5 ms·

Brexit Ten Years On: The Economy

59 points by mooreds 5mo ago

Zigurd 5mo ago
Just when the UK thought they had done the biggest self own in history, 'Merica says hold muh beer.
- water-data-dude 5mo ago
  America can do anything the UK can do, but bigger and better!
  - ako 5mo ago
    Makes me think of Peter Tosh: "Anything you can do, I can do it better, I'm the toughest".
    - bryanrasmussen 5mo ago
      Anything you can do I can do better just makes me think of Annie Oakley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO23WBji_Z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO23WBji_Z0
  - IAmBroom 5mo ago
    And Texas will double down on that claim for themselves. They even disconnected from the (essentially) country-wide power networks, so they could build something Texan... from which several people die every cold snap.
- lenerdenator 5mo ago
  I still wouldn't put it at the level of Brexit. The US actually has enough weight as an economy to have some bargaining power at trade negotiations. Now, whether the negotiator is working in good faith or not is another matter, but if the US suddenly stopped doing business with an individual country, it would likely cause the other side at least some problems. The UK does not have the weight the US does, and sanctioned itself from all of its largest trading partners in one stroke. If it wants back into the EU (which would likely be the smart thing to do), serious concessions will have to be made. Like, "How much do you really like the pound sterling?" concessions. Also, Reform's gaining steam, so those concessions are unlikely to be given.
  - ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
    > I still wouldn't put it at the level of Brexit. Perhaps not yet, but we have at minimum 2 and a half years of the Trump Family Circus to contend with, and they've gotten a lot destroyed in what time they've had so far. And, Trump isn't the real problem. Anti-intellectualism here has hit it's zenith. Fully a third of our country is so propagandized and media-illiterate that they can't really be said to share a reality with the rest of us anymore. I don't know how we can fix this. Talk radio, Fox News, and social media may well have damaged our civil life beyond repair. And they're still doing it.
    - lenerdenator 5mo ago
      Oh, they've got that there too. GB News, TikTok, all the rest.
      - ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
        And largely owned by the same fucking people, to boot. Hey maybe letting like 30 people have as much money as some sovereign nations was a bad idea guys...
    - pstuart 5mo ago
      One can take some hope that Germany recovered from its descent into fascism. But that was in a time where there was no social media and other brainwashing technologies embedded into the population. My hopes are tempered, to say the least.
      - lenerdenator 5mo ago
        They also had 45 years of being split in half with one side being under a totalitarian government, and the other being partially administrated by three other countries with troops stationed there and the threat of thermonuclear war should ever the two sides get in a disagreement. Also, many of the same ills that caused fascism the first time are starting to re-emerge. You can see this in the rise of AfD.
  - 5mo ago
vrganj 5mo ago
We miss you, British friends. Come back home! <3 In related news: > A British poll shows that a new Brexit referendum would reverse the vote that led to Britain’s departure from the European Union a decade ago. Fifty-two per cent of Britons think the UK should rejoin the EU, according to an Ipsos survey of 1,137 British adults conducted between May 14 and May 20. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/new-referendum-would-flip-brexit-result-10-years-on-poll-finds https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/new-referendum-wou...
- mr_sturd 5mo ago
  If there were another vote, the media circus, and manipulation via social media would make sure we stay out.
  - frereubu 5mo ago
    I'm not as sure as you about the result, but I do agree that the campaigning would be absolutely awful to go through, and would reopen a lot of really deep wounds on all sides. It's all very well saying you'd like to rejoin when someone asks you on the street, but an entirely different thing if there was a months-long campaign to have to get through.
    - rtkwe 5mo ago
      Not even that but one of the major issues with the first referendum was that Brexit was ill defined so the pro camp was able to promise basically anything as the final status and everyone had a different idea of what the actual outcome would be. Any vote without the actual final deal on the table or at least a guarantee that the final deal will get a vote will kind of inevitably lead to the same "wait I voted for that?!" that happened when the Real Brexit (tm) finally came out. I'm almost certain that the final Brexit would not have been approved and pretty equally certain people would be vastly unhappy with the requirement to rejoin.
  - mytailorisrich 5mo ago
    Considering how the EU and the UK have evolved, I suspect that today staying out of the EU would get more votes than Brexit did back in 2016.
