>Radical plans to tear EU regulations off Britain’s statute books en masse have already been abandoned. The benefits of buccaneering free trade agreements (FTAs) have proved elusive. Britain's public services, far from receiving a promised boost, have in many cases almost stopped working. The number of people moving to Britain from abroad is higher than ever. It’s not what advocates of Leave had in mind.
No, but it's what the establishment who wanted nothing to change and Brexit to fail had in mind.
May was prior to leaving the EU; even if you accept that it left in 2020 (it formally left in Jan 2020, but realistically was still part of the EU for the remainder of the year), she was already gone.
... Eh? Is this the new line now? Brexit was a disaster not because it was an extremely silly idea, but rather due to saboteurs? I mean, I suppose you can tell yourself that if you want, but...
That was the narrative only weeks after the vote. In realising nothing could be delivered, the saboteur story was invented to shift blame on to some Others. Scapegoating is a story as old as time.
On the brightside, this narrative probably contributes to the potential death of the Conservative party today as a plurality of brexit voters are projected to abandon them for Reform.
Recent tweet from them:
> YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU: Only one party can save Britain from the corrupt establishment.
> Today, vote with your HEART and vote for what you TRULY believe in.
I find it remarkable that, if it really is an existential crisis, it'll be because the Lib Dems outnumber them. Just a decade ago it was a terrible alliance with the Lib Dems that put the Tories in power in the first place, setting up Brexit.
All they got in exchange was a failed referendum on alternative voting. They proceeded to get crushed and almost vanished.
But here they are, potentially taking over from the Tories. There's some nine dimensional chess for you.
> All they got in exchange was a failed referendum on alternative voting
Which was sabotaged by the Tories reneging on promises they made to the Lib-dems, and the campaign against it led by Dominic Cummings, using the same "lets spend the money on the NHS instead" lie that he re-used for brexit.
The irony that passing this would have potentially saved them from destruction at the hands of Reform UK (and indeed avoided Brexit altogether) is an added delicous irony.
The Conservatives are bleeding support to every other party, not just the Lib Dems. Labour's drift to the centre and UKIP/Reform's attacks from the right and over Brexit have an important part to play here.
> Brexit was a disaster not because it was an extremely silly idea, but rather due to saboteurs?
The mostly likely things that has made Brexit not work, if it could ever have worked, and other than the people in charge being terrible at their jobs, are the enormous headwinds of Covid and the war in Ukraine.
I mean, if anything, the invasion of Ukraine likely _masked_ problems for longer; continental Europe was far harder hit than the UK by energy deficits (most UK gas comes from the North Sea fields and Norway, and it also had LPG importation facilities on a greater scale than did, say, Germany on the eve of the war). Without it, the economic divergence would look worse, not better.
Covid was largely in the rear-view mirror by the time the UK _really_ left; the really disruptive changes didn't start til mid 2021.
It's incredibly likely. Lots of money spent on weapons and helping refugees, which has to come from somewhere; huge amount of fuel prices going up, which drives most other goods up. Straight after Covid.
And World War I was lost by Germany because its army was stabbed in the back. And Communism never failed because true communism was never implemented anywhere including the USSR, only state capitalism. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
You can never reason with cults, as their logical system are closed, self-referential and unfalsifiable.
"The alter orbis which Great Britain has aspired to be is not simply a world apart from continental Europe but a world embracing non- European continents and islands overseas." - Arnold Toynbee
Brexit was always an eventuality, but much like the empire was always going to fail.
Oddly, it's not nearly the disaster I anticipated. It looks like an ordinary weak economy, the kind you get from time to time.
It's certainly a disaster compared to "we hold all the cards", said by a fraud and many were convinced by that fraud. I hope they are coming to understand that relative nightmare and turn out the fraudsters for a very long time.
At the end of that time I suspect they'll find themselves mostly not-as-well-off-as-they-could-be, rather than actually poverty stricken and isolated. It'll be the kind of thing economists point to on charts, but not really easy to see in the various economic noise.
I hope it's no worse than that. And maybe, just maybe, that somebody somewhere learned something.
> It looks like an ordinary weak economy, the kind you get from time to time.
The real question is, can they get out of it? It's one thing to do it for a few years, but, if nothing else, they can't afford to run current budget deficits forever, and they don't have _that_ much scope for increasing revenue other than growing the economy. And really that deficit is with spending lower than it should be; public services are really struggling at this point.
