On the other hand, if EE have to pay interconnection and transit costs to other operators, why shouldn't they be able to charge that to their customers?
This is so sad to watch all this happening. We had decades of growing closer together and then some power-hungry nutjobs undid all that again within just a few years.
It's extremely depressing talking to people about Brexit,
It's turned into a belief system and to question it is almost(maybe the same!!) like saying your religion is wrong
No matter how logical I am in trying to discuss the pros and cons, the conversation will invarably go to the statement - you just don't know the real impact yet
followed by a virtual fingers in the ear when discussing facts, then followed by them saying lets change the subject.
It's somehow been internalised to a degree that peoples existance depends on it working and them being right
> to a degree that peoples existance depends on it
That's because for many, it actually does. If "project fear" turns out to be right, a lot of people will get poor - and more importantly, they will have to admit that they were wrong, which is absolutely unconceivable and shameful in the pub-culture shouting match that political debate has turned into after the '80s.
from my angle yes, zero, nothing not one proper conversation
I tried many time to talk anyone about the logic, nothing
after the vote the same.
and I'm not really an emotional person at all, but I realised early on this was emotional subject. I just wanted to understand the facts and the reasons
This has the potential to go off the rails very quickly.
51% of the electorate who voted 5 years ago said they wished to leave the EU. This is absolutely true.
The nuance here is that of that 51%, their reasons for voting to leave and their intended/desired future arrangement with the EU was not uniform. Some wished to maintain close ties (common market, freedom of movement, regulatory alignment etc), others wanted a clean break from everything, and a spectrum of opinion in between the two
Brexit was many things to many different people. It’s this ambiguity and room for manoeuvre in defining what exactly “Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union” is, which has been seized upon by the power-hungry, who are a minority of all Brexiteers, but a sizeable portion of the Eurosceptic MPs of the Conservative party at the time.
It appears obvious that Cameron intended the referendum to silence the eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party once and for all, as the Alternative Vote referendum did to reform of “first past the post” in the previous administration.
This backfired on him spectacularly. And he resigned immediately once the gambit failed.
But even in the "best case" where 51% voted to remain it would still have not settled the conflict. It was essentially 50/50 and that's not a clear vote for anything.
The UK was (is?) deeply split on what relationship it wants with Europe.
I agree completely with you. Personally, the referendum in my opinion should have been "Remain in the EU" vs "Clear defined vision for what we want after leaving the EU", literally any of the definitions of it; "hard brexit", or "soft brexit". That would have killed the ambiguity, and would have ensured that any the end result of such a referendum would carry the support of all the people who voted to leave.
I don't think a yes/no vote on a complex issue where there was blatant propaganda (bordering on misinformation) in support of either side really tells you much about how citizens feel about the actual complexities of case.
Phrased differently: no.
I do believe the UK is deeply split on whether to believe certain media/politicians though.
Source on the lies? I always hear these types of things on HN, but nobody seems to ever back it up. We get it, you didn't want Brexit, but that doesn't mean I'm going to blindly believe that the Leave campaign was full of liars.
I don't think I'll be taking GQ's opinion on politics seriously. That first link is very interesting -- it seems to show that Brexit is pretty much a mixed bag.
Here's one. (Only just read your response. Sorry.)
"There will be no change for EU citizens already lawfully resident in the UK. These EU citizens will automatically be granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK and will be treated no less favourably than they are at present."
(Signed Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Michael Gove. June 1st 2016.)
This one is pertinent as the deadline for "Settled Status" is looming. Johnson could pass a law honouring his promise to 17 million Leave voters who were reassured by his promise that their friends and family would not even have to apply for permanent residency in the UK, but hasn't.
It's easy and simplistic to blame individual "nutjobs" or "the media" for brexit happening. As if the huge numbers of brexit-voters were simple folk who got bamboozled. Far more difficult to accept that working-class people did actually know what they were voting for?
It feels like we're living in the Truman Show [0]. The script-writing is getting ever more bizarre. The British public just seems to be coasting along unquestioning, while the rest of the world looks on ever more incredulously.
I was lucky enough to spend the first 10 years of my career working abroad for 90% of the time, with zero hassle with visas etc. It's a shame that this sort of thing will be a complete and utter nightmare now.
The right-wing talk radio hosts in the UK are still utterly convinced that brexit has been a success.
I struggle so hard to understand that perspective. I don't see how anything good has happened as a result.
We now have:
- a shortage of workers from the EU
- harder to buy things from europe
- harder to sell things to europe
- more red tape when trying to drive in europe
- higher insurance costs when going to europe
- no rights to live or work in europe
- thousands of EU citizens yet to apply for settled status and will be liable for expulsion
- zero extra money for our health service
- more expensive mobile phone costs
and that's just what I can think off from the top of my head.
But also a much higher vaccination rate. Probably a few thousands more of your compatriots would have died had you followed the EU vaccination program, don't forget that.
An internal trade border within the UK that has directly triggered a multi-day arson-involved protest in the bit of the country that no longer has unfettered trade with the capital.
I was/am anti-brexit but I have to admit things are nowhere near as bad as people were saying it would be by now. As far as I can tell the UK is if anything doing better than the EU on multiple metrics currently.
Really? I was a pessimist on Brexit but not in my wildest dream did I expect stuff to get as bad. I thought they would end up like Norway. But they have basically no alignment right now. It’s harder to trade with the UK than Canada.
