5 ms·

I was ordering bike parts in the UK from Belgium, after the import taxes hit the company, they lost 80% of their sales. How can brexit negotiators fucked up so

by zoobab 4y ago

I was ordering bike parts in the UK from Belgium, after the import taxes hit the company, they lost 80% of their sales. How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly?

LatteLazy 4y ago
They didn't necessarily "fuck up". Many people voted for exactly this sort of BS. I am not saying that was a good idea. But that's what things like "Less Imports" and "no more regulations" mean in practice.
- hunglee2 4y ago
  100% correct. Was not a negotiating failure, it was the desired outcome, though perhaps not the desired consequences of such an outcome
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    It's interesting to see interviews with people who voted for Brexit. They understand that they have a worse life, but their emotions about the vote didn't change as significantly as their life circumstances because of their vote.
    - LatteLazy 4y ago
      For many people it was a religious decision, a matter of faith. "You cannot reason people out of something they did not reason their way into"
    - fidgewidge 4y ago
      It's because the reasons they have a worse life aren't caused by Brexit. The ruling party hasn't actually changed anything even though now they legally can.
- throwaway_3850 4y ago
  It is also told, that the EU has the toughest negotiators in the world. They got trained full-time on inner conflicts and just keep burying interlocutors, no matter the country.
- stevekemp 4y ago
  No. People didn't vote for that, because unfortunately the referendum was very non-specific "Do you want to leave the EU?" question with only a yes/no answer. (Of course if there had been a "Yes, however you like", "Yes-gently", "yes-brutally", "no", kinda question the votes would have been split enough to make no consensus possible.) Some people might have thought they were voting for a hard-exit, others a soft-one. But the actual specifics varied depending on who you spoke to. It was Theresa May who drew a bunch of arbitrary lines in the sand, and essentially chose the kind of exit that would happen, but that was after a "Please Leave" result, not a vote on any specific form of exit. After that things got vaguer. But even if we pretend there was a specific kind of exit being voted for, the fact is things are still not "done" with the implementation. Checks on the UK-side are still absent, the whole Irish border situation is imprecise, and still not settled, and the mass-repealing of EU-related laws has been postponed. All in all it's a mess, probably fair to say its a bigger mess if you voted remain, but still even if you voted leave I'd be surprised if you'd be happy with the current state of things.
  - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
    I'm fairly sure that most brexit voters were expecting a soft brexit. There were plenty of politicians stating that it was absolutely not going to be a hard brexit, or at least that's what they said up until the vote.
    - stevekemp 4y ago
      Different politicians promised different things, with varying degrees of seriousness and commitment. (For example the Boris-Bus). I realize I'm getting pedantic, but at the end of the day people just voted "Yes, leave" or "No, remain". The actual specifics were wonderfully ambiguous. (FWIW I'm a UK citizen, and I submitted a postal-vote for the referendum, having already left the country for unrelated reasons.)
      - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
        UK Remoaner here. I do remember brexit proponents going on TV and specifically stating that we would stay in the EU market and no way would it be a hard brexit. But yes, the vote was flawed due to "brexit" not being defined at all.
- googlryas 4y ago
  It was essentially a 50/50 split. Why they decided before hand simple majority wins and not 66% or something is beyond me.
hunglee2 4y ago
they didn't negotiate. Cake-ism was not a Boris Johnson joke, it turned out to be the actual policy. Hence, bare bones agreement (which, according to Michel Barnier, we are not even compliant on) and massive surge of costs to UK consumers.
ferminaut 4y ago
brexit is about setting the stage for things to come. brexit will make fewer people a lot of money. Is it far fetched to see NHS getting bled dry, paving the way for privatized health care?
- redler 4y ago
  Distribute the costs among the many, concentrate the benefits among the few.
xiphias2 4y ago
EU was in a position where it couldn't allow a soft exit to Britain, because the whole EU would fall apart and even more behind other big economies.
- hunglee2 4y ago
  soft Brexit would have been single market, Norway style. This was rejected by UK, not by EU
  - johnsea 4y ago
    Norway style means that UK would still have had to allow freedom of movement. If the EU and especially Germany had adapted their (imo insane & ideology driven) immigration politics, I don't think the UK would have left. But in the given situation, what could UK have done? (nothing)
    - hunglee2 4y ago
      immigration is the right thing to do, Germany will reap the benefit of the millions of people they have brought in. The issue is how to integrate, which is an entirely different problem. So far, no other mechanism to stymie population decline has worked
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  You cannot blame the EU for the UK's hard brexit. That was all down to the UK politician's brexit purity spiral. Theresa May tried to moderate it somewhat, and was swiftly thrown out because of that. This was all internal to the UK. The UK insisted on a hard brexit. The stock "it's the EU's fault!" response is nonsense, again.
- imtringued 4y ago
  The UK wanted a hard Brexit. There was no "soft Brexit" on the table. What you are asking for is the equivalent of changing the constitution of a country for the benefit of a single city. The slippery slope isn't that the country would fall apart, the slippery slope is that the country would abandon its core values for the benefit of a small group of elites that doesn't care about the country.
Y-bar 4y ago
Wasn't import taxes an inevitability as a result of brexit? The free movement of goods and people is a fundamental part of EU and EEA and once you are no longer part of it you no longer have those freedoms and instead have the normal external EU/EEA costs?
- riffraff 4y ago