Like, in some sense it is an ordinary weak economy, but self-inflicted; the government's own office of budget responsibility reckons they've sacrificed 4% of GDP in the long term. For a developed economy, that's not a small hole to climb out of.
The weak economy existed before Brexit. The UK under Thatcher replaced industry with financial services chicanery, and never recovered from the 2008 crisis. Now it's even lost its business in money-laundering to Dubai and has to rebuild from scratch. Labour has sensible policies on curbing the NIMBYs, mainly Tories, who block desperately-needed construction or building the power grid needed to transport renewable energy from Scotland to England, and that alone could provide a significant boost to growth for a decade or two if they can deliver.
If you're a small business that traded with the EU, it was a disaster. If you're a consumer who buys things from the EU, it was a disaster. If you were an assistance dog owner that travelling regularly to the EU, it was a disaster. If you were a young person hoping to study in the EU, it's a disaster.
If you're fairly rich/wealthy now, then sure, it's basically fine.
I am not British, but as an outsider looking in it was very obvious that they were shooting themselves in the foot by distancing their closest trading partners.
At the time of the vote I remember a conversation with a friend's wife, who is British. I simply asked her opinion. The response I got was so caustic and vitriolic. She was very much supportive of the separation, but had no real reason other than "the foreigners are taking jobs from those born in the UK".
She was fully convinced and pissed that I even asked because it clearly meant that I was challenging their rights and freedoms.
It was then that I knew it was not only a bad decision economically, but that it was being made out of irrational thinking and not logical decision making.
One of the immediately likely things after the election is for Labour to rejoin various eurpean standards things, like on Chemicals, accepting the EU rules with no direct say in them, just like Norway and Switzerland.
> [Labour Chancellor] Reeves said she does not think “anyone voted Leave because they were not happy that chemicals regulations were the same across Europe”,
Thing is, the UK _was_ conditioned to care about this sort of thing, over a period of decades. Remember the bendy bananas? Basically since the UK joined, the UK's media engaged in a sustained campaign to convince people that EU regulations were unreasonable.
Except much of the media in question are not the UK's media, being owned by a US citizen, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch had to renounce his Australian citizenship as the US doesn't allow foreigners to own media like Fox there, but the UK doesn't have such basic precautions against foreign influence, and ends up with grotesque situations like Eugene Lebedev (now Lord Lebedev), heir of a KGB agent, owning a major newspaper, The Independent.
Norway is effectively in the EU but without a vote; it's subject to ~all EU laws but does not participate in making them. Switzerland is messier, but it is subject to most EU rules via a series of treaties. The EC considers the Switzerland situation unsatisfactory and messy and would probably be reluctant to do another one (and Swiss business are still significantly disadvantaged vs European ones in trade with Europe).
I can't _really_ see people in the UK opting for a Norway type arrangement vs EU membership, though I suppose to some extent I suppose it does depend on how it's sold; per the Brexit referendum the public is not _that_ interested in the actual facts of the matter vs the marketing.
We know, but my point was that Brexit voters don't know that Swiss and Norwegian deals are basically EU membership fees and obligations on most things but without the voting rights.
The EU would let the UK back in in a heartbeat; the current situation really is good for nobody. It would likely lose the special treatment it had under its previous membership, however.
Well Juncker said yesterday that UK can rejoin in a two centuries - maybe. EU leadership is against letting them back in, so I don't know where get that 'in a heartbeat'.
Juncker is a retired politician; he can more or less say whatever he wants. At the end of the day, the UK rejoining would be of benefit to everybody, and it's hard to imagine that much opposition.
I don't think the UK will try to join anytime soon, but the EU would be silly to not accept them back. The UK is already Europe's second biggest economy, and depending on how Germany goes, could be the biggest in a couple of decade. It has the biggest tech industry in Europe by quite a bit, a relatively healthy demography, a solid military, bases across the world, soft power _galore_).
Like, grudges and personal issues aside, the numbers say the EU would be greatly bolstered with the UK in it.
The EU has repeatedly said we would be welcomed back. Obviously we wouldn't be able to do that unless there was a clear political mandate for that. It would take (in my opinion) at least a generation before those conditions would be possible.