rm445 5mo ago
The EU has mildly outperformed the UK in overall economic growth by perhaps 1 percentage point over the last 5-6 years, i.e. ~7% vs ~6%. While of course both massively underperformed the USA. It's hard to avoid concluding that the actual effects of Brexit have been smaller than this kind of analysis suggests, and while we squabble about such things our countries are missing opportunity after opportunity.
- mugivarra69 5mo ago
  [dead]
- LikesPwsh 5mo ago
  Brexit harming the growth of both UK and EU is another perfectly valid interpretation of those numbers. I'm sure there's a little truth to both, and noise from all kinds of other factors.
  - AlexandrB 5mo ago
    I don't know about that. Canada also tracked the UK more closely than the US and it was not involved in Brexit[1]. The US just did really well during this time. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2024&locations=CA-US-GB-DE&start=2004 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2024...
  - Zigurd 5mo ago
    It's not all noise. Being able to live, work, or study anywhere in the Schengen zone has tremendous value. But it doesn't show up in GDP numbers. Brexit harmed the young people of UK, and they hate it.
    - mytailorisrich 5mo ago
      Regarding the UK specifically, very few people chose to study in the EU when they could while many in the EU wanted to study in the UK. British unis are a huge asset to the country that also brings a lot of money from foreign students. Same for young people wanting to come work in UK/London. Frankly, I think the "harm" done to young British people is vastly overblown and more symbolic than actual.
nostrademons 5mo ago
It's almost like the academics who said that free-trade and globalization were net benefits to the economy were right, and then reversing globalization and shutting borders simply reverses those gains. The interesting part is that while the benefits of globalization were not evenly distributed (part of the reason for the populist backlash against it), reversing it does not seem to benefit the people who were harmed by it. Maybe somebody who actually lives there can correct me, but the working class has seemingly not been lifted back into the middle class just because borders were closed. The factories have not come back. Instead it seems like capital owners benefitted most handsomely from globalization, and then de-globalization just entrenches their gains. And in terms of material gains and consumption, people just do without and all end up poorer. Important lessons for America, which is about to embark on its own de-globalization adventure.
- _HMCB_ 5mo ago
  I like the first part of your username. Not so much the latter.
- kev009 5mo ago
  The term globalization is doing a lot of work in this comment, what does it mean to you?
  - nostrademons 5mo ago
    The idea that governments should get out of the way of free trade across borders, and that the policies they make only serve to make the economy less efficient. The backdrop for the economy should be the world, and not the nation. Within it, firms should feel free to transact with whoever gets the job done best.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - foxygen 5mo ago
      Are we pretending the US/NATO hasn't been interfering with the world's economy for the past decades? Or free trade here means the US being the sheriff of the world, forcing everyone else to use their currency, and bringing "freedom and democracy" to whoever thinks of challenging that?
grahar64 5mo ago
"The question was never whether this would involve costs" Brexit was sold as being positive for the economy. The proponents drove a bus around saying they would get 350 million back. It was largely advertised as a net positive for the economy
- pyeri 5mo ago
  It was totally a rigged referendum, that bus hoarding propaganda somehow worked and the masses fell for the lies. But a great number didn't and it was barely lost by a few percentage points. David Cameron should have stayed and battled it out instead of resigning.
  - kayo_20211030 5mo ago
    David Cameron may be the biggest idiot in almost 300 years of British Prime Ministers, and there's been a few beauties. He really could have done a better job with the whole referendum business. Up/Down only. No "by a majority of...". No requirement for a second referendum on the terms of the disengagement agreement. Asking him to stay around would have been like asking the driver that drove you over the cliff to drive you home. And then there was that other beauty, Boris!
    - rich_sasha 5mo ago
      The other misses opportunity was to require a majority from all the UK's constituent countries. One argument against Scottish independence vote just 2 (!) years prior was that Scotland would lose membership in the EU. And they really like this one it seems, with 62% voting to remain. But since they're only 8% of the population and apparently don't count, they instead got Brexited against their will. Similar with Northern Ireland and, I suppose, Good Friday agreement. Wales voted to leave, for some reason. Maybe they hoped one of the weekly hospital builds would happen there.