I've ordered stuff from the UK, even though I was told I won't be able to. I can go back to live there with little problem if I want despite being told otherwise. They did so much better at vaccinating because the EU didn't screw things for them like for all the member nations etc.
Maybe it will get worse but the anti-brexit campaigns at the time painted a much much more negative picture than what I am seeing.
> I've ordered stuff from the UK, even though I was told I won't be able to.
Who said you can’t. I also ordered there but stopped doing because customs handling adds high fees now. I get charged a flat 10 EUR on top of every order and 20% VAT. Many online stores already charge me UK VAT first so I end up paying VAT twice and the refunding process is burdensome.
> I can go back to live there with little problem if I want despite being told otherwise.
Lucky you. I’m a EU citizen and either in the UK for a few years. I’m not settled and I can’t go back. I would need a corporate visa sponsor and would end up coupled to said employer with no legal protections.
> They did so much better at vaccinating because the EU didn't screw things for them like for all the member nations etc.
Maybe. But right now we’re pretty even and the situation looks better in the EU. Definitely have more freedoms than my British friends right now.
I have yet to see something positive to come out of Brexit. Even the good vaccination program happened while EU rules were still in effect.
Think for a second, for fuck's sake. You could order from China, Venezuela, or Kazakhstan before. Why on earth would have been ordering something from the UK impossible?
The problem was not individuals getting their packages from Amazon.uk or M&S. The problem is that taxes are mechanically going up, that paperwork is more expensive and complicated, and that there are delays at the borders, which make exporting anything perishable a non starter.
Also, you now have to pay additional dues and taxes. This seems inconsistently applied: I have several packages from the UK who went through he border fine, but other did not. But it still is a problem when it happens, and illegal when it does not.
Also, it now takes weeks where it used to take days.
Also, a lot of things cannot be exported plain and simple if standards diverge. Which they will, otherwise the UK won't have a deal with the US.
> Maybe it will get worse but the anti-brexit campaigns at the time painted a much much more negative picture than what I am seeing.
You should not have got your points for remaining from the Telegraph. Even the Grauniad never said that nothing whatsoever would be going to cross the border.
It's rather hard to tell because the pandemic has been such a confounding event; the UK did fairly badly on infection control but well on vaccine rollout. But it's still too early to do a "final" toll of the costs.
Things like roaming charges are much less significant than travel restrictions and quarantine requirements; travel and tourism has fallen off a cliff, so we can't separate out the Brexit impact.
We've another critical Brexit event coming up in the form of the end of the settled status transition period.
I've often heard that local politics influence your day-to-day life substantially more than national politics. There's a corollary there that national politics simply don't have that much effect on your day-to-day.
This was true in the Trump era. Prior to the pandemic, by most metrics America was doing very well in Trump's first few years. The economy was doing well, unemployment was low, and even metrics like African-American unemployment were reaching historically low levels. For the average American who didn't pay attention to the news, that time period was probably one where you had a job, it paid well, and things were looking good. But if you listened to the media you'd think that America was literally burning to the ground.
> national politics simply don't have that much effect on your day-to-day.
No, they do, but in most cases the effects emerge in the long run. Most laws take several months or years to go into effect, and then more time for patterns to emerge, and even more time for them being actually measured.
Take taxes. In the UK, the budget is approved in Spring (let's say 2020). Any change in income tax or corporation tax will go into force a year later, so April 2021. Individuals must file their returns the following January 2022, with nominal penalties for delaying an extra month. Statistical aggregation then takes place, which can take several more months. So basically, you won't know the immediate effect of a tax policy until almost 3 years later - and that's just for short-term effects! Actual long-term patterns might not be visible before 5 or 10 years have passed. In the meantime, we'll already be debating further changes, while we've not even fully absorbed the previous ones.
And taxes are as straightforward a field as you can have! Legislation on things like building standards typically carries some slack to give people time to adapt, and measuring effects of changes can be very hard even over a decade.
Building standards is actually a great example of why local matters more than national. If your town is a stickler on buildings, getting an addition built on your house might take months to get approved and built. The next town over might be laissez-faire and let people do whatever they want with minimal oversight. That's a larger influence on a day-to-day than the federal government mandating, for example, that new buildings need to have XYZ material, which gets phased in slowly and gradually, almost invisibly.
Ish. Because, at least in UK, the national government has final say on land use. So even if a development is unwanted by local authorities, the national government can overrule them.
> I've often heard that local politics influence your day-to-day life substantially more than national politics. There's a corollary there that national politics simply don't have that much effect on your day-to-day.
Both very substantially influence the day-to-day, but usually on very different time scales.
You have to compare to what the UK would be doing within the EU, though. Also, these things take years to sort out. It's only been 6 months, and the British government is already reneging on the rules it approved in Brexit agreement. We'll see if all this fawning on the US is worth alienating the rest of Europe.
The UK is a great country. Over the long term it'll probably be fine, if it manages not to disintegrate. Even I, as a European, could see some possible upsides to Brexit. Not worth the downsides, but still. However, it requires playing it well and subtly, which the current government (and the couple of previous ones; Britain has been terribly governed for a long time)seems intent on not doing. It requires pragmatism, not ideology. At the moment it is looking weak and desperate. For example, I really cannot understand how someone would think that the UK was exploited as part of the single market, but the Australian farce is acceptable. Or why the TPP is an idea worth antagonising most of Europe.