I've always thought actually Brexit supported the left much more than the right.
I think we see that with two of Labour's key manifesto pledges would be either impossible or very difficult to do with EU/SM membership.
Firstly - VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Potentially you could argue for some exemption but I think it would be very slow.
Secondly - Labour's idea of "nationalising" the UK railways is really at odds with EU policy. Netherlands has an ECJ case pending because they do not allow private operators to bid for at least parts of it. I think this could potentially be mitigated but it is really not the spirit or direction of travel of EU law.
I think it's also important to add while a lot of legislation wasn't repealed, a lot of EU legislation is not being added to UK statue books. I think the UK would want to take a very different path on AI regulation vs the EU for example, and had we stayed in would have been a huge point of contention.
There is a lot more nuance in this Brexit argument. While I certainly didn't support it, this does not mean everything the EU does is good, especially in tech. There is too much black and white thinking going on with it. I'd also add that EU growth has been exceptionally poor compared to the US. Something is going wrong in Europe as a whole; and I suspect poor quality overregulation by the EU on growth industries is a (potentially small) part of that picture.
> VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law.
Given the long history of people the in the UK spouting absolute nonsense about what is or is not possible under EU law, do you have a reliable source for that claim?
Quick search leads to the EU council directive on VAT Article 132[0], section I and J which says:
Member States shall exempt the following transactions:
[...]
(i) the provision of children's or young people's education, school or university education, vocational training or retraining, including the supply of services and of goods closely related thereto, by bodies governed by public law having such as their aim or by other organisations recognised by the Member State concerned as having similar objects;
(j) tuition given privately by teachers and covering school or university education;
That wording seems quite clearcut, but then there's a reason I'm not a lawyer.
The EU VAT directive is long misunderstood. Countries have extreme room for interpretation of the VAT rules. For example, Ireland beat the UK on making period products tax exempt by about 20 years, something supposedly disallowed by EU directives. I know Greece charges VAT on fee-paying schools, and the EU doesn't do anything about it.
Ireland, in fairness, has a history of doing tax things just this side of the law, occasionally straying into the wrong side. Notable examples would be corporation tax prior to 2013 (see the Apple thing) and VRT (the EC has actually commented on this, essentially saying that it's legal but against the spirit of the law).
But yeah, very little stopping the UK following Ireland's lead, particularly on relatively trivial matters like the private school fees thing.
I don't think there are any examples of people spouting nonsense over what was allowed? What are you thinking of exactly? What you did sometimes see is that the UK actually followed EU law pretty closely, whereas other countries would flout it to a greater or lesser extent, and then the EU's supporters would say "look see, you can do X Y or Z whilst being in the EU". Which wasn't correct. Unfortunately it was a case of, for the EU's friends ... anything. For the UK, the law.
> Labour's idea of "nationalising" the UK railways
Has already been implemented by the Tories, as all the private rail operators essentially went insolvent, Covid being the coup de grâce. That would be allowed under EU rules.
EU regulations require, IIRC, separation of railway infrastructure companies (like Network Rail is in UK) from actual transport operators. The new regs coming in require that everyone (who gets through necessary certification) can bid for time/space allocation on the infrastructure.
It does not mean you have to privatise or can't nationalize railways, it just means that private operators can exist and have to be able to use same rules and rates for access to infrastructure.
Whether it's good idea or not I can't say, but there's a lot of pro-trade neolibby thought like that in last few decades of EU law.
The UK had an arguably better deal than everyone else; the UK Rebate. This kind of made sense at the time it was introduced (the UK would have been disadvantaged relative to other large economies without it, due to differences in its economy) but had long since ceased making sense. Due to the UK's veto it was impossible to get rid of it. There's no real prospect that they'd be given it again if they applied to rejoin; that would make no sense.
We have left the EU. Both the main parties, left and right, say we are not going to rejoin. The only power the EU has over us is the same they have over any external coubtry who wants to trade with them.
We can improve our trade deals with the EU and harmonise where it makes sense, instead of burdening business with two parallel sts of regulations and testing regimes. This isn't rejoining the EU.
"The only power the EU has over us is the same they have over any external coubtry who wants to trade with them'
My point still stands. As soon as the UK left, they were threatened with horrible trade deals if they ever came back. The anti-brexit supporters seem to show this as a reason why they should have stayed and hate the pro-brexit supporters, rather than hating the EU for the threats in the first place.
