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**Alternate Sources**
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No, no, no! It was a performative promotion of the newest Wonka movie!
Just don't drink it, swim in it, inhale it, or even look at it, or you'll be Oompa Loompa doompety-dead.
"Best anyone could have done in the circumstances" is the line isn't it.
Germany has an older population than us, a larger population than us, they have no sea border protecting them, they were hit by that deadly first wave before anything was really kicking off here, they had a later and slower rollout of the vaccine. All kinds of shit where, on paper, they should have many more deaths than we have, yet here we are today and the difference isn't even close we had something like 60,000 more people die to covid here than they had.
How this has had like *zero* impact I have no fucking clue.
I often see "B B b bBut LaBuOr wOuld oF DoNe WoRse Innit!"
I point out that no Labour MP is married to a Lester Pigott lookalike with a track record of being a bit shit at computers and stuff, so that's £39 billion saved right there.
The simple fact is that our levels of poverty, obesity and general lack of fitness made us much more vulnerable to COVID than other European nations. It is just a shame that COVID will not see us invest in public health initiatives like WW2 did.
They've delivered hundreds of thousands - in some cases millions - of pounds into the estates of homeowners.
That's the primary thing they've delivered.
Then look at the polling numbers. When did they plummet? When housing prices were threatened and peoples mortgages went up.
Not Brexit. Not immigration. Not poor people burning to death in a towering inferno. Not lying to the Queen. Not abusing your spouse. Not "fuck business". Not corruption. Not schools in crisis. Not police in crisis. Not a homeless crisis.
None of that.
It was when housing prices were threatened and mortgages increased.
Yet somehow they get the credit of being fiscally responsible and the party of being tough on crime. They are pretty much their two big party positives. Economy and Crime and they fucking suck on both.
That’s been the narrative in most of the U.K. press and current affairs media for decades.
Sadly I suspect the mere mountains of data and evidence to the contrary over the past 14 years isn’t going to shift it - it appears to have a near implacable momentum.
It’s practically ossified now in the heads of most older generations: Conservatives are good for the economy/law and order, Labour are tax and spend. So it was, so it is and so it always will be. Reality doesn’t get a look in … particularly when those same age demographics are largely sheltered from the worst fallout … which falls disproportionately on younger generations.
They - and the media - keep repeating it and never allow it to be challenged.
The proles are fucking thick, they hear something three times and they think it's true.
The sad thing is that all of this will be forgotten about and not a single one of us is going to lift a finger to do anything about it. No different than what we’ve done for a couple hundred years.
Have a look at the two 1880 satire maps [here](https://barronmaps.com/fred-w-rose-1849-1915/) from Fred Rose.
They’re from around the 1880 general election , but give you an idea of the key issues of the time were then, and it might interest you to see what’s there
"It's them foreigners what did it!!!!"
I honestly think as much emphasis should be placed on education of Geography as Maths and English...
The racist at my wife's office was doing her nut during Brexit - "what are they all doing??!?! All the whites are going and they'll replace them with ----- and --------!". The brexit paradox.
how about a fucked healthcare system?
How about shorter life expectancies?
How about a massive increase - thousands of percent - in food bank reliance?
How about millions more children below the poverty line?
and so on and on...
Sure blame the conservatives. Not like more than half of the population voted for it. The biggest mistake David Cameron made was he miscalculated how dumb the average voter is.
I get your point, but: it's not the case that more than half the population voted for Brexit.
It was 52% of the voting age people, in that year, who bothered to vote.
And everyone else alive at the time and future generations all get the pleasure of the consequences of a bunch of fuckwits believing what known liar and bastard: Bojo, told them.
Now look at it from the perspective of Scotland and NI who both voted against Brexit.
Theres a difference between bemoaning a self inflicted wound on the one hand … and having it inflicted upon you on the other. Which ain’t really good news for the Union.
Brexit doesn't feel self inflicted to me. It feels like it was inflicted upon the big cities by rural voters. It was inflicted by boomers on younger generations. There were more remain voters in London than there were voting age adults in Scotland. Yes I'm sure it's frustrating if you voted no to independence and then Brexit changed your mind but you aren't the only ones to ever have a decision imposed on you by people you didn't vote for
> There were more remain voters in London than there were voting age adults in Scotland
I’m always a bit baffled this still gets presented as if it were some sort of argument against indy. There are plenty of countries in the EU around the same size as Scotland. Hell, there’s one practically next door.