> A (slim) majority of people wanting a stupid thing doesn't make it any less stupid.
A sentence attributed to Italian singer-songwriter-intellectual Roberto "Freak" Antoni, or to author Marcello Marchesi, describes this concept in a great way:
"LET'S EAT SHIT! BILLIONS OF FLIES CANNOT BE WRONG!"
Brexit had popular support for a brief period. The rest of the time there's been solid electoral opposition to it.
A confirmatory referendum - defined as "undemocratic", because of course a clarifying vote on a complex issue can't possibly be democratic, according to the Brexiters - would have killed it.
The most fervent supporters don't really want "Brexit" anyway. What they want is to put the clever people - the professionals who keep the lights on and the engines running - in their place.
Which is why there was so much cut-and-paste rhetoric about "metropolitan elites" and "We've all had enough of experts."
It was a very calculated campaign of disinformation and populist framing aimed at low-information authoritarians - the kinds of people who will reliably destroy their own country from the inside while convincing themselves they're "patriots."
> The rest of the time there's been solid electoral opposition to it.
Not really. After an initial wobble, the most hardcore brexiteer fringe swept to power with very large majorities. Yes, it's FPTP so you can say "not really", but in practice they did - the only strongly anti-brexit party, meanwhile, was soundly battered.
The English masses, for a period, really really wanted it. The only first hint of regret has been this month's byelection, a very small test.
The government is now basically the Vote Leave team. Your argument would hold water if they had implemented what they promised - they have not done so. Voters were mugged.
When did anyone vote for leaving the single market? I thought that it was baseless FUD from project fear before the referendum, when you had Farage and Johnson on the record saying that it would be stupid.
That could reasonably (arguments about FPTP notwithstanding) be claimed be the most recent general election, when the Tory manifesto was the current mess and the Labour manifesto was to “rip up the deeply flawed deal negotiated by Boris Johnson”, to renegotiate with the aim of “Close alignment with the Single Market”, and then to give the U.K. electorate a confirmatory referendum about whatever deal they end up negotiating.
The fact that the Tories are currently whining about the deal they (1) negotiated, (2) signed, (3) won a general election in order to implement, and (4) explicitly denied further parliamentary time to study and debate the consequences of, certainly implies the politicians are dumb, regard of what it says about the voters.
I've yet to see an explanation of how this would have been impossible while in the EU. UK medical approval is through NICE, and purchasing through the NHS (and devolved NHS organisations!)
They did - Hungary bought and deployed the Sinopharm and Sputnik V vaccines which weren't EMA-approved [1], later also taking CoviShield (the AstraZeneca vaccine but manufactured in India) and CanSino.
Why no other countries did it? Who knows. Maybe they thought they were already paying into the EU-wide scheme so why bother?
> Hungary has been using Russia's Sputnik vaccine for months and and Slovakia has also bought doses of it.
> Germany said in April it would begin talks to secure supplies of the Russian vaccine and Austria said it would buy one million doses, but only once the EU's medicines agency approves the jab for use in the EU.
> The Czech Republic and Poland have entered talks with both Russia and China.
So that's Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland - that would be 5 states, ~20%.
> I've yet to see an explanation of how this would have been impossible while in the EU.
So the benefit of being in the EU is that they're shit at basics like vaccinating people to stop them dying, but it's ok as at least they'll let you avoid taking part in that since you know they're going to be shit?
You're a grown up country and are supposedly able to take care of public health. The EU is a helping hand on these issues, and nobody said that you could not get vaccines because of the EU. The EU is not responsible for a country's cock ups.
It would have been slightly harder from a political perspective. But yes, it could have been done.
Ironically, a non-brexited UK government opposing the single-procurement EU program would have probably forced more EU countries to go alone. On practical matters, it's much easier to sabotage anything when you're inside the building, rather than outside.
Brexit, at the least, was a forcing function for the UK to go it alone. Not being able to rely on the EU for vaccines they made up their own strategy -- and it was superior.
Our success at procuring vaccines was, at best, dumb luck. If we had any idea what we were doing as a country, our death rate wouldn't have been so high and perhaps we wouldn't have needed to be so desperate for vaccines.
It's like setting yourself on fire and then being really proud of yourself when you manage to find a fire extinguisher.
- Channel 4 heavily criticised the PM and pulled an ice-statue-replacement stunt after he failed to show for an interview, so they're being sold off.
- Johnson wants to strip electoral watchdog of prosecution powers
- Threatening to reduce the power of the Supreme Court
- Department of Education strongly encouraged schools to make children sing a One Britain, One Nation song (it's as bad as it sounds)
- Heavily trying to push through a Bill to ban protest, including single-person "protests"
- Government often completely bypasses Parliament, by making announcements outside of Parliament, much to the chagrin of the Speaker. This is weird as they have a whopping majority, so it's very deliberate what they're doing.
- Gov is looking at withdrawing from European Convention on Human Rights
- Priti Patel
- Taking control of BBC with cronies in top jobs
- Requiring ID for voting (blatant voter suppression). We do not have a fraud problem.
He said "we gained more fascism", he didn't compare the UK to anything, and Godwin's law is specifically about mentioning Nazis, so I'm chastising you for being offtopic.
