It’s not all that hard, really… especially when you consider the war as a knock-on side effect of Covid, and Covid in turn only being as bad as it was in the UK as a side effect of the kind of “leadership” that allowed something as stupid as Brexit to happen in the first place.
And then you think about Putin’s calculus around attacking UK democratic norms in the lead-up to Brexit and only acting on his plans for Ukraine after seeing Europe / NATO both divided (Brexit) and wounded (Covid).
If you’re in the UK and you’re hurting and you voted to Leave, you broke it and you bought it.
The decapitation offensive was an escalation in an already existing conflict. If anything triggered it I would say it was the failure of Russian influence ops in the US, and the roll up of their agents e.g. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-us-fbi-deripaska-sanctions/32...
> If you’re in the UK and you’re hurting and you voted to Leave, you broke it and you bought it.
Correct. Unfortunately the rest of us have to unbreak it somehow.
> The decapitation offensive was an escalation in an already existing conflict. If anything triggered it I would say it was the failure of Russian influence ops in the US, and the roll up of their agents e.g. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-us-fbi-deripaska-sanctions/32...
In the end its going to be a bunch of things, perhaps including the ones you noted. For example, I've read credible analysis suggesting that the Russian demographic implosion is a long-term driver: in a decade they may not have enough military age people to operate even their weak military and economy at the same time. That makes them vulnerable to India and China and, in their paranoid fantasies, Europe.
But re brexit, the rolling political weakness in the UK, and its severe lack of credibility in Europe, must have looked like it would help their more recent ambitions in Ukraine. I'm fairly confident that brexit will eventually be shown to be at least partly due to organised financing and political disinformation from the Russian state, and I'd be surprised if didn't fit onto some projected timelines in some ministry in Moscow.
> > If you’re in the UK and you’re hurting and you voted to Leave, you broke it and you bought it.
> Correct. Unfortunately the rest of us have to unbreak it somehow.
Germany is in recession and so is the Netherlands. Yet the UK hasn't even had one quarter of negative GDP growth recently.
France is in political turmoil. Across the EU, far-right political parties are gaining real power. Yet in the UK the far-right (the BNP) has no power at all and no hope of gaining even a single MP.
UK politicians are being their usual level of useless, but they're squeeky clean compared to the Qatar corrupted bureaucrats infesting Brussels.
So yeah, I'd take Brexit Britain any day over the mess unfolding over the English Channel.
> UK politicians are being their usual level of useless, but they're squeeky clean
You mean like when the UK government gave a no deal Brexit ferry contract to a company that owns no ships, has no staff and copy-pasted terms and conditions from a pizza takeaway?
Or when they gave 100's of million in PPE contracts during covid without tender, to companies that were registered yesterday, with links to conservative party? And of that PPE ended up getting burned because it was not functional?
Or as this month, they handed over £1.6 billion to an Australian travel firm for a barge to house refugees. This barge is infested with deadly bacteria, and they could have bought the world largest cruise ship with swimming pools and for less!
Because all three only affected the UK... Except the last two didn't.
Where I agree with you is that people who only go by media stories are going to find it hard to untangle them. Those who can go on the actual data, not so much.
I've heard plenty of people say this. But I don't think it's true. The effects of covid and the Ukraine war are what you see in western Europe. So the difference between that and where the UK is (less growth, more inflation etc) is Brexit. Unless there is some pressing reason to think otherwise?
I don't accuse you of this but plenty of brexiteers seem to want to hide in the "we'll never know if it was a good idea because there is no perfect counterfactual" fallacy. It should not be tolerated.
This assumes that the whole is the same as the sum of its parts.
I can turn my cold, or hot, tap on 50% and everything is fine. Turn the other one on 50% as well, and the sink overflows and there's a right mess.
I don't particularly have an opinion here either way, but it seems obvious to me that e.g. it's harder to rejig an economy that's currently subject to stress from other factors.
I don't think it "assumes" that. I think that's how reality works isn't it? If you hadn't turned on the extra tap compared to your neighbour, you'd have been fine. So the extra tap is the problem.
