7 ms·

The UK's Brexit dream is dead

28 points by mpweiher 2y ago

coldtea 2y ago
>Radical plans to tear EU regulations off Britain’s statute books en masse have already been abandoned. The benefits of buccaneering free trade agreements (FTAs) have proved elusive. Britain's public services, far from receiving a promised boost, have in many cases almost stopped working. The number of people moving to Britain from abroad is higher than ever. It’s not what advocates of Leave had in mind. No, but it's what the establishment who wanted nothing to change and Brexit to fail had in mind.
- dave4420 2y ago
  Of the three Prime Ministers we’ve had since leaving the EU, two had campaigned for Brexit. (The other was outlasted by a lettuce.) If Conservative Prime Ministers aren’t part of the establishment, who is?
  - benwad 2y ago
    We've had four: May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      May was prior to leaving the EU; even if you accept that it left in 2020 (it formally left in Jan 2020, but realistically was still part of the EU for the remainder of the year), she was already gone.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >two had campaigned for Brexit They used it as a marketing trick and got stuck with it when the vote came in. Didn't plan to implement the changes people wanted it for, and didn't.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Has anyone outlasted a Doritos bag?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rsynnott 2y ago
  ... Eh? Is this the new line now? Brexit was a disaster not because it was an extremely silly idea, but rather due to saboteurs? I mean, I suppose you can tell yourself that if you want, but...
  - mjburgess 2y ago
    That was the narrative only weeks after the vote. In realising nothing could be delivered, the saboteur story was invented to shift blame on to some Others. Scapegoating is a story as old as time.
    - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
      On the brightside, this narrative probably contributes to the potential death of the Conservative party today as a plurality of brexit voters are projected to abandon them for Reform. Recent tweet from them: > YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU: Only one party can save Britain from the corrupt establishment. > Today, vote with your HEART and vote for what you TRULY believe in.
      - jfengel 2y ago
        I find it remarkable that, if it really is an existential crisis, it'll be because the Lib Dems outnumber them. Just a decade ago it was a terrible alliance with the Lib Dems that put the Tories in power in the first place, setting up Brexit. All they got in exchange was a failed referendum on alternative voting. They proceeded to get crushed and almost vanished. But here they are, potentially taking over from the Tories. There's some nine dimensional chess for you.
        ZeroGravitas 2y ago
        > All they got in exchange was a failed referendum on alternative voting Which was sabotaged by the Tories reneging on promises they made to the Lib-dems, and the campaign against it led by Dominic Cummings, using the same "lets spend the money on the NHS instead" lie that he re-used for brexit. The irony that passing this would have potentially saved them from destruction at the hands of Reform UK (and indeed avoided Brexit altogether) is an added delicous irony.
tanepiper 2y ago
"The alter orbis which Great Britain has aspired to be is not simply a world apart from continental Europe but a world embracing non- European continents and islands overseas." - Arnold Toynbee Brexit was always an eventuality, but much like the empire was always going to fail.
maxehmookau 2y ago
Anyone who thought the Brexit dream was going to be anything other than a nightmare was either a fraud, or convinced by one.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Oddly, it's not nearly the disaster I anticipated. It looks like an ordinary weak economy, the kind you get from time to time. It's certainly a disaster compared to "we hold all the cards", said by a fraud and many were convinced by that fraud. I hope they are coming to understand that relative nightmare and turn out the fraudsters for a very long time. At the end of that time I suspect they'll find themselves mostly not-as-well-off-as-they-could-be, rather than actually poverty stricken and isolated. It'll be the kind of thing economists point to on charts, but not really easy to see in the various economic noise. I hope it's no worse than that. And maybe, just maybe, that somebody somewhere learned something.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    > It looks like an ordinary weak economy, the kind you get from time to time. The real question is, can they get out of it? It's one thing to do it for a few years, but, if nothing else, they can't afford to run current budget deficits forever, and they don't have _that_ much scope for increasing revenue other than growing the economy. And really that deficit is with spending lower than it should be; public services are really struggling at this point. Like, in some sense it is an ordinary weak economy, but self-inflicted; the government's own office of budget responsibility reckons they've sacrificed 4% of GDP in the long term. For a developed economy, that's not a small hole to climb out of.