The whole point of Brexit was to destroy social democracy.
All the elements of social democracy - worker rights, environmental standards, democratic representation, a welfare state - will be replaced with profiteering and spivvery.
Of course if Brexit had been sold as that, hardly anyone would have bought it.
The UK is now in a race between fascism and incompetence. Neither is a good outcome, but an economic implosion followed by popular protests might just about turn this around before protest and resistance are banned by diktat.
From another point of view the UK hasn't been a true democracy for decades. This is the country which hatched a number of coup plots against Harold Wilson, who was a rather stodgy and mainstream left-of-centre politician by European standards, but was considered a Soviet extremist by the Establishment - while that same Establishment protected insiders like Anthony Blunt who actually confessed to recruiting spies for the USSR.
Blunt had gone to the right schools, so was given immunity from prosecution. He was allowed to keep his knighthood, and continued to work - for the Queen, no less - until he retired.
If the intelligence services had had their way the public would never have been told. The story only came out in 1979 because a journalist broke it.
The UK continues to be motivated by a very strange kind of class-based nationalistic extremism. Establishment insiders get almost infinite privileges, no matter what they do or how much they damage the country, while outsiders are treated with suspicion, contempt, and abuse.
Despite so much valid criticism about its inefficiencies, intransparencies, infighting, etc---in the grand scheme of things the EU really seems one of best governmental institutions for the "common people". At least relative to comparable institutions, it appears driven by an intention to do some good. Maybe I am wrong and it's not better, and maybe that's due to my media bias (though I try to read across different sources). However, the vaccine purchasing process, where despite the screw-ups, the EU showed a consideration for global affairs and global cooperation (unlike the US or the UK), or during Brexit, or indeed in the form of the many privacy protection, customer protection, xyz protection rules, the overall outcome of the EU's activities make me genuinely feel as if the people were playing an important part in their considerations.
That's pretty much it. We Europeans like to whine about the EU, and there's a lot of things that need to be improved, but very few of us would be ready to go back to what it was like before.
For starters, there's a lot of people who simply weren't born when their countries joined, and they simply don't know what it was like when you had to pay customs fees to bring stuff across that which is now internal EU borders, when you had to show a passport to cross European borders and so on.
As someone else posted, this is one of those "What have the Romans ever done for us" things.
Do you really want border controls, roaming charges, local currencies back? Sure, there are things the EU does terribly bad, but overall, I think it's a net positive.
I'm born in 1990, so I don't remember the time before the EU, but I've lived in five different EU/EEA countries with very limited bureaucracy. I can't imagine how difficult that would have been before.
I was born in the 70s. I remember the Iron Curtain and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. That is what the EU and predecessors were mindful of and aim never to go back to.
> -in the grand scheme of things the EU really seems one of best governmental institutions for the "common people". At least relative to comparable institutions, it appears driven by an intention to do some good.
cherry picking the EU policies much? The EU has shown again and again they are completely incompetent to make a proper economic market in Europe, or even have semi-consistent regulations across the different borders.
Obvious one is the lack of a unified currency, many member states don't use the Euro. It's hard to think of Europe as a unified entity with a dozen different currencies at play.
> The EU has shown again and again they are completely incompetent to make a proper economic market in Europe, or even have semi-consistent regulations across the different borders.
Well yeah, that's because the EU is not a state, and it gets the powers that the member states want to delegate. The alternative would be the loss of sovereignty of the member states; do you think it would be better? Some things are consistent. Some others, when the tradeoff was deemed unacceptable, are not (think VAT and things like that).
This is a common talking point amongst Brexiteers. Either it is tyrannical and draconian, or it is ineffective and impotent. You cannot have both.
Anyway, the point is that it is still much better than if each country were doing its own thing and if we had trade wars within Europe like we used to before the EEC.
Pre- “EU” (except it wasn’t called the EU then) it took over 200 distinct endorsements (in those days they took the form of actual pieces of paper) to transport a 40ft cargo container by road from England to Italy. Before brexit it took 2 (both electronic now but comparable with the paper process before).
yep. people don't really appreciate how important and groundbreaking this two-tier structure in Europe
the corporate world can much easier capture the political class of its homebase country versus a large and inhomogeneous collection of countries
this works as a two-sided knife: on the negative, not easy to scale businesses across Europe. that is a real problem. on the positive, poor regulation or governance doesn't travel far.
the challenge will be to keep the benefits while smoothing the negatves. I suspect its possible
Man I fucking love EU for all the small things regular people don't see which affect especially us smaller countries like Croatia when we joined. All the standards we had to adopt and regulations and consumer protections which never would have happened otherwise. Fun fact: Croatia had a referendum whether people want to join or not but they specifically changed the law before the referendum because the interest was so low. They made it so that referendums can pass even if the turnout is under 50%. Then afterwards we had a huge swath of random referendums because of this so they changed the law back to pre EU referendum rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Croatian_European_Union_m...
Obviously if the UK isn't inside the EU anymore previous roaming conditions won't apply.
Still, in my country there are phone companies that include extra roaming by their own like Vodafone which has the EU, Switzerland, Norway, UK, USA, etc.
Phone companies love increasing their profit margins by any means.
So far we lost
x) Freedom of movement x) The medical insurance coverage when traveling in Europe x) Access to many European research grants
We gained x) roaming charges x) postage duties for packages
I'm sure I'm missing many other things.