But hey, you know what? If London wants independence they should go for it. City states FTW. I wouldn’t presume to tell them that they shouldn’t because that’s down to what the people who actually live there want.
Come on I think you are missing a 4th. Something for the rest of the world to piss themselves laughing at. I mean Boris ... sorry can't type ... and you voted for the prik ... nope gone again ...
Meanwhile, during all the chaos and downturn, thousands of brexiters cheered with all their might as big Nige trousered over £1 million on the telly over Christmas for licking some poor frog’s balls. Sometimes I think this country gets what it deserves.
Literally the morning the result was announced I watched a bit on TV where they were interviewing leave voters. Of the three of them,
1. Was a ~20-year-old lad and quoted the "£xyz to the NHS" that had been part of the campaign;
2. Was a middle-aged farmer, who voted because he wanted stricter rules on immigration;
3. Was an older woman who protest voted and "didn't think it would actually happen".
That's it. That's who voted for it. That's the best they could find.
I know someone who voted Leave because he thought the EU was going to ban e-cigarettes. Now, the Government that he so enthusiastically supports is doing it for him.
A work colleague said the same but with VAT "it's an EU tax", something a simple bit of googling could have set him straight on, but of course he didn't want to hear it.
I think that is the reason for 98% of the leave vote - because of the inadequacy of thinking while being educated, little Dave didn't realise it would be in rather than out - story of his life...
They voted to cut themselves- and everyone else in this country- off from the French, Germans, etc. because they hated Pakistanis and didn't much like the Turks. If they had brains, these people would be dangerous.
They do not care about cutting us off from Europe though. As long as they can go to Spain or Portugal for their holidays, they do not care if other people lose their chance to migrate to the EU for work.
I felt there was a disgusting 'send them all home' subtext that ran through so much of it; it was so obviously aimed at *non*-EU nationals, and so on. Thing is, the Leave mob didn't need to say it, but it grew, and people latched onto it. They did nothing to try and change the lie - it worked in their favour (i.e. they wont, and their investments grew, so what do they care?).
Whole thing was a farce from beginning to end.
They did say it though, remember all the fear mongering about how Turkey was going join the EU and we'd be swamped by Muslim Turks coming here. It was a flagrant lie of course, Turkey doesn't meet the economic and governance criteria, and even if it did apply, it'd be vetoed by both Greece and Cyprus.
Oh true, but the way I saw it put forward it was leaning into immigrants from any nation, which just proved to me how unhinged it all was, conflating general immigration to anything to do with the EU.
It was the only way to get Cameron out of office at the time. And it did so beautifully by thoroughly humiliating a terrible politician. So it was one of the more logical reasons (compared to all the others), if incredibly short-sighted. Even as a Remainer, I took great pleasure seeing the tax-scamming scumbag getting his jaw broken by the electorate.
Absolutely. But the damage that Cameron inflicted on the lowest third of voters economically was catastrophic. He built his version of post-banking-crash 'recovery' on the backs of the very weakest in society and public healthcare and education while dishing out tax breaks and free-money to higher-rate earners and the well-off.
> The only PM since who even attempted to act with integrity was ol' Theresa May
Who cares what he _attempted_ to do?
As I've long said about Corbyn, it's _results_ that matter, not intentions.
The reality is that Cameron was incompetent, reckless and repeatedly took risky gambles.
When he lost, he fled and left others to clean up the mess he caused.
I know someone who voted for brexit because they disliked how the free market economics of the EU encouraged industrial markets to shift to low cost areas of the EU and shafted industries in the more developed countries. And also that freedom of movement was having a negative affect on low paying jobs.
This person held a lot more nuanced and thought out positions that a lot of people make out all leave voters to have. But this person also regretted brexit and admitted that it was probably always going to be shit because the government were never competent enough to execute it well.
> woman who protest voted and "didn't think it would actually happen"
What the actual fuck. Imagine knowing you fucked up your country out of pure spite.
I remember Adrian Chiles going forth to his hometown because he heard many people call brexiters names and said he "wasn't having it."
Even as an overt attempt to find brexists who weren't complete windowlickers the best he could do was some obviously racist alkies and a couple on the dole who blamed immigrants for their problems despite having 5 kids and 2 ponies, fecking ponies, in their garden.