    - fmajid 2y ago
      The weak economy existed before Brexit. The UK under Thatcher replaced industry with financial services chicanery, and never recovered from the 2008 crisis. Now it's even lost its business in money-laundering to Dubai and has to rebuild from scratch. Labour has sensible policies on curbing the NIMBYs, mainly Tories, who block desperately-needed construction or building the power grid needed to transport renewable energy from Scotland to England, and that alone could provide a significant boost to growth for a decade or two if they can deliver.
mmaniac 2y ago
I expect that the UK will end up rejoining the EU on much worse terms than we had before. Sooner or later it'll happen.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  I doubt it. Politicians and voters will keep pointing the finger at Switzerland and Norway how they succeeded without the EU and that they can too.
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    One of the immediately likely things after the election is for Labour to rejoin various eurpean standards things, like on Chemicals, accepting the EU rules with no direct say in them, just like Norway and Switzerland. > [Labour Chancellor] Reeves said she does not think “anyone voted Leave because they were not happy that chemicals regulations were the same across Europe”,
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      She is correct. I really doubt anyone will care in practice, unless they're conditioned to care.
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        Thing is, the UK _was_ conditioned to care about this sort of thing, over a period of decades. Remember the bendy bananas? Basically since the UK joined, the UK's media engaged in a sustained campaign to convince people that EU regulations were unreasonable. The EC actually had a website for this at one point: https://web.archive.org/web/20200131192225/https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200131192225/https://blogs.ec....
        Rinzler89 2y ago
        >Remember the bendy bananas? The WHAT?
martinald 2y ago
I've always thought actually Brexit supported the left much more than the right. I think we see that with two of Labour's key manifesto pledges would be either impossible or very difficult to do with EU/SM membership. Firstly - VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Potentially you could argue for some exemption but I think it would be very slow. Secondly - Labour's idea of "nationalising" the UK railways is really at odds with EU policy. Netherlands has an ECJ case pending because they do not allow private operators to bid for at least parts of it. I think this could potentially be mitigated but it is really not the spirit or direction of travel of EU law. I think it's also important to add while a lot of legislation wasn't repealed, a lot of EU legislation is not being added to UK statue books. I think the UK would want to take a very different path on AI regulation vs the EU for example, and had we stayed in would have been a huge point of contention. There is a lot more nuance in this Brexit argument. While I certainly didn't support it, this does not mean everything the EU does is good, especially in tech. There is too much black and white thinking going on with it. I'd also add that EU growth has been exceptionally poor compared to the US. Something is going wrong in Europe as a whole; and I suspect poor quality overregulation by the EU on growth industries is a (potentially small) part of that picture.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  > VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Given the long history of people the in the UK spouting absolute nonsense about what is or is not possible under EU law, do you have a reliable source for that claim?
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    Please see the guidelines[0] on how to treat people. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - reedf1 2y ago
      Seems a reasonable question to me, not cross-examining.
Slava_Propanei 2y ago
[dead]
billy99k 2y ago
[flagged]
- mmaniac 2y ago
  The Conservatives were in power during the Brexit vote and for the next 8 years. Which leftists obstructed Brexit?
- rsynnott 2y ago
  The UK had an arguably better deal than everyone else; the UK Rebate. This kind of made sense at the time it was introduced (the UK would have been disadvantaged relative to other large economies without it, due to differences in its economy) but had long since ceased making sense. Due to the UK's veto it was impossible to get rid of it. There's no real prospect that they'd be given it again if they applied to rejoin; that would make no sense.
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago
  What utter nonsense. We have left the EU. Both the main parties, left and right, say we are not going to rejoin. The only power the EU has over us is the same they have over any external coubtry who wants to trade with them. We can improve our trade deals with the EU and harmonise where it makes sense, instead of burdening business with two parallel sts of regulations and testing regimes. This isn't rejoining the EU.