I love Sir Patrick, but - that sort of thing was exemplary of how the anti-Brexit campaign did not understand who they had to talk to, and how. Political campaigns like this one need to use the propaganda equivalent of heavy hammers, so that they can squash simple opinions like ripe melons. Instead they showed up with fancy decorative swords that could barely cut through butter. The decorative-sword community loved it, but nobody else took it seriously.
Possibly it was because a referendum campaign is fought in very different terms from a first-past-the-post campaign, which UK operatives are used to. In FPTP, you want to fire up your base, preach to the choir, strenghten your core support, so they'll actually show up on polling day and maybe bring a friend. You can do that by leveraging precise characteristics of this or that group, you can rely on a bedrock of shared beliefs to build your messages, and you can even plan on multi-election strategies.
In a one-off referendum you just need a massive amount of votes. There is no precision, there is little space for subtlety. You need to build bridges with very simple messages that can resonate with the largest possible demographics in the fastest possible way. Preaching to the choir is pointless - anyone who feels strongly about the specific issue, will show up no matter what. You need to persuade the dubious to show up for you. A Monty-Pythonesque sketch will not do that; a lot of people won't even get it, or will get it wrong. A funny guy going around promising unicorns and rainbows will do nicely, though.
I remember someone saying that if the EU roaming regulation would've come before the Brexit referendum it might've turned out differently.
In hindsight maybe that's a sign. The roaming regulation is one of the examples where citizens can very directly experience the impact of the EU. There should be more of that.
I still don't understand why UK citizens were forbidden to vote if they lived abroad.
My mother and grandparents (anti-brexit) live abroad, were not able to vote, and are now living the consequences of it (they only have the UK nationality). It's crazy
The eligibility criteria for this referendum were not linked to general rights to vote for the UK Parliament, there was a separate piece of legislation. You were probably classed as still living in the UK at the time.
I am fully aware of where I was legally resident at the time of the referendum.
Wikipedia:
"The Representation of the People Acts 1983 (1983 c. 2) and 1985 (1985 c. 50), as amended, also permit certain British citizens (but not other British nationals), who had once lived in the United Kingdom, but had since and in the meantime lived outside of the United Kingdom, but for a period of no more than 15 years, to vote"
I say this trying to be measured: you are NEVER going to get a reasonable discussion about Brexit on HackerNews, despite all the excellent qualities of this website.
The vast majoriry of people here experienced the benefits of EU "globalisation" without any of the downsides. And when you are enjoying the benefits of a system, it's really quite difficult to see those who are not.
HN has had plenty of pro-Brexit comments too and your sentiments have their counterparts in "why is HN overrun with Brexiteers" complaints, etc. - this is standard. The truth is that the distribution here isn't so different from the population at large. If you control for education levels it likely tracks it closely.
(International distribution is the real wild card, but that's more hidden from view, since everyone here posts in English and the English of non-native speakers is mostly astonishingly good.)
In my experience with chatting to people who were pro-Brexit, a lot of those people were especially enjoying the benefits of the EU but hadn't even realised it (eg living in communities neglected by the UK government who had received EU funding for regeneration).
I find it astonishing that the "Conservative" party has exposed itself to a huge level of political risk by becoming the "Brexit / English Nationalist" Party and implementing such a hard Brexit.
When the impact of Brexit on daily lives and the fact that most / all of the promises made during the referendum won't be realised there must be a risk of a huge backlash.
They have a large majority at the moment but there are definite signs of cracks appearing. Short term political gain vs long term risk.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadIt's turned into a belief system and to question it is almost(maybe the same!!) like saying your religion is wrong
No matter how logical I am in trying to discuss the pros and cons, the conversation will invarably go to the statement - you just don't know the real impact yet
followed by a virtual fingers in the ear when discussing facts, then followed by them saying lets change the subject.
It's somehow been internalised to a degree that peoples existance depends on it working and them being right
That's because for many, it actually does. If "project fear" turns out to be right, a lot of people will get poor - and more importantly, they will have to admit that they were wrong, which is absolutely unconceivable and shameful in the pub-culture shouting match that political debate has turned into after the '80s.
when it does turn out crap (it's already started) I doubt people will say they're wrong.
I recon they'll either stay quiet and just convinently forgot they voted to leave or
argue they were right based on the <insert any made up arguement here> and the politicians were wrong and are to blame
Both are an acute cancer to society.
Man do I miss the days when he was just a bad joke. :(
I tried many time to talk anyone about the logic, nothing
after the vote the same.
and I'm not really an emotional person at all, but I realised early on this was emotional subject. I just wanted to understand the facts and the reasons
51% of the electorate who voted 5 years ago said they wished to leave the EU. This is absolutely true.
The nuance here is that of that 51%, their reasons for voting to leave and their intended/desired future arrangement with the EU was not uniform. Some wished to maintain close ties (common market, freedom of movement, regulatory alignment etc), others wanted a clean break from everything, and a spectrum of opinion in between the two
Brexit was many things to many different people. It’s this ambiguity and room for manoeuvre in defining what exactly “Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union” is, which has been seized upon by the power-hungry, who are a minority of all Brexiteers, but a sizeable portion of the Eurosceptic MPs of the Conservative party at the time.