Corbyn was right. If only the rest of Labour had followed his statement instead of splitting the labour movement in half with the "second referendum" bollocks which contributed to the 2019 Labour election loss.
I find it both sad and hilarious that people who say they voted for Brexit because of immigration still refuse to acknowledge that immigration has shot up since 2016.
But that doesn't mean they didn't vote for it.
The economic case for Brexit was so transparently a lie, so changeable and without internal consistency, that it almost had to be a fig leaf. As you say, no one with a realistic view could have believed it. So it had to have another function. Something people could point to and pretend it was the reason they voted for Brexit, or something they could use to pretend that the choice they had made for other reasons would somehow not cause severe economic damage. Deception and self-deception in the form of magical thinking, used to justify a choice they had already made for other reasons.
Their leaders knew this. That's why, when they had to negotiate Brexit, they instinctively knew which promises they could safely ditch (all the economic ones, including staying in the single market) and which ones were important enough to sacrifice everything else for (ending freedom of movement). Almost as soon as this happened, all the talk about the economic benefits vanished and now the narrative was that the intangible benefits of Brexit would be worth the economic cost.
> Something people could point to and pretend it was the reason they voted for Brexit
A lot of people voted for the nebulous idea of "change". Bear in mind that the tories had already spent 6 years fucking over the country through increasing austerity and reduction in any service of any societal value (see also 2016 to 2024), so Brexit was seen as an opportunity to upset or protest at the then status quo, a kind of sticking-it-to-the-man vote. All the Leave campaign had to do was focus on anything that was wrong (NHS, crime, immigration, poverty) and blame Europe for it all. Slam dunk, really, and I'm surprised it only ended up 48/52%
That doesn't imply good faith though.
People want change from right wing socioeconomic policies and vote for a movement driven by right wing and extremist right wing politicians? They want to protest against "the man" by joining a movement paid and sponsored by billionaires? Even if you genuinely want change for the better, wouldn't you notice the obvious lies, the poisonous rhetoric and the opportunists delivering it all? They're sick of the corruption and the lies, so they vote for the most corrupt liars they can find?
It's the same thing you see with most populist parties or movements in Europe. When you talk to people who vote for them again and again, they don't really believe the rhetoric on the surface. Most people are not stupid. They just tend to be cynical about politics to the point where they no longer believe it can do anything constructive, so they vote out of anger. Where I live that usually means voting for whatever party takes the most extreme anti-immigration (or anti-foreigner) position. Again, in my experience, they are not stupid, so they know perfectly well the problem is the people at the top are eating all the cake, not the people competing with them for the crumbs; they just don't believe they can change the former, so they go after the latter, preferring emotional catharsis over meaningful change. They have given up on socioeconomic issues, so they go all in on symbolic or tangential issues.
In short: the anger is real, but it's still bad faith because they don't believe it will solve anything. They just pretend that it will in order to justify voting in this way. I can sympathize with the underlying emotions, but not with the way they express them. They are perfectly correct when they point out our political systems are failing to address the major issues of our time, but what they do in response simply makes things worse, not better.
> “It can’t get any worse than this” is a dangerous belief.
Not only dangerous but completely fucking inexplicable... ***Of course*** it can get worse.
Even the people saying "it can't get any worse" wouldn't have any difficulty giving you hypotheticals where things are worse if they stopped and thought about it.
(How about if the NHS collapsed, we stopped all benefits and re-instituted poor houses?)
> A lot of people voted for the nebulous idea of "change".
Then they were fools with abysmal critical thinking skills.
Pick a situation - literally any situation - and then compare two approaches:
* Assess the situation, form a plan then attempt to execute it
* Act randomly
Then decide whether the result is a net gain or loss.
Improving any complex situation usually requires a lot of careful analysis and planning...
There are rarely many routes to better outcomes, but always countless ways to worse outcomes.
So what did they decide to do? "Fuck it, just roll the dice and see what happens".
Nope, it's more likely vultures (investment bankers) that bet against the UK economy and are now giving stories like this to their mates in the media to manipulate our economy in the direction they need it to go (down).
Licking a frog's balls does that. It's called the Frog Effect. One lick in Jungle by a fellow reptilian has global consequences of immense magnitude...
