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Catastrophic Brexit damage exposed by The Independent's brutal front-page
(www.thelondoneconomic.com)
Thanks Russia (not only ofc but part of it)!
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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Brexit
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You can thank the British people for that vote. No scapegoating. No playing the victim. Only the British people brought that into reality (helped some by their politicians, and foreign adversaries who have completely open and anonymous access to the social discourse)
But it was the British who did it in the end, and fed directly into the enemy's ideal of a less cohesive western world.
From my (admittedly limited) understanding, some British politicians oversold Brexit, with a few politicians and business leaders knowingly telling outright lies. They certainly deserve a large portion of blame.
I see your point, but I don’t think it’s fair to put all of the blame on British voters when they were deliberately misled by the people who were supposed to be knowledgeable, reliable experts.
Following the win of Leave, the Brits elected to government the very politicians who lied the most and the most shamelessly, including the guy who coined the phrase "We don't need any experts".
Even better, part of the reason they got reelected was the shameless campaign by the Neoliberals to overthrow from the Labour Party leadership the first leftwinger they elected leader in decades (the system in that party for approving leadership candidates is as anti-democratic as it gets, but they let the guy through because they thought there was no chance in Hell he would win the election, and then he won). Anyways, right smack during the election campaign you had the likes of the BBC and The Guardian as well as lots of Labour Party politicians from the New Labour faction (the one from Tony Blair, famously described by Margreth Thatcher as "my greatest achievement") slandering that leftwing Labour party leader as anti-semitic and implying he was a Communist (infamously, the BBC used as background in one of their news programs and picture of him doctored to show him wearing a Soviet cap) all to bring him down and restore the New Labour faction (full on neoliberal rightwingers) to the leadership of the party.
And don't get me started of how the Remain arguments were so weak because a lot of the Remain politicians had spent the last 2 decades blaming the EU for all manner of bad policies that they themselves were pushing, so many in not most of ways in which the EU was a good thing for Britain they couldn't just admit to being so because that would shown their previous lies about it.
Most Brits are to blame for Brexit, both the Posh Fascists in the Tory party and the Neoliberals of New Labour and the Liberal Democrat Party, the latter 2 who, even though they were against Leave, both created the conditions that led to so many voting Leave and who, to stop any kind of political move to the Left in the country, pretty much rewarded with power (and all the juicy, juicy money that those in power later get when their "friends" reward them for their "friendliness" whilst it power, which is how Corruption works in Britain) the very Posh Fascists that had campaigned for Leave.
There is a slice of Britons who have no blame whatsoever for Brexit, but those aren't the ones who support the Tories, LibDems or New Labour.
Thank you for the summary.
In case you forgot, Cambridge Analytica who manipulated Facebook to promote Leave was financed by wealthy Americans.
Figures like that make me wonder if Musk can just sweep in and buy the country somehow. If the cost of brexit was less than what he paid for Twitter...perhaps it's the next toy he's gonna finance with his endless dollars
Errrr..... No it doesn't work like that.
If you lose $10,000 off the value of your house because the markets are down, it doesn't mean your house is worth $10,000.
That being said, petrol is cheap and you can absolutely burn down the house for less than it costs to buy it.
Perhaps then he'll just buy a bunch of petrol and burn England to the ground, then buy it for pennies on the dollar?! 🙃
Brexit is one of the reasons I question if democracy is the best system we can come up with.
Democracy has incredible legitimacy. Anything else we have come up with so far was usually legitimized using religion or simply by violence. Both kinda meh.
I think it's going to be hard to beat democracy in that respect.
It's just that with Brexit there is nothing to blame, no first past the post, no electoral college, no two party system, nothing, it was a pure vote of direct democracy and people still chose against their interests. What hope is there for everything else.
Yes, the people can be blamed and that's exactly the point: legitimacy.
There are issues with direct democracy, though. You just cannot expect regular people to be informed enough to make good decisions on everything. And some things like protecting minorities are especially hard with direct democracy.
Electing representatives through a sort of vibe check, who then consult experts, is actually a pretty good compromise. This principle also has pretty high legitimacy, but just generally makes more informed decisions.
In the US, while the electoral college is a fucking mess, I can at least understand why the founding fathers implemented it. People will say it was to ensure the elites were kept in power; and maybe that's true to some extent. But the real reason is simple: they knew that the average citizen is a fucking idiot and leaving leadership decisions up to them would be a race to the bottom.
I thought it was to ensure the more populated states doesn’t have too much decision making power over the less populated states
Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…
Winston Churchill
I wonder if the immigration thing is a mistake of Brexit or if it's what the Powers That Be wanted all along. Dumping that many EU nationals yet having a net increase of 2.3 million seems like it could only mean the kind of cheap and manipulable labor that the moneyed interests want.
Then why is labour in such short supply?
If my theory is right I suppose it'd be because they need more than 2.3 million immigrants
Likely the reason "they" voted Brexit is because they want less immigrants but more labour, not putting a and b together.
How to undo Brexit?
Kiss the ring and admit that it was a silly idea.
That was the movie that kills you after a couple days cause some ghost climbs out of the tv and eats your butt right
So I'm not fan of Brexit but the figures are out of context and are not "catastrophic" which is why Brexit so far is being ignored as an issue.
For example, in 2022 exports were at £384bn, imports at £627bn, and exports to the EU were actually up overall.
So the £22bn is lost exports is theoretically how much more would have been exported and it's equivalent to 5.8% of exports or a 5.4% increase. Nice to have but not as framatic as the article says.
The £30bn divorce Bill sounds a lot. But total UK spending for 2023 was £1,189bn for example. That's equivalent of 2.5% of spending and was a one off cost in one year.
So, no these things are not good, but also they are not catastrophic and so they are barely noticeable to people. Leaving the EU has been a negative but it's been a smaller economic negative in the short term than perhaps was expected.
The long term economic damage of the cumulative loss of trade growth and is more substantial but will only really become apparent to people if the EU quality of living goes up and the UK falls behind. Unfortunately the EU is mired in its own financial and political problems (particularly Germany and France) so the effect of Brexit will be hidden from view from most people for the next few years.
I want us to rejoin the EU but I'm worried that the damage is just about tolerable enough that it may not offset the higher bar for reentering. We gave up a lot of exclusive hard won benefits for the UK that we wouldn't get back on rejoining - so such as rebates to account for the broken Common Agricultural Policy, and opt outs on joining the Euro and Eurozone.