It appears obvious that Cameron intended the referendum to silence the eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party once and for all, as the Alternative Vote referendum did to reform of “first past the post” in the previous administration.
This backfired on him spectacularly. And he resigned immediately once the gambit failed.
The UK was (is?) deeply split on what relationship it wants with Europe.
Phrased differently: no. I do believe the UK is deeply split on whether to believe certain media/politicians though.
https://fullfact.org/economy/brexit/
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/list-of-brexit-lies
Frankly, google "Brexit Lies". Even the spectator was laying in to the tories.
If you haven't seen the lies, respectfully, you're either blind or willfully ignorant.
"There will be no change for EU citizens already lawfully resident in the UK. These EU citizens will automatically be granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK and will be treated no less favourably than they are at present."
(Signed Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Michael Gove. June 1st 2016.)
This one is pertinent as the deadline for "Settled Status" is looming. Johnson could pass a law honouring his promise to 17 million Leave voters who were reassured by his promise that their friends and family would not even have to apply for permanent residency in the UK, but hasn't.
Remain meant keeping things as they were. That was clear.
Leave meant anything on an enormous spectrum of potential outcomes.
Yet to see a single benefit. (I am a remainer, for the record)
I'm embarrassed to be British now.
It feels like we're living in the Truman Show [0]. The script-writing is getting ever more bizarre. The British public just seems to be coasting along unquestioning, while the rest of the world looks on ever more incredulously.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show
I'll go one step further, I am embarrassed there are Brits like you who are "embarrassed".
It's incredibly arrogant and self-centred to share your feelings under the impression you speak for a majority of UK nationals.
My best friend is Polish and was recently naturalised in this country, they were very proud of becoming a citizen.
If you are embarrassed then please leave this country, its better for us all that way.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
I assume the rest will follow suit.
Fuck Brexit.
"Brexit means Brexit!"
"Get Brexit done!"
"We knew what we were voting for!"
"Two world wars and one world cup!"
"£350 million a week to the NHS!"
"Take back control!"
"The will of the people!"
"Leave means leave!"
"No deal is better than a bad deal!"
UK citizens got mugged. They were lied to over and over by the government. They lost rights and freedoms. They gained… Nothing.
I struggle so hard to understand that perspective. I don't see how anything good has happened as a result.
We now have: - a shortage of workers from the EU - harder to buy things from europe - harder to sell things to europe - more red tape when trying to drive in europe - higher insurance costs when going to europe - no rights to live or work in europe - thousands of EU citizens yet to apply for settled status and will be liable for expulsion - zero extra money for our health service - more expensive mobile phone costs
and that's just what I can think off from the top of my head.
Their salary depends on it, so of course they "are".
The UK would've been no different within the EU unless it chose to.
They do terribly at basics like vaccinating people to keep them alive, but it's ok as you can do your own thing?
Lol so why bother being part of it?
And with good reason, trying to outbid each other doesn't make a great strategy to keep a Union.
I don't get why I'm downvited, btw.
Pretty much sums up Brexit.
Maybe it will get worse but the anti-brexit campaigns at the time painted a much much more negative picture than what I am seeing.
Who said you can’t. I also ordered there but stopped doing because customs handling adds high fees now. I get charged a flat 10 EUR on top of every order and 20% VAT. Many online stores already charge me UK VAT first so I end up paying VAT twice and the refunding process is burdensome.
> I can go back to live there with little problem if I want despite being told otherwise.
Lucky you. I’m a EU citizen and either in the UK for a few years. I’m not settled and I can’t go back. I would need a corporate visa sponsor and would end up coupled to said employer with no legal protections.
> They did so much better at vaccinating because the EU didn't screw things for them like for all the member nations etc.
Maybe. But right now we’re pretty even and the situation looks better in the EU. Definitely have more freedoms than my British friends right now.
I have yet to see something positive to come out of Brexit. Even the good vaccination program happened while EU rules were still in effect.
Lol then what business is it of yours what the UK decides to do? Why are you giving your opinion on what other people decide to do?
> the situation looks better in the EU
They can't even get their shit together to vaccinate their own people over there! Better off with the UK government as at least they can vaccinate me.
Think for a second, for fuck's sake. You could order from China, Venezuela, or Kazakhstan before. Why on earth would have been ordering something from the UK impossible?
The problem was not individuals getting their packages from Amazon.uk or M&S. The problem is that taxes are mechanically going up, that paperwork is more expensive and complicated, and that there are delays at the borders, which make exporting anything perishable a non starter.
Also, you now have to pay additional dues and taxes. This seems inconsistently applied: I have several packages from the UK who went through he border fine, but other did not. But it still is a problem when it happens, and illegal when it does not.
Also, it now takes weeks where it used to take days.
Also, a lot of things cannot be exported plain and simple if standards diverge. Which they will, otherwise the UK won't have a deal with the US.
> Maybe it will get worse but the anti-brexit campaigns at the time painted a much much more negative picture than what I am seeing.
You should not have got your points for remaining from the Telegraph. Even the Grauniad never said that nothing whatsoever would be going to cross the border.
And again, we are only 6 months in.
Things like roaming charges are much less significant than travel restrictions and quarantine requirements; travel and tourism has fallen off a cliff, so we can't separate out the Brexit impact.
We've another critical Brexit event coming up in the form of the end of the settled status transition period.