  - billy99k 2y ago
    "The only power the EU has over us is the same they have over any external coubtry who wants to trade with them' My point still stands. As soon as the UK left, they were threatened with horrible trade deals if they ever came back. The anti-brexit supporters seem to show this as a reason why they should have stayed and hate the pro-brexit supporters, rather than hating the EU for the threats in the first place.
    - MattPalmer1086 2y ago
      If they rejoined the single market and customs union they would have the same trade deal as every other member. That's kind of the point of it. Not exactly sure what you are referring to when you suggest we were threatened with horrible trade deals if we ever came back. Can you provide some references?
Detrytus 2y ago
[flagged]
- exclusiv 2y ago
  Bold statement. Based on what? Being better at tactics everyone would have used in the past if they had the might? Fast forward to today and you can still come up with an easy list of 20 countries that exhibit human rights abuses on their own people on a day to day basis.
- SilverBirch 2y ago
  This just goes to the core problem of the binary referendum. You might say that Brexit was about a specific set of policy goals that you wanted to pursue once we were out of the EU, but that's not how the vote worked. You got Brexit. You weren't promised any specific policies in the aftermath, or rather to be accurate you were - you were promised a plethora of inconsistent, contradictory and mutually exclusive policies. You got Liam Fox's easiest trade deal ever, you got Dan Hannan's "absolutely nobody is suggesting we would give up our position in the free market in Europe". You got your Canada plus and your Norway minus. You took back control on immigration! May I suggest, given that what you were told in the lead up to the referendum was clearly self-contradictory nonsense, we might have predicted exactly this implementation.
lucozade 2y ago
> Sorry Boris, your Euroskeptic vision has failed in so many ways. > Boris Johnson is out of parliament, making millions from speeches and newspaper columns. I'm pretty sure Boris thinks he succeeded just fine. The rest of the country, not so much. > All the key Vote Leave characters have left the stage. I get why you'd want to try to forget about Nigel Farage but the article even has a graph showing how spectacularly Reform is surging in the polls. They'll probably not quite get to the level they need to take a chunk of seats, as their voters are probably quite spread out, but if they get anything close to these numbers in the vote today, that would be pretty impressive. Politically at least.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Well, yeah, they basically say it in the office; Boris got to be famous, and paid millions, which is, one assumes, what he was going for in the first place. The idea that he was doing any of this out of deeply-held principles always seemed... a bit naive.
  - beej71 2y ago
    Speaking as someone in the US, I certainly recognize the theme. Apparently quite effective, historically-speaking.
  - fmajid 2y ago
    Boris picked Brexit as a vehicle to unseat his buddy Cameron, and couldn't care about the consequences for ordinary Brits. It was a hugely cynical choice, but entirely rational. Sunak, on the other hand, was a true believer. Yes, he may be disciplined and hard-working the way Johnson never could be, but there is nothing quite as destructive as a diligent moron.
draw_down 2y ago
[dead]
SilverBirch 2y ago
I think in some ways Labour is going to deliver Brexit in a way that the Tories just couldn't. All the promises that Brexiteers made were the upside of deals, but without the willingness to pay the cost. Yes, our regulations could diverge and in some cases we might have good reason to. But Brexiteers want frictionless trade, and you can't diverge and have no friction. So we just didn't chose. We didn't diverge, because that would be too difficult, but we also didn't take diverging off the table because that was meant to be our big chance! So labour will decide, they'll decide to align on some rules in exchange for reducing some friction. That is what Brexit meant. It meant tearing up the deal we had with the EU. Now it's torn up, we have to get on with deciding what our new relationship should be.
- sdwr 2y ago
  Middle ground? Unheard of! I think you're supposed to be telling me which side eats babies.
tempodox 2y ago
What a bloody mess. > “The EU doesn't want us back," he said. While I doubt the veracity of this statement, there's a saying on the continent that God knew why (s)he put the Brits on an island. I'm starting to believe that…
- Ekaros 2y ago
  I would say that EU might be accepting, but it will probably take 10 or 20 years of political change. And being much more accepting of EU in general. Also possibly higher integration with things like Euro and Schengen... What is the point accepting someone who would not want to play together.
tzs 2y ago