      - tim333 5mo ago
        I think it should have been at least a two stage process. First vote do you want to leave? Second vote after figuring out the details of hard/soft etc. go back to the voters with - so this is the deal, do you want it? The second likely would have been a no.
RishiByte 5mo ago
[flagged]
shevy-java 5mo ago
"Services firms, especially in regulated sectors, lost important market access rights. Free movement ended." You mean Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson lied to the people? I am ... shocked. Ok not really. The strange thing is that Nigel keeps on lying - and people still (!!!) buy his lies. It is a fascinating case study. I concede that Nigel is good at rhetorics, but it also seems as if people want to be lied to. Otherwise they would have realised they were duped. For the other EU member states, having UK no longer torpedo decisions, is actually great. The EU is way too huge anyway - and sadly, wants to expand more and more. That's also going to lead to a break up situation. And populists such as Nigel will take advantage of that (if the UK were in the EU).
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
tremarley 5mo ago
Some would say Brexit - January 31, 2020 is the UK's independence day.
- IAmBroom 5mo ago
  As munksbeer posted... https://www.reaction.life/p/britain-looks-like-brexit https://www.reaction.life/p/britain-looks-like-brexit It's /s, BTW.
Uhhrrr 5mo ago
For comparison, Remain advocates predicted a fall in GDP of 3.6-6.0%: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/brexit-would-put-our-economy-in-serious-danger-article-by-david-cameron-and-george-osborne https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/brexit-would-put-our-...
- MagnumOpus 5mo ago
  So it seems like they have been spot on? TFA quotes the OBR as estimating a 4% negative impact and the CEFR estimate of -5.5% cumulative impact.
  - Uhhrrr 5mo ago
    I should mention that the Remain advocate estimates of 3.6-6.0 were for a time frame of two years: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hm-treasury-analysis-the-immediate-economic-impact-of-leaving-the-eu https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hm-treasury-analy...
  - mike_hearn 5mo ago
    There has been no negative impact. Every claim of negative impact falls apart when investigated. I wrote about one example on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473246 The actual data doesn't support any of these estimates. Note the response of the guy I was arguing with. Faced with the reality that the sources he/she trusted are lying, they rejected the honest source they asked for because of "bias". This kind of motivated reasoning is everywhere in this debate. Quite annoying.
haaz 5mo ago
Glad to see that people on hackernews know more about the costs of EU regulation than Jim Ratcliffe, James Dyson, Tim Martin etc. Just look at the AI act, GDPR, and how the EU shot their tech sector in the foot with these. If being in the EU was so great then why don't Norway or Switzerland join? I am an EU citizen and it is extremely convenient in my personal life (common currency, no visas, my sim card works everywhere) but I'm also aware that the most effective governments are city states such as Singapore or heavily decentralized states like UAE, Switzerland, Denmark, even China and up until recently the US and UK. The EU creates far more regulations, red tape, and friction than the single market removes, and tying the fate of the UK to dying economies like Germany and France does no one any good.
- soco 5mo ago
  ...heavily decentralized Switzerland...? What does this even mean? Care to explain, if there is anything to explain of course? And no-regulations Switzerland? I don't know the other countries but if at least one example is completely imaginary, the rest kinda lose their strength in my view.
- jsbisviewtiful 5mo ago
  > If being in the EU was so great then why don't Norway or Switzerland join? I'm not an economist nor am I an European citizen, but both of those countries have very successful and wealthy economies. It doesn't seem necessary or advantageous for them to join the EU as, if anything, introducing a second currency and new laws that are tied to many other countries' prosperity would just risk destabilization. If the situation for either country changes in the future, it might make more sense for them to join at that point, but as of the moment they have no need or widespread desire to. Last I heard, Switzerland is even voting on whether to cap their population, which would prob not fly in the EU.
- zoenolan 5mo ago
  > If being in the EU was so great, then why don't Norway or Switzerland join? https://www.ft.com/content/5c8a871f-9a49-45f4-9ac0-543a608a5a9d https://www.ft.com/content/5c8a871f-9a49-45f4-9ac0-543a608a5... https://archive.is/dCYJG https://archive.is/dCYJG
elAhmo 5mo ago
Good read for people in the future reading this and seeing so many comments that imply Brexit wasn’t that bad. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/14/how-uk-economy-changed-since-brexit-vote-charts https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/14/how-uk-econ...