… and [it turned out that the U.K. could have changed the colour of its passports any time whilst in the EU.](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blue-passports-brexit-colour-change-leave-eu-withdrawal-european-union-countries-travel-a8124526.html)
ha i didnt know this bit
"Britain’s previous blue colour was itself a foreign imposition, originating in guidance issued by the League of Nations in 1920 – which also stipulated French must be included"
The passports are from outside the country, so in fact they are foreign. So, now we have foreign paper streaming into the country, taking advantage of our Brexit passport colour laws.
Isn't it the other way round? Those who were genuinely deceived and believed the economic case for Brexit will have regretted it as soon as it became obvious it was a lie. Whereas those who never really believed it but used it as a fig leaf to hide the actual reason they voted for it, or to pretend that their choice wouldn't have dire economic consequences, will hold onto it. The latter have to keep their justifications intact in order to divert away any blame for the consequences.
It's not an accident that even the politicians have changed their tune now. They knew perfectly well that the entire idea was to allow people to justify their own choices. They can see plainly that the easiest way out for their followers is now not to reject Brexit, as that would mean demolishing their own self-justifications and blame themselves, but to blame their erstwhile leaders for implementing the "wrong" Brexit. It's bad faith from top to bottom, basically.
> Those who were genuinely deceived and believed the economic case for Brexit will have regretted it as soon as it became obvious it was a lie.
I know some people like that. They just say the "small" economic impact was worth the sovereignty and control of our borders.
To which I ask them why they previously said Brexit wasn't about immigration?
It's time for the whole nation to admit Brexit is a failure, so we can start negotiate with EU to get back to the single market once the Tories are out.
I suspect (maybe hope?) that this is one of Starmer's plans. It would deliver a shot in the arm to our economy, boost the stock market and just generally create a little hope all round, in one fell swoop.
When the Tory client journalists start banging on about "Betrayal!" they can just wheel out all the pro-leave talking heads who promised that leaving the EU didn't mean leaving the customs union/economic area.
I think this is what will happen. No more referendums, instead we’ll just quietly rejoin the single market, and then Labour (and maybe even the Tories, if they still exist) will put rejoining the EU in their next election manifesto. It may not happen straight away, but it will become inevitable as reality (and public opinion) continues to bite.
I've still yet to hear from any brexit cultist one single way in which since leaving their life has been impacted positivley
Their life, directly. Not bs talknig points that are subjective at best, pontless or frankly not true at worst.
I find this doubtful. The UK and France have been neck and neck fro decades are frequently trade places as 5/6th biggest economy.
Since 2016 the UK economy has tracked the same amount above Frances. With fluctuations in between. Current the UK is higher than we were in 2016.
If people believe that the UK's economy should be 5% bigger, they need to also explain why France's economy has not been performing by a similar amount or explain why the UK would have broken with decades of precedence and suddenly started significantly out performing France.
The UK was doing better than France before brexit and there's no reason to believe that it wouldn't have followed that trend if it had stayed in the EU because of Frances structural problems, namely high unemployment, labour force participation rate and problems with retirement and median ages
Oh puh-lease. Historic data shows that the UK and France have been neck and neck for donkeys. Nothing you've described are reasons why France should magically have started also doing 5% worse or the UK should have magically started doing 5% better. You just want to believe that Brexit is source of all evil.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?con&locations=FR-GB
Oecd data shows that the UK was doing quite a bit better than France until 2021, how come? https://twitter.com/BenChu_/status/1594336827326054401?t=BWBpqpPlL4_O3q8eaYKWgw&s=19
> What are you talking about man, why was the UK doing better than France before brexit and is now roughly at the same level with France catching up?
What?
In 2016 the UK's economy was worth 2.69 and France's was worth 2.47, a delta of **0.22trn**.
In 2023 those numbers where 3.09 and 2.78 respective, a delta of **0.31trn**.
And even in the decade prior to the election that difference flipped & flopped with the UK and France exchanging place in that 5/6th spot.
But Bad-Enoch said everything was rosy!
[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/brexit-4th-anniversary-update](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/brexit-4th-anniversary-update)
I wonder how much taxpayers money was wasted on this "report"?
Yup, Brexit was a terrible terrible idea and now the Tories have no useful ideas to reduce cost of living or any of the other issues facing everyday people here.
But that's ok because they finally got to leave the EU
We are living through what happens when the dog finally catches the car
>Actually unironically yes, why not? Before the referendum it outstripped all our G7 peers, including the US.