Did the opposition to Brexit before the referendum campaign all or mostly on why Brexit would be bad, or did they put any significant effort into arguing that even if you were very pro-Brexit you should vote "remain" on that particular referendum because that particular referendum was flawed? The question on the referendum was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" and your choices were "remain" or "leave". The correct referendum would have been something like "Should the United Kingdom (1) prepare a detailed plan for leaving the European Union and negotiate the necessary trade and travel and military agreements between the UK and the EU that implementing the plan would require, and then (2) hold a referendum on whether to enact that plan and ratify the accompanying agreements?" From what I've read a lot of pro-Brexit voters envisioned a quite different Brexit than the one they actually got.
- mmaniac 2y ago
  The beauty of Brexit is that voters could project whatever they wanted onto it.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  It was the former: they campaigned exclusively on why Brexit would be bad. And moreover they argued exclusively that it would be bad due to economic impact. It's not something you ever read here on HN and it's very surprising/unusual, but for people who made their decision based only on the campaigns, hindsight shows that voting Leave was entirely correct and voting Remain was incorrect. You'd never be able to have that level of clarity over something like an election because there's too much vagueness involved, but the specific structure of the Brexit vote and campaigns actually allows an objective evaluation. The reason is that both campaigns made unusually objective and testable claims. On the Remain side they predicted a huge and immediate recession if Leave won due to uncertainty, they predicted enormous "emergency" tax rises to compensate for that, they predicted the UK would not be able to stay in the Horizon research framework, and more generally they predicted that the UK would underperform relative to the rest of Europe due to new trade barriers hurting trade with Europe. On the Leave side they stated the UK would be able to implement an Australian-style points based immigration system, that it would allow for new trade deals, that it would let the membership fees be reallocated to general healthcare spending, that it would allow divergence from EU law and that it would let voters "take back control". Both sides made no specific predictions about what would happen in the Remain case iirc, because that was assumed to be the status quo. Well, Leave did win, and that lets us test these predictions. The 500-800,000 job losses due to an uncertainty-created recession never happened, the UK is still in the Horizon research framework (after leaving and rejoining), and the trade ratio of EU:ROW for the UK hasn't changed. In fact there's been no discernable change in EU/UK trade whatsoever, implying the single market had no benefits. The UK's performance has matched the rest of the EU as well. So basically all their main predictions were wrong. On the Leave side, the UK does now have a points-based immigration system, it does have new trade deals, the membership fees are now being spent on public services instead, the UK is diverging from EU law (albeit slowly), and so on. The main disappointment for Leave voters is that mass immigration ideology proved so strong that the Conservatives chose political suicide and set the points threshold so low that immigration soared instead of reducing, this is technically not a failure by Leave who only campaigned on having a controllable system. The implicit assumption was that politicians would prefer to keep their jobs and set the points threshold high than destroy their own party; this assumption was wrong and now voters are "taking back control" by wiping out the Tories and moving votes to Reform... something that would have previously been impossible (as Reform's manifesto wouldn't have been legal).
orcul 2y ago
There was never a "dream". Just lies and populism.
dave333 2y ago
Given that Northern Ireland is effectively in the EU trade-wise it would make sense for UK to put most of the southern UK into the same state for frictionless trade with the EU, but have areas of the UK that can free trade with the rest of the world. Would mean an internal "border" say from The Wash to the Bristol Channel. Effectively there would be two classes of goods - EU and non-EU - subject to different rules. Or maybe the border could be horizontal - a non-EU layer able to free trade with the rest of the world, and an EU-compliant layer on top. Goods would stay in their own layer unless they cross the non-physical border in some computer system someplace.
oliwarner 2y ago
It was always a lie. And it was so obvious. It pivoted on securing a deal with the EU to get back their buy-in, to maintain previously negotiated treaties in exchange for nothing but spite. And the EU held literally all the cards while idiot "brexiteers" just hamstrung their government by creating arbitrary deadlines _in law_. I almost understand why people voted for it initially but I'm staggered by how many people still believe in it.
heatherlaseur 2y ago
[dead]

