely. It's a simple game of spot the difference really...
Unless, of course you are postulating that Covid and the Ukraine invasion had a decisive effect on the UK economy's behaviour post-Brexit. Something that is counter to (AFAIK, all) the available evidence...
AFZ
*The long-term productivity issues don't help and austerity did major damage to the UK's growth potential as well but that's not critical to our discussion here.
I do notice increases in foodstuffs but I don't investigate the cause. Our shopping is done by credit card and we just buy what we want. Every month, the card is paid off by our current account. Sometimes the prices do not increase but the product becomes a bit smaller Not me . We voted to leave and we left. That's what I call democracy.
Here we go again. There was no vote on how we left. As soon as the leave side won they deviated from a Swiss style Brexit to a hard Brexit.
Democracy also means not having just one vote on a subject. Though if you listen to Bexiteers it does.
I may not be keen on Starmer and the current Labour Party, but he is starting sensible talks with the EU which I applaud
Did you vote for a Swiss style Brexit ? I suspect that you didn't.
The talks will only be sensible if they can improve the situation in the island of Ireland. Everything else is fine
As @Alan Cresswell said there was no type of leave to vote for. It was either in or out. I voted in. As I said it was not until the Cons under Boris won that election that a hard Brexit was pushed.
We are paying the consequences for that. The EU was prepared got it we were not. Not only are our ports not really set up to check but it is easy for smugglers to bring in stuff. Especially as Lorrie’s are likely not be checked at the border but at an inland check point. That makes it easy to drop off illegal stuff in between the two.
I voted out as I wanted us to be more independent. I got what I wanted. I would have been OK with Custom Union etc but it was not to be
Which way should someone have voted if they wanted to leave but only if we stayed in the single market and customs union? If they voted leave do you think they'd have cause to complain that in the event their vote was taken as a mandate for the hard Brexit they didn't want?
Good question. I would have recommended 'Remain' in those circumstances
Which get to the UK because it's now an external market and the UK government hasn't been able to organise comprehensive import stage checks.
No, it would have been checked at/near source as it was intended for the internal market.
As far as I am concerned, Brexit has taken away from me the country I thought I was a citizen of and which was a substantial part of my identity. I now wonder whether that was something that was destroyed by the morning news on the 24th June 2016 or whether I had been previously been living under a complete delusion.
As for any claim that one wanted the UK to be more independent, and it now is, two simple questions. How so? Even if it is, which I doubt, I get no benefit whatsoever from the government being under fewer restraints. How are you any different?
If that all upsets you, @Telford, then so be it.
Well said @Enoch.
people who voted the same as me although I accept they may have had different reasons That doesn't upset me. but I will be upset when Starmer betrays us.