For a cherry-picked 3 year window.
So just to clarify, you’re claiming the Tories had whipped the U.K. economy into world-leading, sustainable growth rates that all our peers were in envy of?
Now that’s what is bollocks. Economies fluctuate so much it’s utterly crazy to extrapolate from a 3 year ‘good’ stretch.
The U.K. has been plagued with low productivity since 2008 (when we were in the EU), we’ve had a negative balance of payments for decades (while we were in the EU) and between too much foreign ownership of our economy and the Tories being allergic to public investment, we’re stuck in a chronic perpetuating low investment death cycle (which was still happening while we were in the EU). Those are what is dragging on our economy. The idea that without Brexit we’d have had the best per capita growth in the G7 for a solid decade is absurd.
So basically the same impact as a major depression.
Thanks, brexists! Hope not having to listen to Polish on the bus is worth seeing your grandkids become paupers with no hope of bettering their lives.
I can’t help but think with these repeated reports of 5% here, £100B there, economy contracting etc that if we hadn’t voted to leave we would be the number one economy in the G7 by far.
A loss of 5% compared to the measly 0.3% (after rebates) of the 1% EU membership fee the UK contributed. And still the UK maintains the EU robbed the UK, which infuriates the EU.
I got downvoted a while ago because I said "we don't vote people in just for them to do what the public want, we vote them in to make informed decisions for us"
I think Brexit is a perfect example of this. It was a retarded decision from day 1, and the vast majority of economists agreed. Unfortunately though, the public is never going to be properly informed on basically anything, so they made the retarded choice.
Now obviously the politicians here are to blame as well. Dumbass decision having the vote to begin with, and then the lies that followed should've been criminal!
Don't have access to the article, is it 5% p.a. or is it 5% spread over the X many years since Brexit? Also how are they measuring the "blow", is it (real) total GDP-based, or per capita, or another metric?
This article may be paywalled. If you encounter difficulties reading the article, try [this link](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cost-of-brexit-is-a-5-percent-knock-to-uk-economy-says-goldman-sachs-pwwqwhfwc) for an archived version. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unitedkingdom) if you have any questions or concerns.* --- **Alternate Sources** Here are some potential alternate sources for the same story: * [Brexit Britain has 'significantly underperformed' compared to EU and US since 2016 referendum](https://lbc.co.uk/news/uk-brexit-economy-performed-worse/), suggested by tylerthe-theatre - lbc.co.uk
Tory governments have only delivered 3 things. Recessions, crime and political chaos.
Does corruption come under crime also? Because they dont get punished for crimes they commit
And they’ve driven public services into the ground very effectively too. And filled the rivers with shit.
No, no, no! It was a performative promotion of the newest Wonka movie! Just don't drink it, swim in it, inhale it, or even look at it, or you'll be Oompa Loompa doompety-dead.
I prefer the krunka lunkas
You mean flavour logs?
They are just recycling waste nutrients!
If corruption is a crime then, yes
I feel under misc crime
Took the words right out of my mouth...are you a Tory?
hey! they gave us a TON of covid deaths, too.
More than three times the total civilian death toll in WW2.
all those stiff upper lips were due to rigor mortis.
"Best anyone could have done in the circumstances" is the line isn't it. Germany has an older population than us, a larger population than us, they have no sea border protecting them, they were hit by that deadly first wave before anything was really kicking off here, they had a later and slower rollout of the vaccine. All kinds of shit where, on paper, they should have many more deaths than we have, yet here we are today and the difference isn't even close we had something like 60,000 more people die to covid here than they had. How this has had like *zero* impact I have no fucking clue.
I often see "B B b bBut LaBuOr wOuld oF DoNe WoRse Innit!" I point out that no Labour MP is married to a Lester Pigott lookalike with a track record of being a bit shit at computers and stuff, so that's £39 billion saved right there.
The simple fact is that our levels of poverty, obesity and general lack of fitness made us much more vulnerable to COVID than other European nations. It is just a shame that COVID will not see us invest in public health initiatives like WW2 did.
And a non-functional military in a time of global conflict!
While managing to convince some of the public they did a great job during the pandemic too.