Bold statement. Based on what? Being better at tactics everyone would have used in the past if they had the might?
Fast forward to today and you can still come up with an easy list of 20 countries that exhibit human rights abuses on their own people on a day to day basis.
This just goes to the core problem of the binary referendum. You might say that Brexit was about a specific set of policy goals that you wanted to pursue once we were out of the EU, but that's not how the vote worked. You got Brexit.
You weren't promised any specific policies in the aftermath, or rather to be accurate you were - you were promised a plethora of inconsistent, contradictory and mutually exclusive policies. You got Liam Fox's easiest trade deal ever, you got Dan Hannan's "absolutely nobody is suggesting we would give up our position in the free market in Europe". You got your Canada plus and your Norway minus. You took back control on immigration!
May I suggest, given that what you were told in the lead up to the referendum was clearly self-contradictory nonsense, we might have predicted exactly this implementation.
> Sorry Boris, your Euroskeptic vision has failed in so many ways.
> Boris Johnson is out of parliament, making millions from speeches and newspaper columns.
I'm pretty sure Boris thinks he succeeded just fine. The rest of the country, not so much.
> All the key Vote Leave characters have left the stage.
I get why you'd want to try to forget about Nigel Farage but the article even has a graph showing how spectacularly Reform is surging in the polls. They'll probably not quite get to the level they need to take a chunk of seats, as their voters are probably quite spread out, but if they get anything close to these numbers in the vote today, that would be pretty impressive. Politically at least.
Well, yeah, they basically say it in the office; Boris got to be famous, and paid millions, which is, one assumes, what he was going for in the first place. The idea that he was doing any of this out of deeply-held principles always seemed... a bit naive.
Boris picked Brexit as a vehicle to unseat his buddy Cameron, and couldn't care about the consequences for ordinary Brits. It was a hugely cynical choice, but entirely rational. Sunak, on the other hand, was a true believer. Yes, he may be disciplined and hard-working the way Johnson never could be, but there is nothing quite as destructive as a diligent moron.
I think in some ways Labour is going to deliver Brexit in a way that the Tories just couldn't. All the promises that Brexiteers made were the upside of deals, but without the willingness to pay the cost. Yes, our regulations could diverge and in some cases we might have good reason to. But Brexiteers want frictionless trade, and you can't diverge and have no friction. So we just didn't chose. We didn't diverge, because that would be too difficult, but we also didn't take diverging off the table because that was meant to be our big chance!
So labour will decide, they'll decide to align on some rules in exchange for reducing some friction. That is what Brexit meant. It meant tearing up the deal we had with the EU. Now it's torn up, we have to get on with deciding what our new relationship should be.
While I doubt the veracity of this statement, there's a saying on the continent that God knew why (s)he put the Brits on an island. I'm starting to believe that…
I would say that EU might be accepting, but it will probably take 10 or 20 years of political change. And being much more accepting of EU in general. Also possibly higher integration with things like Euro and Schengen...
What is the point accepting someone who would not want to play together.
Did the opposition to Brexit before the referendum campaign all or mostly on why Brexit would be bad, or did they put any significant effort into arguing that even if you were very pro-Brexit you should vote "remain" on that particular referendum because that particular referendum was flawed?
The question on the referendum was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" and your choices were "remain" or "leave".
The correct referendum would have been something like "Should the United Kingdom (1) prepare a detailed plan for leaving the European Union and negotiate the necessary trade and travel and military agreements between the UK and the EU that implementing the plan would require, and then (2) hold a referendum on whether to enact that plan and ratify the accompanying agreements?"
From what I've read a lot of pro-Brexit voters envisioned a quite different Brexit than the one they actually got.
It was the former: they campaigned exclusively on why Brexit would be bad. And moreover they argued exclusively that it would be bad due to economic impact.
It's not something you ever read here on HN and it's very surprising/unusual, but for people who made their decision based only on the campaigns, hindsight shows that voting Leave was entirely correct and voting Remain was incorrect. You'd never be able to have that level of clarity over something like an election because there's too much vagueness involved, but the specific structure of the Brexit vote and campaigns actually allows an objective evaluation.
