The damning statistics that reveal the true cost of Brexit, five years on
The damning statistics that reveal the true cost of Brexit, five years on
As January marks five years on from Britain leaving the EU, Alicja Hagopian and Kate Devlin explore its impact
Summary
Five years after Brexit, its promises of sovereignty, economic gains, and reduced migration remain unfulfilled. While Brexit offers regulatory flexibility, its overall impacts are largely negative.
The UK economy has suffered a £100bn annual output loss, with GDP 4% smaller than it would have been without Brexit.
Trade barriers have reduced exports, particularly to the EU, with small businesses and sectors like agriculture and fishing hit hardest.
Migration has surged to record levels, but net EU migration has turned negative.
Public dissatisfaction is high, with 59% believing Brexit has gone poorly.
Brexit was a mistake? Who'd have thought it?
The real irony is that age was a huge factor in voting - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36616028.amp
So the folks getting a lot of the flak today are more likely to be remainers, I wonder how that's going to pan out in the long run (spoiler, it'll go as well as Brexit).
The ones cleaning up the mess in the UK are not the ones who voted for it - keep that in mind.
The problem with the modern media is that they frame everything in the context of money. Thus they ignore that the Britons joined just for the economy. They are a staunchly capitalist country that never managed to fit within the EU spirit. They kept resisting the integration and asking opt-outs for every initiative. During the exit process they acted as spoilt children, they absorbed all the attention and time of the European council and brought all the other activities nearly to a standstill. All of that tedious process ended up with a partial exit, the UK is still standing on the edge with one foot in and another out.
At this point I think that the best thing to do to stop crying over the spilled milk and do not even dare to think to come back, it would be just a pain for everybody.
If Britons want to join the EU, they can leave the UK.
And almost six in 10 Britons (59 per cent) think that Brexit has gone fairly or very badly, with just 12 per cent believing it has gone well, according to a YouGov poll in October.
Right-wing politics is a scam that people fall for again and again. How often do we see these polls saying right-wing voters are disappointed when exactly what everyone told them would happen happens? Then they fall for the next right-wing scam and do it all over again. No learning ever seems to occur.
No learning ever seems to occur.
Not so surprising when you remember that leaning left correlates with higher degrees of education.
Because no learning has to occur. The most anger inducing thing about right wing shitfuckery is that to fight against it, it pushes us to do shit that's... tantamount to right wing shitfuckery.
In other words, the only language they have understood is power and we're failing by refusing to accept that the reason they don't learn is because we haven't sufficiently dickslapped them into next fucking Thursday over it.
We do a lot of glad-handing right wing crime and acting like it's not a big deal while swiftly cracking down on left-wing... anything, not even crime. There was that guy in Florida who did nothing but posted online after Jan 6th 2021 that all leftists needed to be armed and prepared, and he was arrested and put away for longer than anyone who actually was at Jan 6th.
I know I'm speaking in USA examples, but I've seen the same of britain, using kid gloves with white people and cracking down on brown people. Like the whole shebang about "grooming gangs" in the UK is a firestorm of racism and blaming it on immigrants while the statistics and numbers actually say its widely white british people organizing grooming gangs.
What actually needs to happen is we need to give them what they ask for. They want more law and order and harsher sentences? Fine, that's what they will get for their bullshit, locked up with less patience and understanding with severely long sentences to keep these fucking idiots who refuse to learn off our fucking streets. They're the real street trash that needs to be taken the fuck out. If they want to cry all day about being victims of the system, we can show them what real victims of the system deal with.
They only understand power, so we have to actively show we have power, hold it against them, make them suffer, that's literally the only thing they will ever fucking understand. They will force us to play their stupid fucking power games just to have a normal fucking society without them, because they will never, ever stop vying for power.
It's like the old saying "a conservative would gladly eat shit if they knew a liberal had to smell their breath." it's about using power against someone else, even if the only power you have is to upset them. They don't care as long as it makes them feel like they have power over someone else.
They view literally everything through the lens of power, is it really such a shocker so many of them are fucking rapists since rape is about power?
good answer it's has always been about power
and being able to wield power without corruption is the human condition
I'm not certain we're hardwired that way.
though I'm hopeful
It doesn't help in this case that Labour has been doing a terrible job.