This was true in the Trump era. Prior to the pandemic, by most metrics America was doing very well in Trump's first few years. The economy was doing well, unemployment was low, and even metrics like African-American unemployment were reaching historically low levels. For the average American who didn't pay attention to the news, that time period was probably one where you had a job, it paid well, and things were looking good. But if you listened to the media you'd think that America was literally burning to the ground.
No, they do, but in most cases the effects emerge in the long run. Most laws take several months or years to go into effect, and then more time for patterns to emerge, and even more time for them being actually measured.
Take taxes. In the UK, the budget is approved in Spring (let's say 2020). Any change in income tax or corporation tax will go into force a year later, so April 2021. Individuals must file their returns the following January 2022, with nominal penalties for delaying an extra month. Statistical aggregation then takes place, which can take several more months. So basically, you won't know the immediate effect of a tax policy until almost 3 years later - and that's just for short-term effects! Actual long-term patterns might not be visible before 5 or 10 years have passed. In the meantime, we'll already be debating further changes, while we've not even fully absorbed the previous ones.
And taxes are as straightforward a field as you can have! Legislation on things like building standards typically carries some slack to give people time to adapt, and measuring effects of changes can be very hard even over a decade.
Both very substantially influence the day-to-day, but usually on very different time scales.
The UK is a great country. Over the long term it'll probably be fine, if it manages not to disintegrate. Even I, as a European, could see some possible upsides to Brexit. Not worth the downsides, but still. However, it requires playing it well and subtly, which the current government (and the couple of previous ones; Britain has been terribly governed for a long time)seems intent on not doing. It requires pragmatism, not ideology. At the moment it is looking weak and desperate. For example, I really cannot understand how someone would think that the UK was exploited as part of the single market, but the Australian farce is acceptable. Or why the TPP is an idea worth antagonising most of Europe.
Remember the UK citizens voted on this TWICE in practical effects. They want it. They may not be as stupid as you think they are.
Obvious troll is obvious.
But for posterity:
- Wanting something doesn't make it sensible. - A (slim) majority of people wanting a stupid thing doesn't make it any less stupid.
A sentence attributed to Italian singer-songwriter-intellectual Roberto "Freak" Antoni, or to author Marcello Marchesi, describes this concept in a great way:
"LET'S EAT SHIT! BILLIONS OF FLIES CANNOT BE WRONG!"
A confirmatory referendum - defined as "undemocratic", because of course a clarifying vote on a complex issue can't possibly be democratic, according to the Brexiters - would have killed it.
The most fervent supporters don't really want "Brexit" anyway. What they want is to put the clever people - the professionals who keep the lights on and the engines running - in their place.
Which is why there was so much cut-and-paste rhetoric about "metropolitan elites" and "We've all had enough of experts."
It was a very calculated campaign of disinformation and populist framing aimed at low-information authoritarians - the kinds of people who will reliably destroy their own country from the inside while convincing themselves they're "patriots."
Not really. After an initial wobble, the most hardcore brexiteer fringe swept to power with very large majorities. Yes, it's FPTP so you can say "not really", but in practice they did - the only strongly anti-brexit party, meanwhile, was soundly battered.
The English masses, for a period, really really wanted it. The only first hint of regret has been this month's byelection, a very small test.
https://labour.org.uk/manifesto-2019/the-final-say-on-brexit...
The fact that the Tories are currently whining about the deal they (1) negotiated, (2) signed, (3) won a general election in order to implement, and (4) explicitly denied further parliamentary time to study and debate the consequences of, certainly implies the politicians are dumb, regard of what it says about the voters.
The UK could've done exactly what it did whilst an EU member.
Why no other countries did it? Who knows. Maybe they thought they were already paying into the EU-wide scheme so why bother?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_Hungar...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-52380823
> Hungary has been using Russia's Sputnik vaccine for months and and Slovakia has also bought doses of it.
> Germany said in April it would begin talks to secure supplies of the Russian vaccine and Austria said it would buy one million doses, but only once the EU's medicines agency approves the jab for use in the EU.
> The Czech Republic and Poland have entered talks with both Russia and China.
So that's Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland - that would be 5 states, ~20%.
So the benefit of being in the EU is that they're shit at basics like vaccinating people to stop them dying, but it's ok as at least they'll let you avoid taking part in that since you know they're going to be shit?
Ironically, a non-brexited UK government opposing the single-procurement EU program would have probably forced more EU countries to go alone. On practical matters, it's much easier to sabotage anything when you're inside the building, rather than outside.
Our success at procuring vaccines was, at best, dumb luck. If we had any idea what we were doing as a country, our death rate wouldn't have been so high and perhaps we wouldn't have needed to be so desperate for vaccines.
It's like setting yourself on fire and then being really proud of yourself when you manage to find a fire extinguisher.
- Channel 4 heavily criticised the PM and pulled an ice-statue-replacement stunt after he failed to show for an interview, so they're being sold off.
- Johnson wants to strip electoral watchdog of prosecution powers
- Threatening to reduce the power of the Supreme Court
- Department of Education strongly encouraged schools to make children sing a One Britain, One Nation song (it's as bad as it sounds)
- Heavily trying to push through a Bill to ban protest, including single-person "protests"
- Government often completely bypasses Parliament, by making announcements outside of Parliament, much to the chagrin of the Speaker. This is weird as they have a whopping majority, so it's very deliberate what they're doing.