The reason is that both campaigns made unusually objective and testable claims. On the Remain side they predicted a huge and immediate recession if Leave won due to uncertainty, they predicted enormous "emergency" tax rises to compensate for that, they predicted the UK would not be able to stay in the Horizon research framework, and more generally they predicted that the UK would underperform relative to the rest of Europe due to new trade barriers hurting trade with Europe. On the Leave side they stated the UK would be able to implement an Australian-style points based immigration system, that it would allow for new trade deals, that it would let the membership fees be reallocated to general healthcare spending, that it would allow divergence from EU law and that it would let voters "take back control". Both sides made no specific predictions about what would happen in the Remain case iirc, because that was assumed to be the status quo.
Well, Leave did win, and that lets us test these predictions. The 500-800,000 job losses due to an uncertainty-created recession never happened, the UK is still in the Horizon research framework (after leaving and rejoining), and the trade ratio of EU:ROW for the UK hasn't changed. In fact there's been no discernable change in EU/UK trade whatsoever, implying the single market had no benefits. The UK's performance has matched the rest of the EU as well. So basically all their main predictions were wrong.
On the Leave side, the UK does now have a points-based immigration system, it does have new trade deals, the membership fees are now being spent on public services instead, the UK is diverging from EU law (albeit slowly), and so on. The main disappointment for Leave voters is that mass immigration ideology proved so strong that the Conservatives chose political suicide and set the points threshold so low that immigration soared instead of reducing, this is technically not a failure by Leave who only campaigned on having a controllable system. The implicit assumption was that politicians would prefer to keep their jobs and set the points threshold high than destroy their own party; this assumption was wrong and now voters are "taking back control" by wiping out the Tories and moving votes to Reform... something that would have previously been impossible (as Reform's manifesto wouldn't have been legal).
Given that Northern Ireland is effectively in the EU trade-wise it would make sense for UK to put most of the southern UK into the same state for frictionless trade with the EU, but have areas of the UK that can free trade with the rest of the world. Would mean an internal "border" say from The Wash to the Bristol Channel. Effectively there would be two classes of goods - EU and non-EU - subject to different rules. Or maybe the border could be horizontal - a non-EU layer able to free trade with the rest of the world, and an EU-compliant layer on top. Goods would stay in their own layer unless they cross the non-physical border in some computer system someplace.
It was always a lie. And it was so obvious. It pivoted on securing a deal with the EU to get back their buy-in, to maintain previously negotiated treaties in exchange for nothing but spite. And the EU held literally all the cards while idiot "brexiteers" just hamstrung their government by creating arbitrary deadlines _in law_.
I almost understand why people voted for it initially but I'm staggered by how many people still believe in it.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadNo, but it's what the establishment who wanted nothing to change and Brexit to fail had in mind.
If Conservative Prime Ministers aren’t part of the establishment, who is?
They used it as a marketing trick and got stuck with it when the vote came in. Didn't plan to implement the changes people wanted it for, and didn't.
Recent tweet from them:
> YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU: Only one party can save Britain from the corrupt establishment.
> Today, vote with your HEART and vote for what you TRULY believe in.
All they got in exchange was a failed referendum on alternative voting. They proceeded to get crushed and almost vanished.
But here they are, potentially taking over from the Tories. There's some nine dimensional chess for you.
Which was sabotaged by the Tories reneging on promises they made to the Lib-dems, and the campaign against it led by Dominic Cummings, using the same "lets spend the money on the NHS instead" lie that he re-used for brexit.
The irony that passing this would have potentially saved them from destruction at the hands of Reform UK (and indeed avoided Brexit altogether) is an added delicous irony.
The mostly likely things that has made Brexit not work, if it could ever have worked, and other than the people in charge being terrible at their jobs, are the enormous headwinds of Covid and the war in Ukraine.
Covid was largely in the rear-view mirror by the time the UK _really_ left; the really disruptive changes didn't start til mid 2021.
You can never reason with cults, as their logical system are closed, self-referential and unfalsifiable.
Brexit was always an eventuality, but much like the empire was always going to fail.
It's certainly a disaster compared to "we hold all the cards", said by a fraud and many were convinced by that fraud. I hope they are coming to understand that relative nightmare and turn out the fraudsters for a very long time.
At the end of that time I suspect they'll find themselves mostly not-as-well-off-as-they-could-be, rather than actually poverty stricken and isolated. It'll be the kind of thing economists point to on charts, but not really easy to see in the various economic noise.