  no, they were not, Turkey and Switzerland are not in the EU nor in EEA, but they can sell (some) of their goods to EU countries with no taxes due to specific agreements. UK explicitly chose to avoid such arrangements.
  - drooopy 4y ago
    Turkey, Switzerland, and/or even russia (pre-Ukraine war) are part of the EU Customs Union that the UK chose to stay out of.
    - riffraff 4y ago
      not switzerland, and I have no idea why you think Russia was ever part of the EU customs union. But the point is that staying out of the customs union was not an "inevitabile result of leaving the EU", it was a choice separated from it.
  - fidgewidge 4y ago
    The UK didn't choose to avoid such arrangements and requested many times for a comprehensive free trade deal. The problem is that the EU considers arrangements such as those with the Swiss to be legacy, deprecated and no longer on offer. They have also spent a lot of time pressuring Switzerland in various ways to try and force it to become a de-facto member-without-membership. They don't want any country in Europe to have any option other than membership, whereby membership means full control from Brussels without local elections having any meaningful outcomes. That is their goal and doing a trade deal with the UK would have undermined that.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
johnsea 4y ago
How can the EU be so unfriendly?
- ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
  I think the EU were perfectly happy to have talks and negotiations, but the UK wanted to be able to influence the EU without being bound by its rules - hardly a reasonable stance for the UK to take
- dmitriid 4y ago
  The EU is a huge economic block, and Britain's single most important trading partner. They can be whatever the fuck they like to be. And the EU was exceptionally friendly and patient towards the UK which demanded all the benefits with none of the responsibilities. UK's entire chain of options were known to everyone with half a brain even before Brexit started. Described succintly in this chart: edit see first chart on House of Lords page here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldeucom/130/13008.htm https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldeu... end edit and explained very briefly in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agZ0xISi40E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agZ0xISi40E
- tacker2000 4y ago
  How can the UK be so deluded as to think they would get a better deal and be better off than they already were? They were in the union, kept their own currency and had exemptions from a lot of EU rules. Now they fucked up royally out of pure arrogance and some ill-advised nationalism. Good luck.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    This was the real shocker to me. The UK had an absurdly good deal in the EU. This was a fight between guys who make billions from domestic commerce and guys who make billions from international commerce and the local guys won. A cost of living crisis is a boon for them.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    > How can the EU be so unfriendly? I suspect that the grandparent is joking, doing the "why did the EU do this to the UK?" The joke is that brexit issues are never the UK's fault. Along the lines of https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/who-killed-hannibal https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/who-killed-hannibal
petesergeant 4y ago
> How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly? I don't think you can blame the negotiators. The politicians sold a Brexit that was somehow going to be soft enough to allow access to EU markets, but strong enough that the UK didn't have to follow any rules or give any concessions. The only two options on the table at any point in this were "stay in the single market but without any influence, and get rules simply handed down by Brussels" or "hard brexit", and the first was political suicide. Few (30%?) would have voted for Brexit had they had an honest vision presented as to what it would actually mean.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
  My favourite analogy for the Brexit vote is as follows: Imagine if you will, voting on what to have for dinner. 30% are vegetarian 30% eat only pork 30% eat only beef 10% eat any meat Now, if the only two options are meat or no-meat, then you're going to get 30% voting for no-meat and 70% voting for meat - a clear majority. However when you got to the shops, what do you buy? Pork will only satisfy 40% and beef will only satisfy 40%, so you're going to end up with 60% unhappy with the choice.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    I think you describe the fundamental crisis of democracy. No single proposal ever has a majority of support. So you get what is essentially a confidence motion... that the 'winner' themselves would not survive.
    - petesergeant 4y ago
      That's a weakness of FPTP voting systems, not of democracy
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Leave were perfectly aware of this, which is why Brexit was presented as everything for everyone instead of a specific deal. Quite literally. Aside from the broad lies - the infamous £350m a week for the NHS, and the "Absolutely no one is suggesting the UK will leave the Single Market", among many others - Cambridge Analytica aimed micro-targeted ads with knowingly misleading promises at micro-demographics. The whole point of Brexit was to remove local and EU democratic oversight and turn the UK into a neoliberal dictatorship. Those responsible are perfectly happy to trash most of the UK's economy as long as they personally get much, much richer. The entire project is a shocking exercise in leveraging exceptionalist collective narcissism into a pretext for oligarchy and corruption on a Russian scale.
scythe 4y ago
Import taxes are a 100% voluntary policy of the United Kingdom that has nothing to do with any negotiations (except insofar as the UK uses them for leverage). The government could abolish these taxes with the stroke of a pen, effective tomorrow. >How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly? It's my understanding that a failure to reach an acceptable solution to the Irish border produced a worse deal with a Europe less willing to compromise and also drained away the time to negotiate new trade agreements before Brexit went into effect. In a sense, Britain's colonial past came back to bite it.
mrguyorama 4y ago
No other outcome was possible. Why would europe have given the UK anything?