Saying "brexit might have worked it it wasn't for the rest of reality" just seems like a long way around of saying "brexit didn't and never would have worked" no?
It's hard for me to explain if you don't see it intuitively, I guess.
Imagine that you take up a gym routine. Ordinarily it would go well. You then break your leg.
If you keep doing squats then you're going to end up in a pretty bad place. You may need to change course.
I'm not saying that I think Brexit was a good or bad idea. I just don't see how it's not intuitively obvious that economic changes aren't just additive. It's a complex system with lots of nonlinearity, mixing, etc.
To me, brexit was a self imposed broken leg. The best that can be said is "technically our squats haven't gotten worse because not being able to do them means they are just null, no like 0s".
The reason people don't try to separate out the factors like that is because if you do, the results are that Brexit had no measurable negative impact. It only actually took place for real in Feb 2020 and then there was a transition period for about a year, so the impact was drowned by lockdowns. See for yourself:
If you looked at those growth numbers having never heard of Brexit you'd have no clue anything UK specific had happened (virtually indistinguishable from e.g. Spain).
Even if we restrict to only exports, the huge dip occurs at the exact same time it does for every other country in Europe (lockdowns). By the middle of 2022 exports have caught back up to where they'd have been without COVID (extrapolated). There's been a dip again since then, but that's clearly driven by the economy and inflation/energy prices given the timing.
The GFC and lockdowns were major impacts. Leaving the EU doesn't even seem to show up in comparison.
It's worth asking why the economic predictions were so far off here. In hindsight it shouldn't be surprising because EU membership was never that significant to the British economy, despite what was routinely claimed during the campaigns. The UK is a much more heavily services oriented economy than the EU "core" countries, and the EU never really got anywhere with its attempts at a single services market (arguably deliberately). The single market made it easy for Germany/France to sell into the UK, but didn't make it easier for the UK to sell into France/Germany. And of course trade is still happening at significant levels, it's not like leaving the EU meant cross-border trade dropped to zero, it just added some paperwork.
There's also the unfortunate fact that economists were exaggerating deliberately, especially when they claimed that merely voting to leave would have instant and massive negative effects. As Paul Krugman put it:
What we’re hearing overwhelmingly from economists is the claim that it will also have severe short-run adverse impacts. And that claim seems dubious.
Or maybe more to the point, it’s a claim that doesn’t follow in any clear way from standard macroeconomics — but it’s being presented as if it does. And I worry that what we’re seeing is a case of motivated reasoning, which could end up damaging economists’ credibility.
The vote was in 2016. Looking for 2015 to now, it clearly shows the UK having achieved 0% growth (in GDP per capita) since 2015. Literally all the other countries and the EU as a whole out performed us.
I think the ability to look at data like this and come to completely different conclusions perfectly sums up the divide between brexiteer (I assume you are, I hope that is ok?) And remoaners like me.
The reason growth is zero in your graph since 2015 is because lockdowns and other pandemic mitigations (+knockon inflation) were so destructive. It went from +4% from a 2015 baseline to -6%, and the "rebound" only recovered half of what had been lost. This is up to 2021, see below.
Growth before and after the Brexit vote was entirely unaffected by it, so it's impossible to claim that the vote itself led to any economic impact. N.B. the Treasury forecast a recession that'd destroy 500,000-800,000 jobs before any legal changes had been made at all, just from the uncertainty created by the vote. Clearly very wrong, therefore they don't really have the ability to do this type of economic forecasting and nor were they aware of this fact. So all claims about Brexit economic impact have to be taken with an enormous pinch of salt because economics, as a profession, doesn't have the claimed level of understanding. Alternatively, as the publicly voiced doubt by Kruger indicates, they know they can't make such predictions but are engaging in "motivated reasoning".
Anyway, that lack of any impact from the vote is why you'd have to look for impact in 2020/2021. But how can anyone separate out the different variables there? You'd have needed the economic situation to be perfectly normal in all other European countries, with Brexit the only thing that changed, to create a comparable situation.