59 points by mooreds 5mo ago

Zigurd 5mo ago

Just when the UK thought they had done the biggest self own in history, 'Merica says hold muh beer.

water-data-dude 5mo ago
America can do anything the UK can do, but bigger and better!
- ako 5mo ago
  Makes me think of Peter Tosh: "Anything you can do, I can do it better, I'm the toughest".
  - bryanrasmussen 5mo ago
    Anything you can do I can do better just makes me think of Annie Oakley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO23WBji_Z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO23WBji_Z0
- IAmBroom 5mo ago
  And Texas will double down on that claim for themselves. They even disconnected from the (essentially) country-wide power networks, so they could build something Texan... from which several people die every cold snap.
lenerdenator 5mo ago
I still wouldn't put it at the level of Brexit. The US actually has enough weight as an economy to have some bargaining power at trade negotiations. Now, whether the negotiator is working in good faith or not is another matter, but if the US suddenly stopped doing business with an individual country, it would likely cause the other side at least some problems. The UK does not have the weight the US does, and sanctioned itself from all of its largest trading partners in one stroke. If it wants back into the EU (which would likely be the smart thing to do), serious concessions will have to be made. Like, "How much do you really like the pound sterling?" concessions. Also, Reform's gaining steam, so those concessions are unlikely to be given.
- ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
  > I still wouldn't put it at the level of Brexit. Perhaps not yet, but we have at minimum 2 and a half years of the Trump Family Circus to contend with, and they've gotten a lot destroyed in what time they've had so far. And, Trump isn't the real problem. Anti-intellectualism here has hit it's zenith. Fully a third of our country is so propagandized and media-illiterate that they can't really be said to share a reality with the rest of us anymore. I don't know how we can fix this. Talk radio, Fox News, and social media may well have damaged our civil life beyond repair. And they're still doing it.
  - lenerdenator 5mo ago
    Oh, they've got that there too. GB News, TikTok, all the rest.
    - ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
      And largely owned by the same fucking people, to boot. Hey maybe letting like 30 people have as much money as some sovereign nations was a bad idea guys...
  - pstuart 5mo ago
    One can take some hope that Germany recovered from its descent into fascism. But that was in a time where there was no social media and other brainwashing technologies embedded into the population. My hopes are tempered, to say the least.
    - lenerdenator 5mo ago
      They also had 45 years of being split in half with one side being under a totalitarian government, and the other being partially administrated by three other countries with troops stationed there and the threat of thermonuclear war should ever the two sides get in a disagreement. Also, many of the same ills that caused fascism the first time are starting to re-emerge. You can see this in the rise of AfD.
- 5mo ago

vrganj 5mo ago

We miss you, British friends. Come back home! <3 In related news: > A British poll shows that a new Brexit referendum would reverse the vote that led to Britain’s departure from the European Union a decade ago. Fifty-two per cent of Britons think the UK should rejoin the EU, according to an Ipsos survey of 1,137 British adults conducted between May 14 and May 20. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/new-referendum-would-flip-brexit-result-10-years-on-poll-finds https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/new-referendum-wou...

mr_sturd 5mo ago
If there were another vote, the media circus, and manipulation via social media would make sure we stay out.
- frereubu 5mo ago
  I'm not as sure as you about the result, but I do agree that the campaigning would be absolutely awful to go through, and would reopen a lot of really deep wounds on all sides. It's all very well saying you'd like to rejoin when someone asks you on the street, but an entirely different thing if there was a months-long campaign to have to get through.
  - rtkwe 5mo ago
    Not even that but one of the major issues with the first referendum was that Brexit was ill defined so the pro camp was able to promise basically anything as the final status and everyone had a different idea of what the actual outcome would be. Any vote without the actual final deal on the table or at least a guarantee that the final deal will get a vote will kind of inevitably lead to the same "wait I voted for that?!" that happened when the Real Brexit (tm) finally came out. I'm almost certain that the final Brexit would not have been approved and pretty equally certain people would be vastly unhappy with the requirement to rejoin.
- mytailorisrich 5mo ago
  Considering how the EU and the UK have evolved, I suspect that today staying out of the EU would get more votes than Brexit did back in 2016.