by zoobab 4y ago

I was ordering bike parts in the UK from Belgium, after the import taxes hit the company, they lost 80% of their sales. How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly?

LatteLazy 4y ago

They didn't necessarily "fuck up". Many people voted for exactly this sort of BS. I am not saying that was a good idea. But that's what things like "Less Imports" and "no more regulations" mean in practice.

hunglee2 4y ago
100% correct. Was not a negotiating failure, it was the desired outcome, though perhaps not the desired consequences of such an outcome
- xiphias2 4y ago
  It's interesting to see interviews with people who voted for Brexit. They understand that they have a worse life, but their emotions about the vote didn't change as significantly as their life circumstances because of their vote.
  - LatteLazy 4y ago
    For many people it was a religious decision, a matter of faith. "You cannot reason people out of something they did not reason their way into"
  - fidgewidge 4y ago
    It's because the reasons they have a worse life aren't caused by Brexit. The ruling party hasn't actually changed anything even though now they legally can.
throwaway_3850 4y ago
It is also told, that the EU has the toughest negotiators in the world. They got trained full-time on inner conflicts and just keep burying interlocutors, no matter the country.
stevekemp 4y ago
No. People didn't vote for that, because unfortunately the referendum was very non-specific "Do you want to leave the EU?" question with only a yes/no answer. (Of course if there had been a "Yes, however you like", "Yes-gently", "yes-brutally", "no", kinda question the votes would have been split enough to make no consensus possible.) Some people might have thought they were voting for a hard-exit, others a soft-one. But the actual specifics varied depending on who you spoke to. It was Theresa May who drew a bunch of arbitrary lines in the sand, and essentially chose the kind of exit that would happen, but that was after a "Please Leave" result, not a vote on any specific form of exit. After that things got vaguer. But even if we pretend there was a specific kind of exit being voted for, the fact is things are still not "done" with the implementation. Checks on the UK-side are still absent, the whole Irish border situation is imprecise, and still not settled, and the mass-repealing of EU-related laws has been postponed. All in all it's a mess, probably fair to say its a bigger mess if you voted remain, but still even if you voted leave I'd be surprised if you'd be happy with the current state of things.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
  I'm fairly sure that most brexit voters were expecting a soft brexit. There were plenty of politicians stating that it was absolutely not going to be a hard brexit, or at least that's what they said up until the vote.
  - stevekemp 4y ago
    Different politicians promised different things, with varying degrees of seriousness and commitment. (For example the Boris-Bus). I realize I'm getting pedantic, but at the end of the day people just voted "Yes, leave" or "No, remain". The actual specifics were wonderfully ambiguous. (FWIW I'm a UK citizen, and I submitted a postal-vote for the referendum, having already left the country for unrelated reasons.)
    - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
      UK Remoaner here. I do remember brexit proponents going on TV and specifically stating that we would stay in the EU market and no way would it be a hard brexit. But yes, the vote was flawed due to "brexit" not being defined at all.
googlryas 4y ago
It was essentially a 50/50 split. Why they decided before hand simple majority wins and not 66% or something is beyond me.