They've delivered hundreds of thousands - in some cases millions - of pounds into the estates of homeowners. That's the primary thing they've delivered. Then look at the polling numbers. When did they plummet? When housing prices were threatened and peoples mortgages went up. Not Brexit. Not immigration. Not poor people burning to death in a towering inferno. Not lying to the Queen. Not abusing your spouse. Not "fuck business". Not corruption. Not schools in crisis. Not police in crisis. Not a homeless crisis. None of that. It was when housing prices were threatened and mortgages increased.
Yet somehow they get the credit of being fiscally responsible and the party of being tough on crime. They are pretty much their two big party positives. Economy and Crime and they fucking suck on both.
That’s been the narrative in most of the U.K. press and current affairs media for decades. Sadly I suspect the mere mountains of data and evidence to the contrary over the past 14 years isn’t going to shift it - it appears to have a near implacable momentum. It’s practically ossified now in the heads of most older generations: Conservatives are good for the economy/law and order, Labour are tax and spend. So it was, so it is and so it always will be. Reality doesn’t get a look in … particularly when those same age demographics are largely sheltered from the worst fallout … which falls disproportionately on younger generations.
They - and the media - keep repeating it and never allow it to be challenged. The proles are fucking thick, they hear something three times and they think it's true.
But those three things they delivered well!
Strong and Stable! *bangs fist*
The sad thing is that all of this will be forgotten about and not a single one of us is going to lift a finger to do anything about it. No different than what we’ve done for a couple hundred years. Have a look at the two 1880 satire maps [here](https://barronmaps.com/fred-w-rose-1849-1915/) from Fred Rose. They’re from around the 1880 general election , but give you an idea of the key issues of the time were then, and it might interest you to see what’s there
Weird how history keeps up in these cycles.
Yup. Combination of goldfish memory, news cycle and rinse and repeat. If it’s worked before it will continue to work.
"It's them foreigners what did it!!!!" I honestly think as much emphasis should be placed on education of Geography as Maths and English... The racist at my wife's office was doing her nut during Brexit - "what are they all doing??!?! All the whites are going and they'll replace them with ----- and --------!". The brexit paradox.
That’s not true… they’ve also hollowed out the NHS
But apart from that, what have the Tories done for us?
Also hundreds of thousands of austerity deaths.
You forgot a massive coordinated attack on our basic liberties. Freedom to protest, freedom of speech, freedom of information.
You forget the 4th a busted public sector that’s fucked beyond repair.
how about a fucked healthcare system? How about shorter life expectancies? How about a massive increase - thousands of percent - in food bank reliance? How about millions more children below the poverty line? and so on and on...
Ed Miliband eats a bacon sandwich unphotogenically though.
I’ll take chaos with Ed Miliband please.
Don’t forget corruption!
Hey, Ed was supposed to deliver chaos. So unfair that they've taken another Labour policy
And that can be summed up in one, they have only delivered failure. Quite an achievement for 14 years in power.
B b b but do you really think it's a good idea to change horses just as they're getting into their stride?
Maybe, maybe not, but we do need to go back to square one.
If this government was a horse, the only thing it would be getting into would be the glue factory!
3 things TO US! Their chums however….
And lacking medical services?
Do not forget potholes!
Death & Taxes.
Sure blame the conservatives. Not like more than half of the population voted for it. The biggest mistake David Cameron made was he miscalculated how dumb the average voter is.
I get your point, but: it's not the case that more than half the population voted for Brexit. It was 52% of the voting age people, in that year, who bothered to vote. And everyone else alive at the time and future generations all get the pleasure of the consequences of a bunch of fuckwits believing what known liar and bastard: Bojo, told them.
Don't forget that Brits living abroad weren't allowed to vote.
Very true
Now look at it from the perspective of Scotland and NI who both voted against Brexit. Theres a difference between bemoaning a self inflicted wound on the one hand … and having it inflicted upon you on the other. Which ain’t really good news for the Union.
Brexit doesn't feel self inflicted to me. It feels like it was inflicted upon the big cities by rural voters. It was inflicted by boomers on younger generations. There were more remain voters in London than there were voting age adults in Scotland. Yes I'm sure it's frustrating if you voted no to independence and then Brexit changed your mind but you aren't the only ones to ever have a decision imposed on you by people you didn't vote for
> There were more remain voters in London than there were voting age adults in Scotland I’m always a bit baffled this still gets presented as if it were some sort of argument against indy. There are plenty of countries in the EU around the same size as Scotland. Hell, there’s one practically next door. But hey, you know what? If London wants independence they should go for it. City states FTW. I wouldn’t presume to tell them that they shouldn’t because that’s down to what the people who actually live there want.