rm445 5mo ago

The EU has mildly outperformed the UK in overall economic growth by perhaps 1 percentage point over the last 5-6 years, i.e. ~7% vs ~6%. While of course both massively underperformed the USA. It's hard to avoid concluding that the actual effects of Brexit have been smaller than this kind of analysis suggests, and while we squabble about such things our countries are missing opportunity after opportunity.

mugivarra69 5mo ago
[dead]
LikesPwsh 5mo ago
Brexit harming the growth of both UK and EU is another perfectly valid interpretation of those numbers. I'm sure there's a little truth to both, and noise from all kinds of other factors.
- AlexandrB 5mo ago
  I don't know about that. Canada also tracked the UK more closely than the US and it was not involved in Brexit[1]. The US just did really well during this time. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2024&locations=CA-US-GB-DE&start=2004 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2024...
- Zigurd 5mo ago
  It's not all noise. Being able to live, work, or study anywhere in the Schengen zone has tremendous value. But it doesn't show up in GDP numbers. Brexit harmed the young people of UK, and they hate it.
  - mytailorisrich 5mo ago
    Regarding the UK specifically, very few people chose to study in the EU when they could while many in the EU wanted to study in the UK. British unis are a huge asset to the country that also brings a lot of money from foreign students. Same for young people wanting to come work in UK/London. Frankly, I think the "harm" done to young British people is vastly overblown and more symbolic than actual.

nostrademons 5mo ago

It's almost like the academics who said that free-trade and globalization were net benefits to the economy were right, and then reversing globalization and shutting borders simply reverses those gains. The interesting part is that while the benefits of globalization were not evenly distributed (part of the reason for the populist backlash against it), reversing it does not seem to benefit the people who were harmed by it. Maybe somebody who actually lives there can correct me, but the working class has seemingly not been lifted back into the middle class just because borders were closed. The factories have not come back. Instead it seems like capital owners benefitted most handsomely from globalization, and then de-globalization just entrenches their gains. And in terms of material gains and consumption, people just do without and all end up poorer. Important lessons for America, which is about to embark on its own de-globalization adventure.

_HMCB_ 5mo ago
I like the first part of your username. Not so much the latter.
kev009 5mo ago
The term globalization is doing a lot of work in this comment, what does it mean to you?
- nostrademons 5mo ago
  The idea that governments should get out of the way of free trade across borders, and that the policies they make only serve to make the economy less efficient. The backdrop for the economy should be the world, and not the nation. Within it, firms should feel free to transact with whoever gets the job done best.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - foxygen 5mo ago
    Are we pretending the US/NATO hasn't been interfering with the world's economy for the past decades? Or free trade here means the US being the sheriff of the world, forcing everyone else to use their currency, and bringing "freedom and democracy" to whoever thinks of challenging that?

grahar64 5mo ago

"The question was never whether this would involve costs" Brexit was sold as being positive for the economy. The proponents drove a bus around saying they would get 350 million back. It was largely advertised as a net positive for the economy

pyeri 5mo ago
It was totally a rigged referendum, that bus hoarding propaganda somehow worked and the masses fell for the lies. But a great number didn't and it was barely lost by a few percentage points. David Cameron should have stayed and battled it out instead of resigning.
- kayo_20211030 5mo ago
  David Cameron may be the biggest idiot in almost 300 years of British Prime Ministers, and there's been a few beauties. He really could have done a better job with the whole referendum business. Up/Down only. No "by a majority of...". No requirement for a second referendum on the terms of the disengagement agreement. Asking him to stay around would have been like asking the driver that drove you over the cliff to drive you home. And then there was that other beauty, Boris!
  - rich_sasha 5mo ago
    The other misses opportunity was to require a majority from all the UK's constituent countries. One argument against Scottish independence vote just 2 (!) years prior was that Scotland would lose membership in the EU. And they really like this one it seems, with 62% voting to remain. But since they're only 8% of the population and apparently don't count, they instead got Brexited against their will. Similar with Northern Ireland and, I suppose, Good Friday agreement. Wales voted to leave, for some reason. Maybe they hoped one of the weekly hospital builds would happen there.
    - tim333 5mo ago
      I think it should have been at least a two stage process. First vote do you want to leave? Second vote after figuring out the details of hard/soft etc. go back to the voters with - so this is the deal, do you want it? The second likely would have been a no.