28 points by mpweiher 2y ago

>Radical plans to tear EU regulations off Britain’s statute books en masse have already been abandoned. The benefits of buccaneering free trade agreements (FTAs) have proved elusive. Britain's public services, far from receiving a promised boost, have in many cases almost stopped working. The number of people moving to Britain from abroad is higher than ever. It’s not what advocates of Leave had in mind. No, but it's what the establishment who wanted nothing to change and Brexit to fail had in mind.

dave4420 2y ago
Of the three Prime Ministers we’ve had since leaving the EU, two had campaigned for Brexit. (The other was outlasted by a lettuce.) If Conservative Prime Ministers aren’t part of the establishment, who is?
- benwad 2y ago
  We've had four: May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    May was prior to leaving the EU; even if you accept that it left in 2020 (it formally left in Jan 2020, but realistically was still part of the EU for the remainder of the year), she was already gone.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >two had campaigned for Brexit They used it as a marketing trick and got stuck with it when the vote came in. Didn't plan to implement the changes people wanted it for, and didn't.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Has anyone outlasted a Doritos bag?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rsynnott 2y ago
... Eh? Is this the new line now? Brexit was a disaster not because it was an extremely silly idea, but rather due to saboteurs? I mean, I suppose you can tell yourself that if you want, but...
- mjburgess 2y ago
  That was the narrative only weeks after the vote. In realising nothing could be delivered, the saboteur story was invented to shift blame on to some Others. Scapegoating is a story as old as time.
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    On the brightside, this narrative probably contributes to the potential death of the Conservative party today as a plurality of brexit voters are projected to abandon them for Reform. Recent tweet from them: > YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU: Only one party can save Britain from the corrupt establishment. > Today, vote with your HEART and vote for what you TRULY believe in.
    - jfengel 2y ago
      I find it remarkable that, if it really is an existential crisis, it'll be because the Lib Dems outnumber them. Just a decade ago it was a terrible alliance with the Lib Dems that put the Tories in power in the first place, setting up Brexit. All they got in exchange was a failed referendum on alternative voting. They proceeded to get crushed and almost vanished. But here they are, potentially taking over from the Tories. There's some nine dimensional chess for you.
      - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
        > All they got in exchange was a failed referendum on alternative voting Which was sabotaged by the Tories reneging on promises they made to the Lib-dems, and the campaign against it led by Dominic Cummings, using the same "lets spend the money on the NHS instead" lie that he re-used for brexit. The irony that passing this would have potentially saved them from destruction at the hands of Reform UK (and indeed avoided Brexit altogether) is an added delicous irony.

tanepiper 2y ago

"The alter orbis which Great Britain has aspired to be is not simply a world apart from continental Europe but a world embracing non- European continents and islands overseas." - Arnold Toynbee Brexit was always an eventuality, but much like the empire was always going to fail.

maxehmookau 2y ago

Anyone who thought the Brexit dream was going to be anything other than a nightmare was either a fraud, or convinced by one.

jfengel 2y ago
Oddly, it's not nearly the disaster I anticipated. It looks like an ordinary weak economy, the kind you get from time to time. It's certainly a disaster compared to "we hold all the cards", said by a fraud and many were convinced by that fraud. I hope they are coming to understand that relative nightmare and turn out the fraudsters for a very long time. At the end of that time I suspect they'll find themselves mostly not-as-well-off-as-they-could-be, rather than actually poverty stricken and isolated. It'll be the kind of thing economists point to on charts, but not really easy to see in the various economic noise. I hope it's no worse than that. And maybe, just maybe, that somebody somewhere learned something.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > It looks like an ordinary weak economy, the kind you get from time to time. The real question is, can they get out of it? It's one thing to do it for a few years, but, if nothing else, they can't afford to run current budget deficits forever, and they don't have _that_ much scope for increasing revenue other than growing the economy. And really that deficit is with spending lower than it should be; public services are really struggling at this point. Like, in some sense it is an ordinary weak economy, but self-inflicted; the government's own office of budget responsibility reckons they've sacrificed 4% of GDP in the long term. For a developed economy, that's not a small hole to climb out of.
  - fmajid 2y ago
    The weak economy existed before Brexit. The UK under Thatcher replaced industry with financial services chicanery, and never recovered from the 2008 crisis. Now it's even lost its business in money-laundering to Dubai and has to rebuild from scratch. Labour has sensible policies on curbing the NIMBYs, mainly Tories, who block desperately-needed construction or building the power grid needed to transport renewable energy from Scotland to England, and that alone could provide a significant boost to growth for a decade or two if they can deliver.