- Gov is looking at withdrawing from European Convention on Human Rights
- Priti Patel
- Taking control of BBC with cronies in top jobs
- Requiring ID for voting (blatant voter suppression). We do not have a fraud problem.
I could go on...
Stop shutting down debate with bullshit conversation-stoppers, the GP made a valid point.
All the elements of social democracy - worker rights, environmental standards, democratic representation, a welfare state - will be replaced with profiteering and spivvery.
Of course if Brexit had been sold as that, hardly anyone would have bought it.
The UK is now in a race between fascism and incompetence. Neither is a good outcome, but an economic implosion followed by popular protests might just about turn this around before protest and resistance are banned by diktat.
From another point of view the UK hasn't been a true democracy for decades. This is the country which hatched a number of coup plots against Harold Wilson, who was a rather stodgy and mainstream left-of-centre politician by European standards, but was considered a Soviet extremist by the Establishment - while that same Establishment protected insiders like Anthony Blunt who actually confessed to recruiting spies for the USSR.
Blunt had gone to the right schools, so was given immunity from prosecution. He was allowed to keep his knighthood, and continued to work - for the Queen, no less - until he retired.
If the intelligence services had had their way the public would never have been told. The story only came out in 1979 because a journalist broke it.
The UK continues to be motivated by a very strange kind of class-based nationalistic extremism. Establishment insiders get almost infinite privileges, no matter what they do or how much they damage the country, while outsiders are treated with suspicion, contempt, and abuse.
Brexit is just the latest twist in that story.
Laziness or faulty memory?
As someone else posted, this is one of those "What have the Romans ever done for us" things.
I'm born in 1990, so I don't remember the time before the EU, but I've lived in five different EU/EEA countries with very limited bureaucracy. I can't imagine how difficult that would have been before.
cherry picking the EU policies much? The EU has shown again and again they are completely incompetent to make a proper economic market in Europe, or even have semi-consistent regulations across the different borders.
"again and again" - yet you fail to cite a litany of actual examples?
Well yeah, that's because the EU is not a state, and it gets the powers that the member states want to delegate. The alternative would be the loss of sovereignty of the member states; do you think it would be better? Some things are consistent. Some others, when the tradeoff was deemed unacceptable, are not (think VAT and things like that).
This is a common talking point amongst Brexiteers. Either it is tyrannical and draconian, or it is ineffective and impotent. You cannot have both.
Anyway, the point is that it is still much better than if each country were doing its own thing and if we had trade wars within Europe like we used to before the EEC.
Today we’re back up to 16.
What a waste of everyone’s time.
Edit: easier to read link than the europa one: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55887043 - in this case over 70 bits of paper for some fish
the corporate world can much easier capture the political class of its homebase country versus a large and inhomogeneous collection of countries
this works as a two-sided knife: on the negative, not easy to scale businesses across Europe. that is a real problem. on the positive, poor regulation or governance doesn't travel far.
the challenge will be to keep the benefits while smoothing the negatves. I suspect its possible
Still, in my country there are phone companies that include extra roaming by their own like Vodafone which has the EU, Switzerland, Norway, UK, USA, etc.
Phone companies love increasing their profit margins by any means.
(Here is it for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xad5Rl0N2E )
Possibly it was because a referendum campaign is fought in very different terms from a first-past-the-post campaign, which UK operatives are used to. In FPTP, you want to fire up your base, preach to the choir, strenghten your core support, so they'll actually show up on polling day and maybe bring a friend. You can do that by leveraging precise characteristics of this or that group, you can rely on a bedrock of shared beliefs to build your messages, and you can even plan on multi-election strategies.
In a one-off referendum you just need a massive amount of votes. There is no precision, there is little space for subtlety. You need to build bridges with very simple messages that can resonate with the largest possible demographics in the fastest possible way. Preaching to the choir is pointless - anyone who feels strongly about the specific issue, will show up no matter what. You need to persuade the dubious to show up for you. A Monty-Pythonesque sketch will not do that; a lot of people won't even get it, or will get it wrong. A funny guy going around promising unicorns and rainbows will do nicely, though.
In hindsight maybe that's a sign. The roaming regulation is one of the examples where citizens can very directly experience the impact of the EU. There should be more of that.
My mother and grandparents (anti-brexit) live abroad, were not able to vote, and are now living the consequences of it (they only have the UK nationality). It's crazy
I was able to vote.
Wikipedia:
"The Representation of the People Acts 1983 (1983 c. 2) and 1985 (1985 c. 50), as amended, also permit certain British citizens (but not other British nationals), who had once lived in the United Kingdom, but had since and in the meantime lived outside of the United Kingdom, but for a period of no more than 15 years, to vote"
The vast majoriry of people here experienced the benefits of EU "globalisation" without any of the downsides. And when you are enjoying the benefits of a system, it's really quite difficult to see those who are not.
(International distribution is the real wild card, but that's more hidden from view, since everyone here posts in English and the English of non-native speakers is mostly astonishingly good.)
When the impact of Brexit on daily lives and the fact that most / all of the promises made during the referendum won't be realised there must be a risk of a huge backlash.
They have a large majority at the moment but there are definite signs of cracks appearing. Short term political gain vs long term risk.