> Literally all the other countries and the EU as a whole out performed us.
That data ends in 2021, when the UK was still very much killing itself with COVID mitigations. A more up to date graph tells a different story:
In 2022 UK growth rate was 4.1% - higher than the pre-Brexit baseline and much higher than Germany which returned to normal growth rates. So by playing this game I could argue that Brexit has clearly unleashed the Great British Economy. But I wouldn't do that because, again, Brexit is small potatoes next to the chaos unleashed by the public health community. Also at the level of these tiny differences GDP gets affected by things like bank holidays for the King's Coronation and other trivia.
Fundamentally, there's very little difference between the different European economies at this point. They are all vastly outclassed by what's happening in the USA. Arguing over Brexit is a pointless distraction given it apparently has such a tiny impact that it can't even be separated from other factors, and even if you assume otherwise, avoiding it could only have kept the UK in line with other Euro-area economies. But the UK needs to be matching the USA, not France or Germany.
Not sure that's true. Firstly a lot of the effects of Brexit hit before covid or the war (eg devaluation of Sterling by about 25%) secondly you can control for covid and the war because those have happened to all the Eurozone countries as well, although each country got its own chance to muck up the covid response which muddies the waters somewhat.
Brexit hasn't even begun, Uk does not do checks on EU goods entering the country because it would cost too much, they accept all electrical goods from EU and have not made any changes to their regulations of anything from e-bikes to vacuum cleaner power ratings. Because no-one will produce goods specifically for UK, it will be massive extra cost.
Recently they announced that the EU CE (Conformité Européenne) mark will be accepted indefinitely.
As son as they start changing any of the EU laws on the book, even for maximum allowed power of vacuums, that will cause trade issues.
This is just an opinion piece from someone who believes the "advent of Veilid" (a distributed, secure P2P messaging framework) will prove the UK's attempts to break encryption in messaging applications pointless.
My pet peeve: "information wants to be free" just means the universe tends towards entropy. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, once information has been distributed it will take energy to "undistribute" it. Trying to extend this to "information wants to be encrypted" is both stupid and inaccurate - people want things to be encrypted, but the plaintext "wants to be free" as much as any other data.
The more complete quote from Brand is: “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.”
People often only remember the first bit…
——
“ On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other”
> But we discovered something. Our one hope against total domination. A hope that with courage, insight and solidarity we could use to resist. A strange property of the physical universe that we live in.
> The universe believes in encryption.
> It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.
Perhaps they should have said "information wants to be encrypted" Computers are getting better and better at cryptography all of the time. Applies the same logic behind "information wants to be free."
As an aside...
>the universe tends towards entropy.
To me, the paradox of entropy is that it represents chaos and yet it is an inevitable end state of the universe. It would seem that all efforts against the natural order are themselves a form of chaos. I question the distinction between the two.
31 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 69.4 ms ] threadAnd then you think about Putin’s calculus around attacking UK democratic norms in the lead-up to Brexit and only acting on his plans for Ukraine after seeing Europe / NATO both divided (Brexit) and wounded (Covid).
If you’re in the UK and you’re hurting and you voted to Leave, you broke it and you bought it.
This doesn't make sense since the war has been happening, at some intensity, since about 2014. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
The decapitation offensive was an escalation in an already existing conflict. If anything triggered it I would say it was the failure of Russian influence ops in the US, and the roll up of their agents e.g. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-us-fbi-deripaska-sanctions/32...
> If you’re in the UK and you’re hurting and you voted to Leave, you broke it and you bought it.
Correct. Unfortunately the rest of us have to unbreak it somehow.
> This doesn't make sense since the war has been happening, at some intensity, since about 2014. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
> The decapitation offensive was an escalation in an already existing conflict. If anything triggered it I would say it was the failure of Russian influence ops in the US, and the roll up of their agents e.g. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-us-fbi-deripaska-sanctions/32...