hunglee2 4y ago

they didn't negotiate. Cake-ism was not a Boris Johnson joke, it turned out to be the actual policy. Hence, bare bones agreement (which, according to Michel Barnier, we are not even compliant on) and massive surge of costs to UK consumers.

ferminaut 4y ago

brexit is about setting the stage for things to come. brexit will make fewer people a lot of money. Is it far fetched to see NHS getting bled dry, paving the way for privatized health care?

redler 4y ago
Distribute the costs among the many, concentrate the benefits among the few.

xiphias2 4y ago

EU was in a position where it couldn't allow a soft exit to Britain, because the whole EU would fall apart and even more behind other big economies.

hunglee2 4y ago
soft Brexit would have been single market, Norway style. This was rejected by UK, not by EU
- johnsea 4y ago
  Norway style means that UK would still have had to allow freedom of movement. If the EU and especially Germany had adapted their (imo insane & ideology driven) immigration politics, I don't think the UK would have left. But in the given situation, what could UK have done? (nothing)
  - hunglee2 4y ago
    immigration is the right thing to do, Germany will reap the benefit of the millions of people they have brought in. The issue is how to integrate, which is an entirely different problem. So far, no other mechanism to stymie population decline has worked
SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
You cannot blame the EU for the UK's hard brexit. That was all down to the UK politician's brexit purity spiral. Theresa May tried to moderate it somewhat, and was swiftly thrown out because of that. This was all internal to the UK. The UK insisted on a hard brexit. The stock "it's the EU's fault!" response is nonsense, again.
imtringued 4y ago
The UK wanted a hard Brexit. There was no "soft Brexit" on the table. What you are asking for is the equivalent of changing the constitution of a country for the benefit of a single city. The slippery slope isn't that the country would fall apart, the slippery slope is that the country would abandon its core values for the benefit of a small group of elites that doesn't care about the country.

Y-bar 4y ago

Wasn't import taxes an inevitability as a result of brexit? The free movement of goods and people is a fundamental part of EU and EEA and once you are no longer part of it you no longer have those freedoms and instead have the normal external EU/EEA costs?

riffraff 4y ago
no, they were not, Turkey and Switzerland are not in the EU nor in EEA, but they can sell (some) of their goods to EU countries with no taxes due to specific agreements. UK explicitly chose to avoid such arrangements.
- drooopy 4y ago
  Turkey, Switzerland, and/or even russia (pre-Ukraine war) are part of the EU Customs Union that the UK chose to stay out of.
  - riffraff 4y ago
    not switzerland, and I have no idea why you think Russia was ever part of the EU customs union. But the point is that staying out of the customs union was not an "inevitabile result of leaving the EU", it was a choice separated from it.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  The UK didn't choose to avoid such arrangements and requested many times for a comprehensive free trade deal. The problem is that the EU considers arrangements such as those with the Swiss to be legacy, deprecated and no longer on offer. They have also spent a lot of time pressuring Switzerland in various ways to try and force it to become a de-facto member-without-membership. They don't want any country in Europe to have any option other than membership, whereby membership means full control from Brussels without local elections having any meaningful outcomes. That is their goal and doing a trade deal with the UK would have undermined that.
fidgewidge 4y ago

johnsea 4y ago

How can the EU be so unfriendly?