Brexiteers promised a new age of British sovereignty
And now farage wants to flog the country off to trump and musk
But half a decade on, and by many metrics, Brexit appears to have missed the mark
What mark? There was never a mark just a whole pack of lies.
Sovereignty somehow always means a Russian alignment.
Yeah, crazy right? Almost like the Kremlin was behind every shitty thing in the entire fucking world.
My current and former workplace both took huge hits and ended up cutting staff because it suddenly became super expensive to import raw materials, and more difficult and expensive to export finished goods. But it's ok because some retired boomers get to shout 'taking our country back' then blame foreigners for anything negative that happens
But it's ok because some retired boomers get to shout 'taking our country back' then blame foreigners for anything negative that happens
And then fly back to Spain with the sense of superiority that comes from carrying a blue passport.
What's wrong with the other 41% that they don't think it's gone poorly?
So which politician have enough balls to say out loud UK needs to rejoin the EU?
The real price the UK will pay for Brexit should not be measured (and will probably not be remembered) in economic terms.
How would you measure it?
The loss of openness, the limiting of education and work opportunities, the rise of bad nationalism, the fracturing of European unity and community, the isolation of being stuck between the EU and the US, the inability to pop over to France for lunch or Germany for a football game, the loss of stature in an evolving world, the backwards steps to being more insular… I don’t know. All these things and more “may” come to pass.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
It hurt itself in its confusion
But we could offset some of that by selling off all the sweet control we gained.
China is buying themselves control all over the place. Maybe they're interested.
Knowing very little about UK politics and even less five years ago I seem to remember casually analyzing leaving the EU as a dumb idea but what do I know.
Everyone with an IQ over room temperature knew leaving the EU was a losing move for everyone but the oligarchs looking to snap up businesses for cheap. They're intentionally driving the UK economy into the ground so they can snap everything up in a fire sale knowing that their wealth is safely protected in foreign investments. They're trying the same playbook over in the US now. Trump will tank the US economy (not to mention gut the anti-monopoly regulations) and then the megacorps will start gobbling.
Has Brexit cost them anything politically? Or is it still the exact same bullshit as before Brexit happened? Sure seems like nothing has changed.
The AfD in Germany, currently propped up by Musk in the form of Alice Weidel, whose modus operandi is demagoguery wants the Brexit analogue Dexit. She was granted a 15 minute interview by bloomberg a few days ago. Basically every statement was a blantant lie. She proposed free trade regulatories for Germany without being in the EU. Every statement of hers was a lie. And she was frenetically endorsed by EU/German politics oblivious US MAGA heads and Nazis in the comments. All of her proposals would bring Germany and with it possibly huge parts of Europe to its knees and open the door widely for russian interference. I wrote a 6000 character fact-check under the video and garnered 3300 likes for it in one day. Yesterday it was deleted. It was a good run but I think Europe is damned. I partially blame covid brain rot for it.
More than 52% of British people in 2016 and still more than many now, I bet. I always supported Remain but before I voted I wanted to do my due diligence and re-evaluate. It took googling "brexit pros and cons" and all of 5 minutes reading a BBC infographic to confirm that basically everything the leave campaign said was completely and utterly wrong.
The fact that most people still voted for it despite the obvious lies was way more disappointing to me than the racism. Back then I thought better of people.
I know a couple of people who said they didn't know what to vote for so voted for the default, which they thought was to leave.
Some other old person said he doesn't like immigrants (or specifically people of a certain skin colour) and wants back gold top milk (which apparently the EU took away...).
Somebody else saying they don't want Brussels telling us what to do and we need our fishing rights back. Also immigration.
My future, my son's future, all now shaped in a more restrictive way because of people's views like this.
Ironically for the old racist man we now have less white Europeans immigrants as before and more from Africa and India regions, at least in the area I live. I love it how it's backfired on him.
basically everything the leave campaign said was completely and utterly wrong.
Which is why spreading public lies with the intention to mislead the public should be a criminal offence.
If they were selling any physical goods, that would be a fraudulent misrepresentation. I don't see why the bar in politics should be any lower.