I hope it's no worse than that. And maybe, just maybe, that somebody somewhere learned something.
The real question is, can they get out of it? It's one thing to do it for a few years, but, if nothing else, they can't afford to run current budget deficits forever, and they don't have _that_ much scope for increasing revenue other than growing the economy. And really that deficit is with spending lower than it should be; public services are really struggling at this point.
Like, in some sense it is an ordinary weak economy, but self-inflicted; the government's own office of budget responsibility reckons they've sacrificed 4% of GDP in the long term. For a developed economy, that's not a small hole to climb out of.
well they lost the right to live, work and freely travel through the EU.
and what did they gain in return for that. a weak economy.
If you're a small business that traded with the EU, it was a disaster. If you're a consumer who buys things from the EU, it was a disaster. If you were an assistance dog owner that travelling regularly to the EU, it was a disaster. If you were a young person hoping to study in the EU, it's a disaster.
If you're fairly rich/wealthy now, then sure, it's basically fine.
At the time of the vote I remember a conversation with a friend's wife, who is British. I simply asked her opinion. The response I got was so caustic and vitriolic. She was very much supportive of the separation, but had no real reason other than "the foreigners are taking jobs from those born in the UK".
She was fully convinced and pissed that I even asked because it clearly meant that I was challenging their rights and freedoms.
It was then that I knew it was not only a bad decision economically, but that it was being made out of irrational thinking and not logical decision making.
> [Labour Chancellor] Reeves said she does not think “anyone voted Leave because they were not happy that chemicals regulations were the same across Europe”,
The EC actually had a website for this at one point: https://web.archive.org/web/20200131192225/https://blogs.ec....
The WHAT?
I can't _really_ see people in the UK opting for a Norway type arrangement vs EU membership, though I suppose to some extent I suppose it does depend on how it's sold; per the Brexit referendum the public is not _that_ interested in the actual facts of the matter vs the marketing.
Like, grudges and personal issues aside, the numbers say the EU would be greatly bolstered with the UK in it.
I think we see that with two of Labour's key manifesto pledges would be either impossible or very difficult to do with EU/SM membership.
Firstly - VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Potentially you could argue for some exemption but I think it would be very slow.
Secondly - Labour's idea of "nationalising" the UK railways is really at odds with EU policy. Netherlands has an ECJ case pending because they do not allow private operators to bid for at least parts of it. I think this could potentially be mitigated but it is really not the spirit or direction of travel of EU law.
I think it's also important to add while a lot of legislation wasn't repealed, a lot of EU legislation is not being added to UK statue books. I think the UK would want to take a very different path on AI regulation vs the EU for example, and had we stayed in would have been a huge point of contention.
There is a lot more nuance in this Brexit argument. While I certainly didn't support it, this does not mean everything the EU does is good, especially in tech. There is too much black and white thinking going on with it. I'd also add that EU growth has been exceptionally poor compared to the US. Something is going wrong in Europe as a whole; and I suspect poor quality overregulation by the EU on growth industries is a (potentially small) part of that picture.
Given the long history of people the in the UK spouting absolute nonsense about what is or is not possible under EU law, do you have a reliable source for that claim?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
But yeah, very little stopping the UK following Ireland's lead, particularly on relatively trivial matters like the private school fees thing.
Has already been implemented by the Tories, as all the private rail operators essentially went insolvent, Covid being the coup de grâce. That would be allowed under EU rules.
It does not mean you have to privatise or can't nationalize railways, it just means that private operators can exist and have to be able to use same rules and rates for access to infrastructure.
Whether it's good idea or not I can't say, but there's a lot of pro-trade neolibby thought like that in last few decades of EU law.
We have left the EU. Both the main parties, left and right, say we are not going to rejoin. The only power the EU has over us is the same they have over any external coubtry who wants to trade with them.
We can improve our trade deals with the EU and harmonise where it makes sense, instead of burdening business with two parallel sts of regulations and testing regimes. This isn't rejoining the EU.
My point still stands. As soon as the UK left, they were threatened with horrible trade deals if they ever came back. The anti-brexit supporters seem to show this as a reason why they should have stayed and hate the pro-brexit supporters, rather than hating the EU for the threats in the first place.
