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I have a similar feeling. On the one hand, I feel like Brexit happened for all the wrong reasons. I don't remember england being a nationalistic nation when I g

I have a similar feeling. On the one hand, I feel like Brexit happened for all the wrong reasons. I don't remember england being a nationalistic nation when I grew up. I found it profoundly alienating to find myself in a country that had voted for Brexit, more or less, because they don't like immigrants. On the other, what happened to Greece was appalling, and confirmed everybody's worst fears about the EU being an instrument of Capital in overrunning democratic norms. I don't think it would be so terrible, in any case, if the EU blocked UK financial services (or if the financial services went under anyway, since I think being in the EU was part of the raison-d'etre). The imbalance of the english economy created by an overweight financial sector that employs basically no-one, and has antithetical legislative needs to all the other sectors, is a lot of what's wrong with the UK as a country. We used to make things. Now all we do is flip houses on the back of one bubble or another. The financial sector has created a weird double-country, with a super-rich capital, and basically impoverished provinces. But this really comes back to what I see as the heart of English dysfunction - and it's English, since the Welsh and Scottish don't seem to share it. The politics are awful. Recruiting half your leadership from one elite boarding school just doesn't work. There's no way you can find enough smart, talented people that way. That's why everything the english state does is always so screwed up. And it's a problem that only gets worse as more power is concentrated in the financial sector.

pjc50 9y ago
> But this really comes back to what I see as the heart of English dysfunction - and it's English, since the Welsh and Scottish don't seem to share it. The politics are awful. Recruiting half your leadership from one elite boarding school just doesn't work This is exactly it. To my mind it's the last retreat of the Empire, inwards and inwards. The idea of having a country operating on a fundamentally equitable basis is just not acceptable to these people. So the UK gets set up almost as a set of internal colonies run from Westminster. > We used to make things. We still do - with a lot fewer people. Manufacturing is still big economically, it's just a high-value-add industry that employs a smaller number of white collar workers and robots. It also has terrible press coverage because it's not in London, and the papers are unwilling to dispatch foreign correspondents to the Midlands to find it.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  To my mind it's the last retreat of the Empire, inwards and inwards. The idea of having a country operating on a fundamentally equitable basis is just not acceptable to these people. Our current political leadership do seem to have a very odd view of the world sometimes, possibly due to most of them (a) being rich and (b) never having worked a normal job outside the politics/media/finance bubble. It's very frustrating that they seem to have gone into this whole business with such an adversarial stance, particularly when even now they don't really seem to have a clear, consistent vision for what they are trying to achieve. To be fair, several of the key figures on the EU side haven't been any better.

pjc50 9y ago

> But this really comes back to what I see as the heart of English dysfunction - and it's English, since the Welsh and Scottish don't seem to share it. The politics are awful. Recruiting half your leadership from one elite boarding school just doesn't work This is exactly it. To my mind it's the last retreat of the Empire, inwards and inwards. The idea of having a country operating on a fundamentally equitable basis is just not acceptable to these people. So the UK gets set up almost as a set of internal colonies run from Westminster. > We used to make things. We still do - with a lot fewer people. Manufacturing is still big economically, it's just a high-value-add industry that employs a smaller number of white collar workers and robots. It also has terrible press coverage because it's not in London, and the papers are unwilling to dispatch foreign correspondents to the Midlands to find it.

Silhouette 9y ago
To my mind it's the last retreat of the Empire, inwards and inwards. The idea of having a country operating on a fundamentally equitable basis is just not acceptable to these people. Our current political leadership do seem to have a very odd view of the world sometimes, possibly due to most of them (a) being rich and (b) never having worked a normal job outside the politics/media/finance bubble. It's very frustrating that they seem to have gone into this whole business with such an adversarial stance, particularly when even now they don't really seem to have a clear, consistent vision for what they are trying to achieve. To be fair, several of the key figures on the EU side haven't been any better.