mmaniac 2y ago

I expect that the UK will end up rejoining the EU on much worse terms than we had before. Sooner or later it'll happen.

Rinzler89 2y ago
I doubt it. Politicians and voters will keep pointing the finger at Switzerland and Norway how they succeeded without the EU and that they can too.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  One of the immediately likely things after the election is for Labour to rejoin various eurpean standards things, like on Chemicals, accepting the EU rules with no direct say in them, just like Norway and Switzerland. > [Labour Chancellor] Reeves said she does not think “anyone voted Leave because they were not happy that chemicals regulations were the same across Europe”,
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    She is correct. I really doubt anyone will care in practice, unless they're conditioned to care.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Thing is, the UK _was_ conditioned to care about this sort of thing, over a period of decades. Remember the bendy bananas? Basically since the UK joined, the UK's media engaged in a sustained campaign to convince people that EU regulations were unreasonable. The EC actually had a website for this at one point: https://web.archive.org/web/20200131192225/https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200131192225/https://blogs.ec....
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        >Remember the bendy bananas? The WHAT?

martinald 2y ago

I've always thought actually Brexit supported the left much more than the right. I think we see that with two of Labour's key manifesto pledges would be either impossible or very difficult to do with EU/SM membership. Firstly - VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Potentially you could argue for some exemption but I think it would be very slow. Secondly - Labour's idea of "nationalising" the UK railways is really at odds with EU policy. Netherlands has an ECJ case pending because they do not allow private operators to bid for at least parts of it. I think this could potentially be mitigated but it is really not the spirit or direction of travel of EU law. I think it's also important to add while a lot of legislation wasn't repealed, a lot of EU legislation is not being added to UK statue books. I think the UK would want to take a very different path on AI regulation vs the EU for example, and had we stayed in would have been a huge point of contention. There is a lot more nuance in this Brexit argument. While I certainly didn't support it, this does not mean everything the EU does is good, especially in tech. There is too much black and white thinking going on with it. I'd also add that EU growth has been exceptionally poor compared to the US. Something is going wrong in Europe as a whole; and I suspect poor quality overregulation by the EU on growth industries is a (potentially small) part of that picture.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago
> VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Given the long history of people the in the UK spouting absolute nonsense about what is or is not possible under EU law, do you have a reliable source for that claim?
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Please see the guidelines[0] on how to treat people. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - reedf1 2y ago
    Seems a reasonable question to me, not cross-examining.

Slava_Propanei 2y ago

[dead]

billy99k 2y ago

[flagged]

mmaniac 2y ago
The Conservatives were in power during the Brexit vote and for the next 8 years. Which leftists obstructed Brexit?
rsynnott 2y ago
The UK had an arguably better deal than everyone else; the UK Rebate. This kind of made sense at the time it was introduced (the UK would have been disadvantaged relative to other large economies without it, due to differences in its economy) but had long since ceased making sense. Due to the UK's veto it was impossible to get rid of it. There's no real prospect that they'd be given it again if they applied to rejoin; that would make no sense.
MattPalmer1086 2y ago
What utter nonsense. We have left the EU. Both the main parties, left and right, say we are not going to rejoin. The only power the EU has over us is the same they have over any external coubtry who wants to trade with them. We can improve our trade deals with the EU and harmonise where it makes sense, instead of burdening business with two parallel sts of regulations and testing regimes. This isn't rejoining the EU.
- billy99k 2y ago
  "The only power the EU has over us is the same they have over any external coubtry who wants to trade with them' My point still stands. As soon as the UK left, they were threatened with horrible trade deals if they ever came back. The anti-brexit supporters seem to show this as a reason why they should have stayed and hate the pro-brexit supporters, rather than hating the EU for the threats in the first place.
  - MattPalmer1086 2y ago
    If they rejoined the single market and customs union they would have the same trade deal as every other member. That's kind of the point of it. Not exactly sure what you are referring to when you suggest we were threatened with horrible trade deals if we ever came back. Can you provide some references?