Not exactly sure what you are referring to when you suggest we were threatened with horrible trade deals if we ever came back.
Can you provide some references?
Fast forward to today and you can still come up with an easy list of 20 countries that exhibit human rights abuses on their own people on a day to day basis.
You weren't promised any specific policies in the aftermath, or rather to be accurate you were - you were promised a plethora of inconsistent, contradictory and mutually exclusive policies. You got Liam Fox's easiest trade deal ever, you got Dan Hannan's "absolutely nobody is suggesting we would give up our position in the free market in Europe". You got your Canada plus and your Norway minus. You took back control on immigration!
May I suggest, given that what you were told in the lead up to the referendum was clearly self-contradictory nonsense, we might have predicted exactly this implementation.
> Boris Johnson is out of parliament, making millions from speeches and newspaper columns.
I'm pretty sure Boris thinks he succeeded just fine. The rest of the country, not so much.
> All the key Vote Leave characters have left the stage.
I get why you'd want to try to forget about Nigel Farage but the article even has a graph showing how spectacularly Reform is surging in the polls. They'll probably not quite get to the level they need to take a chunk of seats, as their voters are probably quite spread out, but if they get anything close to these numbers in the vote today, that would be pretty impressive. Politically at least.
So labour will decide, they'll decide to align on some rules in exchange for reducing some friction. That is what Brexit meant. It meant tearing up the deal we had with the EU. Now it's torn up, we have to get on with deciding what our new relationship should be.
> “The EU doesn't want us back," he said.
While I doubt the veracity of this statement, there's a saying on the continent that God knew why (s)he put the Brits on an island. I'm starting to believe that…
What is the point accepting someone who would not want to play together.
The question on the referendum was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" and your choices were "remain" or "leave".
The correct referendum would have been something like "Should the United Kingdom (1) prepare a detailed plan for leaving the European Union and negotiate the necessary trade and travel and military agreements between the UK and the EU that implementing the plan would require, and then (2) hold a referendum on whether to enact that plan and ratify the accompanying agreements?"
From what I've read a lot of pro-Brexit voters envisioned a quite different Brexit than the one they actually got.
It's not something you ever read here on HN and it's very surprising/unusual, but for people who made their decision based only on the campaigns, hindsight shows that voting Leave was entirely correct and voting Remain was incorrect. You'd never be able to have that level of clarity over something like an election because there's too much vagueness involved, but the specific structure of the Brexit vote and campaigns actually allows an objective evaluation.
The reason is that both campaigns made unusually objective and testable claims. On the Remain side they predicted a huge and immediate recession if Leave won due to uncertainty, they predicted enormous "emergency" tax rises to compensate for that, they predicted the UK would not be able to stay in the Horizon research framework, and more generally they predicted that the UK would underperform relative to the rest of Europe due to new trade barriers hurting trade with Europe. On the Leave side they stated the UK would be able to implement an Australian-style points based immigration system, that it would allow for new trade deals, that it would let the membership fees be reallocated to general healthcare spending, that it would allow divergence from EU law and that it would let voters "take back control". Both sides made no specific predictions about what would happen in the Remain case iirc, because that was assumed to be the status quo.
Well, Leave did win, and that lets us test these predictions. The 500-800,000 job losses due to an uncertainty-created recession never happened, the UK is still in the Horizon research framework (after leaving and rejoining), and the trade ratio of EU:ROW for the UK hasn't changed. In fact there's been no discernable change in EU/UK trade whatsoever, implying the single market had no benefits. The UK's performance has matched the rest of the EU as well. So basically all their main predictions were wrong.
On the Leave side, the UK does now have a points-based immigration system, it does have new trade deals, the membership fees are now being spent on public services instead, the UK is diverging from EU law (albeit slowly), and so on. The main disappointment for Leave voters is that mass immigration ideology proved so strong that the Conservatives chose political suicide and set the points threshold so low that immigration soared instead of reducing, this is technically not a failure by Leave who only campaigned on having a controllable system. The implicit assumption was that politicians would prefer to keep their jobs and set the points threshold high than destroy their own party; this assumption was wrong and now voters are "taking back control" by wiping out the Tories and moving votes to Reform... something that would have previously been impossible (as Reform's manifesto wouldn't have been legal).
I almost understand why people voted for it initially but I'm staggered by how many people still believe in it.