In the end its going to be a bunch of things, perhaps including the ones you noted. For example, I've read credible analysis suggesting that the Russian demographic implosion is a long-term driver: in a decade they may not have enough military age people to operate even their weak military and economy at the same time. That makes them vulnerable to India and China and, in their paranoid fantasies, Europe.
But re brexit, the rolling political weakness in the UK, and its severe lack of credibility in Europe, must have looked like it would help their more recent ambitions in Ukraine. I'm fairly confident that brexit will eventually be shown to be at least partly due to organised financing and political disinformation from the Russian state, and I'd be surprised if didn't fit onto some projected timelines in some ministry in Moscow.
> > If you’re in the UK and you’re hurting and you voted to Leave, you broke it and you bought it.
> Correct. Unfortunately the rest of us have to unbreak it somehow.
Yep.
France is in political turmoil. Across the EU, far-right political parties are gaining real power. Yet in the UK the far-right (the BNP) has no power at all and no hope of gaining even a single MP.
UK politicians are being their usual level of useless, but they're squeeky clean compared to the Qatar corrupted bureaucrats infesting Brussels.
So yeah, I'd take Brexit Britain any day over the mess unfolding over the English Channel.
You mean like when the UK government gave a no deal Brexit ferry contract to a company that owns no ships, has no staff and copy-pasted terms and conditions from a pizza takeaway?
Or when they gave 100's of million in PPE contracts during covid without tender, to companies that were registered yesterday, with links to conservative party? And of that PPE ended up getting burned because it was not functional?
Or as this month, they handed over £1.6 billion to an Australian travel firm for a barge to house refugees. This barge is infested with deadly bacteria, and they could have bought the world largest cruise ship with swimming pools and for less!
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/30/no-deal-bre....
2 - https://www.itv.com/news/2021-04-21/coronavirus-contracts-wo...
3 - https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1781474/Cost-of-migr...
Where I agree with you is that people who only go by media stories are going to find it hard to untangle them. Those who can go on the actual data, not so much.
I don't accuse you of this but plenty of brexiteers seem to want to hide in the "we'll never know if it was a good idea because there is no perfect counterfactual" fallacy. It should not be tolerated.
I can turn my cold, or hot, tap on 50% and everything is fine. Turn the other one on 50% as well, and the sink overflows and there's a right mess.
I don't particularly have an opinion here either way, but it seems obvious to me that e.g. it's harder to rejig an economy that's currently subject to stress from other factors.
But when would you like this holiday from global events while rejigging and would it be English breakfast or earl grey with the breakfast?
Saying "brexit might have worked it it wasn't for the rest of reality" just seems like a long way around of saying "brexit didn't and never would have worked" no?
Sorry if I am missing some deeper meaning here?
Imagine that you take up a gym routine. Ordinarily it would go well. You then break your leg.
If you keep doing squats then you're going to end up in a pretty bad place. You may need to change course.
I'm not saying that I think Brexit was a good or bad idea. I just don't see how it's not intuitively obvious that economic changes aren't just additive. It's a complex system with lots of nonlinearity, mixing, etc.
The reason people don't try to separate out the factors like that is because if you do, the results are that Brexit had no measurable negative impact. It only actually took place for real in Feb 2020 and then there was a transition period for about a year, so the impact was drowned by lockdowns. See for yourself:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
If you looked at those growth numbers having never heard of Brexit you'd have no clue anything UK specific had happened (virtually indistinguishable from e.g. Spain).
Even if we restrict to only exports, the huge dip occurs at the exact same time it does for every other country in Europe (lockdowns). By the middle of 2022 exports have caught back up to where they'd have been without COVID (extrapolated). There's been a dip again since then, but that's clearly driven by the economy and inflation/energy prices given the timing.
The GFC and lockdowns were major impacts. Leaving the EU doesn't even seem to show up in comparison.