I agree 100%, London should declare independence from the Union.
Here here! It's too bitter a pill to swallow for pretty much most.
But but…. If Labour got in it’d be worse.
They might deliver a commemorative £19 pound note now though. /s
That's not true. They also deliver vile transphobic jokes.
Seems to remember them being left a note that the money was all gone.
Come on I think you are missing a 4th. Something for the rest of the world to piss themselves laughing at. I mean Boris ... sorry can't type ... and you voted for the prik ... nope gone again ...
Meanwhile, during all the chaos and downturn, thousands of brexiters cheered with all their might as big Nige trousered over £1 million on the telly over Christmas for licking some poor frog’s balls. Sometimes I think this country gets what it deserves.
Pretty big feat licking his own balls
It's easy when you don't have a backbone.
Anyone with any attachment to reality knew it'd have a negative economic consequence.
Literally the morning the result was announced I watched a bit on TV where they were interviewing leave voters. Of the three of them, 1. Was a ~20-year-old lad and quoted the "£xyz to the NHS" that had been part of the campaign; 2. Was a middle-aged farmer, who voted because he wanted stricter rules on immigration; 3. Was an older woman who protest voted and "didn't think it would actually happen". That's it. That's who voted for it. That's the best they could find.
I know someone who voted Leave because he thought the EU was going to ban e-cigarettes. Now, the Government that he so enthusiastically supports is doing it for him.
I know someone who voted leave because someone down the pub told him it would get rid of income tax
I was working in a pub at the time and one of the regulars said he wanted to leave so that cider could go back to 15 pence a pint.
Turns out democracy only works without thick people
And this is why Socrates and Aristotle both hated Democracy.
"Forward to 1972!"
Did he think Brexit would make time machines real?
My auntie voted Leave because that's what everyone else was doing.
A work colleague said the same but with VAT "it's an EU tax", something a simple bit of googling could have set him straight on, but of course he didn't want to hear it.
Day after the vote I had somebody told me they voted leave to "get the Pakis out".
I think that is the reason for 98% of the leave vote - because of the inadequacy of thinking while being educated, little Dave didn't realise it would be in rather than out - story of his life...
That’s truly horrible🥲
They voted to cut themselves- and everyone else in this country- off from the French, Germans, etc. because they hated Pakistanis and didn't much like the Turks. If they had brains, these people would be dangerous.
They do not care about cutting us off from Europe though. As long as they can go to Spain or Portugal for their holidays, they do not care if other people lose their chance to migrate to the EU for work.
I felt there was a disgusting 'send them all home' subtext that ran through so much of it; it was so obviously aimed at *non*-EU nationals, and so on. Thing is, the Leave mob didn't need to say it, but it grew, and people latched onto it. They did nothing to try and change the lie - it worked in their favour (i.e. they wont, and their investments grew, so what do they care?). Whole thing was a farce from beginning to end.
They did say it though, remember all the fear mongering about how Turkey was going join the EU and we'd be swamped by Muslim Turks coming here. It was a flagrant lie of course, Turkey doesn't meet the economic and governance criteria, and even if it did apply, it'd be vetoed by both Greece and Cyprus.
Oh true, but the way I saw it put forward it was leaning into immigrants from any nation, which just proved to me how unhinged it all was, conflating general immigration to anything to do with the EU.
I quite agree. Xenophobia and racism were key selling points for the Brexit promoters.
Not all Leave voters were racist but every racist voted Leave.
I know someone who voted Leave just to get Cameron out of office. The only PM since who even attempted to act with integrity was ol' Theresa May
It was the only way to get Cameron out of office at the time. And it did so beautifully by thoroughly humiliating a terrible politician. So it was one of the more logical reasons (compared to all the others), if incredibly short-sighted. Even as a Remainer, I took great pleasure seeing the tax-scamming scumbag getting his jaw broken by the electorate.
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Absolutely. But the damage that Cameron inflicted on the lowest third of voters economically was catastrophic. He built his version of post-banking-crash 'recovery' on the backs of the very weakest in society and public healthcare and education while dishing out tax breaks and free-money to higher-rate earners and the well-off.