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
I think the EU were perfectly happy to have talks and negotiations, but the UK wanted to be able to influence the EU without being bound by its rules - hardly a reasonable stance for the UK to take
dmitriid 4y ago
The EU is a huge economic block, and Britain's single most important trading partner. They can be whatever the fuck they like to be. And the EU was exceptionally friendly and patient towards the UK which demanded all the benefits with none of the responsibilities. UK's entire chain of options were known to everyone with half a brain even before Brexit started. Described succintly in this chart: edit see first chart on House of Lords page here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldeucom/130/13008.htm https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldeu... end edit and explained very briefly in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agZ0xISi40E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agZ0xISi40E
tacker2000 4y ago
How can the UK be so deluded as to think they would get a better deal and be better off than they already were? They were in the union, kept their own currency and had exemptions from a lot of EU rules. Now they fucked up royally out of pure arrogance and some ill-advised nationalism. Good luck.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  This was the real shocker to me. The UK had an absurdly good deal in the EU. This was a fight between guys who make billions from domestic commerce and guys who make billions from international commerce and the local guys won. A cost of living crisis is a boon for them.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > How can the EU be so unfriendly? I suspect that the grandparent is joking, doing the "why did the EU do this to the UK?" The joke is that brexit issues are never the UK's fault. Along the lines of https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/who-killed-hannibal https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/who-killed-hannibal

petesergeant 4y ago

> How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly? I don't think you can blame the negotiators. The politicians sold a Brexit that was somehow going to be soft enough to allow access to EU markets, but strong enough that the UK didn't have to follow any rules or give any concessions. The only two options on the table at any point in this were "stay in the single market but without any influence, and get rules simply handed down by Brussels" or "hard brexit", and the first was political suicide. Few (30%?) would have voted for Brexit had they had an honest vision presented as to what it would actually mean.

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
My favourite analogy for the Brexit vote is as follows: Imagine if you will, voting on what to have for dinner. 30% are vegetarian 30% eat only pork 30% eat only beef 10% eat any meat Now, if the only two options are meat or no-meat, then you're going to get 30% voting for no-meat and 70% voting for meat - a clear majority. However when you got to the shops, what do you buy? Pork will only satisfy 40% and beef will only satisfy 40%, so you're going to end up with 60% unhappy with the choice.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  I think you describe the fundamental crisis of democracy. No single proposal ever has a majority of support. So you get what is essentially a confidence motion... that the 'winner' themselves would not survive.
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    That's a weakness of FPTP voting systems, not of democracy
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Leave were perfectly aware of this, which is why Brexit was presented as everything for everyone instead of a specific deal. Quite literally. Aside from the broad lies - the infamous £350m a week for the NHS, and the "Absolutely no one is suggesting the UK will leave the Single Market", among many others - Cambridge Analytica aimed micro-targeted ads with knowingly misleading promises at micro-demographics. The whole point of Brexit was to remove local and EU democratic oversight and turn the UK into a neoliberal dictatorship. Those responsible are perfectly happy to trash most of the UK's economy as long as they personally get much, much richer. The entire project is a shocking exercise in leveraging exceptionalist collective narcissism into a pretext for oligarchy and corruption on a Russian scale.

scythe 4y ago

Import taxes are a 100% voluntary policy of the United Kingdom that has nothing to do with any negotiations (except insofar as the UK uses them for leverage). The government could abolish these taxes with the stroke of a pen, effective tomorrow. >How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly? It's my understanding that a failure to reach an acceptable solution to the Irish border produced a worse deal with a Europe less willing to compromise and also drained away the time to negotiate new trade agreements before Brexit went into effect. In a sense, Britain's colonial past came back to bite it.

mrguyorama 4y ago

No other outcome was possible. Why would europe have given the UK anything?