It's worth asking why the economic predictions were so far off here. In hindsight it shouldn't be surprising because EU membership was never that significant to the British economy, despite what was routinely claimed during the campaigns. The UK is a much more heavily services oriented economy than the EU "core" countries, and the EU never really got anywhere with its attempts at a single services market (arguably deliberately). The single market made it easy for Germany/France to sell into the UK, but didn't make it easier for the UK to sell into France/Germany. And of course trade is still happening at significant levels, it's not like leaving the EU meant cross-border trade dropped to zero, it just added some paperwork.
There's also the unfortunate fact that economists were exaggerating deliberately, especially when they claimed that merely voting to leave would have instant and massive negative effects. As Paul Krugman put it:
https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/0...
What we’re hearing overwhelmingly from economists is the claim that it will also have severe short-run adverse impacts. And that claim seems dubious.
Or maybe more to the point, it’s a claim that doesn’t follow in any clear way from standard macroeconomics — but it’s being presented as if it does. And I worry that what we’re seeing is a case of motivated reasoning, which could end up damaging economists’ credibility.
The vote was in 2016. Looking for 2015 to now, it clearly shows the UK having achieved 0% growth (in GDP per capita) since 2015. Literally all the other countries and the EU as a whole out performed us.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
I think the ability to look at data like this and come to completely different conclusions perfectly sums up the divide between brexiteer (I assume you are, I hope that is ok?) And remoaners like me.
The reason growth is zero in your graph since 2015 is because lockdowns and other pandemic mitigations (+knockon inflation) were so destructive. It went from +4% from a 2015 baseline to -6%, and the "rebound" only recovered half of what had been lost. This is up to 2021, see below.
Growth before and after the Brexit vote was entirely unaffected by it, so it's impossible to claim that the vote itself led to any economic impact. N.B. the Treasury forecast a recession that'd destroy 500,000-800,000 jobs before any legal changes had been made at all, just from the uncertainty created by the vote. Clearly very wrong, therefore they don't really have the ability to do this type of economic forecasting and nor were they aware of this fact. So all claims about Brexit economic impact have to be taken with an enormous pinch of salt because economics, as a profession, doesn't have the claimed level of understanding. Alternatively, as the publicly voiced doubt by Kruger indicates, they know they can't make such predictions but are engaging in "motivated reasoning".
Anyway, that lack of any impact from the vote is why you'd have to look for impact in 2020/2021. But how can anyone separate out the different variables there? You'd have needed the economic situation to be perfectly normal in all other European countries, with Brexit the only thing that changed, to create a comparable situation.
> Literally all the other countries and the EU as a whole out performed us.
That data ends in 2021, when the UK was still very much killing itself with COVID mitigations. A more up to date graph tells a different story:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/gdp...
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/DEU/united-kingdom/gdp...
In 2022 UK growth rate was 4.1% - higher than the pre-Brexit baseline and much higher than Germany which returned to normal growth rates. So by playing this game I could argue that Brexit has clearly unleashed the Great British Economy. But I wouldn't do that because, again, Brexit is small potatoes next to the chaos unleashed by the public health community. Also at the level of these tiny differences GDP gets affected by things like bank holidays for the King's Coronation and other trivia.
Fundamentally, there's very little difference between the different European economies at this point. They are all vastly outclassed by what's happening in the USA. Arguing over Brexit is a pointless distraction given it apparently has such a tiny impact that it can't even be separated from other factors, and even if you assume otherwise, avoiding it could only have kept the UK in line with other Euro-area economies. But the UK needs to be matching the USA, not France or Germany.
Recently they announced that the EU CE (Conformité Européenne) mark will be accepted indefinitely.
As son as they start changing any of the EU laws on the book, even for maximum allowed power of vacuums, that will cause trade issues.
Discussion of Veilid itself on HN is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37118124
People often only remember the first bit…
—— “ On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other”
> The universe believes in encryption.
> It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.
-- http://cryptome.org/2012/12/assange-crypto-arms.htm
As an aside...
>the universe tends towards entropy.
To me, the paradox of entropy is that it represents chaos and yet it is an inevitable end state of the universe. It would seem that all efforts against the natural order are themselves a form of chaos. I question the distinction between the two.