RishiByte 5mo ago

[flagged]

shevy-java 5mo ago

"Services firms, especially in regulated sectors, lost important market access rights. Free movement ended." You mean Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson lied to the people? I am ... shocked. Ok not really. The strange thing is that Nigel keeps on lying - and people still (!!!) buy his lies. It is a fascinating case study. I concede that Nigel is good at rhetorics, but it also seems as if people want to be lied to. Otherwise they would have realised they were duped. For the other EU member states, having UK no longer torpedo decisions, is actually great. The EU is way too huge anyway - and sadly, wants to expand more and more. That's also going to lead to a break up situation. And populists such as Nigel will take advantage of that (if the UK were in the EU).

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

tremarley 5mo ago

Some would say Brexit - January 31, 2020 is the UK's independence day.

IAmBroom 5mo ago
As munksbeer posted... https://www.reaction.life/p/britain-looks-like-brexit https://www.reaction.life/p/britain-looks-like-brexit It's /s, BTW.

Uhhrrr 5mo ago

For comparison, Remain advocates predicted a fall in GDP of 3.6-6.0%: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/brexit-would-put-our-economy-in-serious-danger-article-by-david-cameron-and-george-osborne https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/brexit-would-put-our-...

MagnumOpus 5mo ago
So it seems like they have been spot on? TFA quotes the OBR as estimating a 4% negative impact and the CEFR estimate of -5.5% cumulative impact.
- Uhhrrr 5mo ago
  I should mention that the Remain advocate estimates of 3.6-6.0 were for a time frame of two years: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hm-treasury-analysis-the-immediate-economic-impact-of-leaving-the-eu https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hm-treasury-analy...
- mike_hearn 5mo ago
  There has been no negative impact. Every claim of negative impact falls apart when investigated. I wrote about one example on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473246 The actual data doesn't support any of these estimates. Note the response of the guy I was arguing with. Faced with the reality that the sources he/she trusted are lying, they rejected the honest source they asked for because of "bias". This kind of motivated reasoning is everywhere in this debate. Quite annoying.

haaz 5mo ago

Glad to see that people on hackernews know more about the costs of EU regulation than Jim Ratcliffe, James Dyson, Tim Martin etc. Just look at the AI act, GDPR, and how the EU shot their tech sector in the foot with these. If being in the EU was so great then why don't Norway or Switzerland join? I am an EU citizen and it is extremely convenient in my personal life (common currency, no visas, my sim card works everywhere) but I'm also aware that the most effective governments are city states such as Singapore or heavily decentralized states like UAE, Switzerland, Denmark, even China and up until recently the US and UK. The EU creates far more regulations, red tape, and friction than the single market removes, and tying the fate of the UK to dying economies like Germany and France does no one any good.

soco 5mo ago
...heavily decentralized Switzerland...? What does this even mean? Care to explain, if there is anything to explain of course? And no-regulations Switzerland? I don't know the other countries but if at least one example is completely imaginary, the rest kinda lose their strength in my view.
jsbisviewtiful 5mo ago
> If being in the EU was so great then why don't Norway or Switzerland join? I'm not an economist nor am I an European citizen, but both of those countries have very successful and wealthy economies. It doesn't seem necessary or advantageous for them to join the EU as, if anything, introducing a second currency and new laws that are tied to many other countries' prosperity would just risk destabilization. If the situation for either country changes in the future, it might make more sense for them to join at that point, but as of the moment they have no need or widespread desire to. Last I heard, Switzerland is even voting on whether to cap their population, which would prob not fly in the EU.
zoenolan 5mo ago
> If being in the EU was so great, then why don't Norway or Switzerland join? https://www.ft.com/content/5c8a871f-9a49-45f4-9ac0-543a608a5a9d https://www.ft.com/content/5c8a871f-9a49-45f4-9ac0-543a608a5... https://archive.is/dCYJG https://archive.is/dCYJG

elAhmo 5mo ago

Good read for people in the future reading this and seeing so many comments that imply Brexit wasn’t that bad. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/14/how-uk-economy-changed-since-brexit-vote-charts https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/14/how-uk-econ...