Detrytus 2y ago

[flagged]

exclusiv 2y ago
Bold statement. Based on what? Being better at tactics everyone would have used in the past if they had the might? Fast forward to today and you can still come up with an easy list of 20 countries that exhibit human rights abuses on their own people on a day to day basis.
SilverBirch 2y ago
This just goes to the core problem of the binary referendum. You might say that Brexit was about a specific set of policy goals that you wanted to pursue once we were out of the EU, but that's not how the vote worked. You got Brexit. You weren't promised any specific policies in the aftermath, or rather to be accurate you were - you were promised a plethora of inconsistent, contradictory and mutually exclusive policies. You got Liam Fox's easiest trade deal ever, you got Dan Hannan's "absolutely nobody is suggesting we would give up our position in the free market in Europe". You got your Canada plus and your Norway minus. You took back control on immigration! May I suggest, given that what you were told in the lead up to the referendum was clearly self-contradictory nonsense, we might have predicted exactly this implementation.

lucozade 2y ago

> Sorry Boris, your Euroskeptic vision has failed in so many ways. > Boris Johnson is out of parliament, making millions from speeches and newspaper columns. I'm pretty sure Boris thinks he succeeded just fine. The rest of the country, not so much. > All the key Vote Leave characters have left the stage. I get why you'd want to try to forget about Nigel Farage but the article even has a graph showing how spectacularly Reform is surging in the polls. They'll probably not quite get to the level they need to take a chunk of seats, as their voters are probably quite spread out, but if they get anything close to these numbers in the vote today, that would be pretty impressive. Politically at least.

rsynnott 2y ago
Well, yeah, they basically say it in the office; Boris got to be famous, and paid millions, which is, one assumes, what he was going for in the first place. The idea that he was doing any of this out of deeply-held principles always seemed... a bit naive.
- beej71 2y ago
  Speaking as someone in the US, I certainly recognize the theme. Apparently quite effective, historically-speaking.
- fmajid 2y ago
  Boris picked Brexit as a vehicle to unseat his buddy Cameron, and couldn't care about the consequences for ordinary Brits. It was a hugely cynical choice, but entirely rational. Sunak, on the other hand, was a true believer. Yes, he may be disciplined and hard-working the way Johnson never could be, but there is nothing quite as destructive as a diligent moron.

draw_down 2y ago

[dead]

SilverBirch 2y ago

I think in some ways Labour is going to deliver Brexit in a way that the Tories just couldn't. All the promises that Brexiteers made were the upside of deals, but without the willingness to pay the cost. Yes, our regulations could diverge and in some cases we might have good reason to. But Brexiteers want frictionless trade, and you can't diverge and have no friction. So we just didn't chose. We didn't diverge, because that would be too difficult, but we also didn't take diverging off the table because that was meant to be our big chance! So labour will decide, they'll decide to align on some rules in exchange for reducing some friction. That is what Brexit meant. It meant tearing up the deal we had with the EU. Now it's torn up, we have to get on with deciding what our new relationship should be.

sdwr 2y ago
Middle ground? Unheard of! I think you're supposed to be telling me which side eats babies.

tempodox 2y ago

What a bloody mess. > “The EU doesn't want us back," he said. While I doubt the veracity of this statement, there's a saying on the continent that God knew why (s)he put the Brits on an island. I'm starting to believe that…

Ekaros 2y ago
I would say that EU might be accepting, but it will probably take 10 or 20 years of political change. And being much more accepting of EU in general. Also possibly higher integration with things like Euro and Schengen... What is the point accepting someone who would not want to play together.

tzs 2y ago

Did the opposition to Brexit before the referendum campaign all or mostly on why Brexit would be bad, or did they put any significant effort into arguing that even if you were very pro-Brexit you should vote "remain" on that particular referendum because that particular referendum was flawed? The question on the referendum was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" and your choices were "remain" or "leave". The correct referendum would have been something like "Should the United Kingdom (1) prepare a detailed plan for leaving the European Union and negotiate the necessary trade and travel and military agreements between the UK and the EU that implementing the plan would require, and then (2) hold a referendum on whether to enact that plan and ratify the accompanying agreements?" From what I've read a lot of pro-Brexit voters envisioned a quite different Brexit than the one they actually got.

mmaniac 2y ago
The beauty of Brexit is that voters could project whatever they wanted onto it.
mike_hearn 2y ago
It was the former: they campaigned exclusively on why Brexit would be bad. And moreover they argued exclusively that it would be bad due to economic impact. It's not something you ever read here on HN and it's very surprising/unusual, but for people who made their decision based only on the campaigns, hindsight shows that voting Leave was entirely correct and voting Remain was incorrect. You'd never be able to have that level of clarity over something like an election because there's too much vagueness involved, but the specific structure of the Brexit vote and campaigns actually allows an objective evaluation. The reason is that both campaigns made unusually objective and testable claims. On the Remain side they predicted a huge and immediate recession if Leave won due to uncertainty, they predicted enormous "emergency" tax rises to compensate for that, they predicted the UK would not be able to stay in the Horizon research framework, and more generally they predicted that the UK would underperform relative to the rest of Europe due to new trade barriers hurting trade with Europe. On the Leave side they stated the UK would be able to implement an Australian-style points based immigration system, that it would allow for new trade deals, that it would let the membership fees be reallocated to general healthcare spending, that it would allow divergence from EU law and that it would let voters "take back control". Both sides made no specific predictions about what would happen in the Remain case iirc, because that was assumed to be the status quo. Well, Leave did win, and that lets us test these predictions. The 500-800,000 job losses due to an uncertainty-created recession never happened, the UK is still in the Horizon research framework (after leaving and rejoining), and the trade ratio of EU:ROW for the UK hasn't changed. In fact there's been no discernable change in EU/UK trade whatsoever, implying the single market had no benefits. The UK's performance has matched the rest of the EU as well. So basically all their main predictions were wrong. On the Leave side, the UK does now have a points-based immigration system, it does have new trade deals, the membership fees are now being spent on public services instead, the UK is diverging from EU law (albeit slowly), and so on. The main disappointment for Leave voters is that mass immigration ideology proved so strong that the Conservatives chose political suicide and set the points threshold so low that immigration soared instead of reducing, this is technically not a failure by Leave who only campaigned on having a controllable system. The implicit assumption was that politicians would prefer to keep their jobs and set the points threshold high than destroy their own party; this assumption was wrong and now voters are "taking back control" by wiping out the Tories and moving votes to Reform... something that would have previously been impossible (as Reform's manifesto wouldn't have been legal).

orcul 2y ago

There was never a "dream". Just lies and populism.

dave333 2y ago

Given that Northern Ireland is effectively in the EU trade-wise it would make sense for UK to put most of the southern UK into the same state for frictionless trade with the EU, but have areas of the UK that can free trade with the rest of the world. Would mean an internal "border" say from The Wash to the Bristol Channel. Effectively there would be two classes of goods - EU and non-EU - subject to different rules. Or maybe the border could be horizontal - a non-EU layer able to free trade with the rest of the world, and an EU-compliant layer on top. Goods would stay in their own layer unless they cross the non-physical border in some computer system someplace.

oliwarner 2y ago

It was always a lie. And it was so obvious. It pivoted on securing a deal with the EU to get back their buy-in, to maintain previously negotiated treaties in exchange for nothing but spite. And the EU held literally all the cards while idiot "brexiteers" just hamstrung their government by creating arbitrary deadlines _in law_. I almost understand why people voted for it initially but I'm staggered by how many people still believe in it.

heatherlaseur 2y ago

[dead]