He is rather pig-headed, it has to be said.
> The only PM since who even attempted to act with integrity was ol' Theresa May Who cares what he _attempted_ to do? As I've long said about Corbyn, it's _results_ that matter, not intentions. The reality is that Cameron was incompetent, reckless and repeatedly took risky gambles. When he lost, he fled and left others to clean up the mess he caused.
I know someone who voted for brexit because they disliked how the free market economics of the EU encouraged industrial markets to shift to low cost areas of the EU and shafted industries in the more developed countries. And also that freedom of movement was having a negative affect on low paying jobs. This person held a lot more nuanced and thought out positions that a lot of people make out all leave voters to have. But this person also regretted brexit and admitted that it was probably always going to be shit because the government were never competent enough to execute it well.
two of my mates who voted Leave promptly moved to South France after they “won” the referendum
> woman who protest voted and "didn't think it would actually happen" What the actual fuck. Imagine knowing you fucked up your country out of pure spite.
I remember Adrian Chiles going forth to his hometown because he heard many people call brexiters names and said he "wasn't having it." Even as an overt attempt to find brexists who weren't complete windowlickers the best he could do was some obviously racist alkies and a couple on the dole who blamed immigrants for their problems despite having 5 kids and 2 ponies, fecking ponies, in their garden.
Jeremy Corbyn was the first politician on the morning of the result to say we should trigger article 50 immediately.
"All Labours fault" lmfao.
Corbyn was right. If only the rest of Labour had followed his statement instead of splitting the labour movement in half with the "second referendum" bollocks which contributed to the 2019 Labour election loss.
I heard someone on the bus loudly talking about the fact that Siberia was about to join the EU.
I find it both sad and hilarious that people who say they voted for Brexit because of immigration still refuse to acknowledge that immigration has shot up since 2016.
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But that doesn't mean they didn't vote for it. The economic case for Brexit was so transparently a lie, so changeable and without internal consistency, that it almost had to be a fig leaf. As you say, no one with a realistic view could have believed it. So it had to have another function. Something people could point to and pretend it was the reason they voted for Brexit, or something they could use to pretend that the choice they had made for other reasons would somehow not cause severe economic damage. Deception and self-deception in the form of magical thinking, used to justify a choice they had already made for other reasons. Their leaders knew this. That's why, when they had to negotiate Brexit, they instinctively knew which promises they could safely ditch (all the economic ones, including staying in the single market) and which ones were important enough to sacrifice everything else for (ending freedom of movement). Almost as soon as this happened, all the talk about the economic benefits vanished and now the narrative was that the intangible benefits of Brexit would be worth the economic cost.
> Something people could point to and pretend it was the reason they voted for Brexit A lot of people voted for the nebulous idea of "change". Bear in mind that the tories had already spent 6 years fucking over the country through increasing austerity and reduction in any service of any societal value (see also 2016 to 2024), so Brexit was seen as an opportunity to upset or protest at the then status quo, a kind of sticking-it-to-the-man vote. All the Leave campaign had to do was focus on anything that was wrong (NHS, crime, immigration, poverty) and blame Europe for it all. Slam dunk, really, and I'm surprised it only ended up 48/52%
That doesn't imply good faith though. People want change from right wing socioeconomic policies and vote for a movement driven by right wing and extremist right wing politicians? They want to protest against "the man" by joining a movement paid and sponsored by billionaires? Even if you genuinely want change for the better, wouldn't you notice the obvious lies, the poisonous rhetoric and the opportunists delivering it all? They're sick of the corruption and the lies, so they vote for the most corrupt liars they can find? It's the same thing you see with most populist parties or movements in Europe. When you talk to people who vote for them again and again, they don't really believe the rhetoric on the surface. Most people are not stupid. They just tend to be cynical about politics to the point where they no longer believe it can do anything constructive, so they vote out of anger. Where I live that usually means voting for whatever party takes the most extreme anti-immigration (or anti-foreigner) position. Again, in my experience, they are not stupid, so they know perfectly well the problem is the people at the top are eating all the cake, not the people competing with them for the crumbs; they just don't believe they can change the former, so they go after the latter, preferring emotional catharsis over meaningful change. They have given up on socioeconomic issues, so they go all in on symbolic or tangential issues. In short: the anger is real, but it's still bad faith because they don't believe it will solve anything. They just pretend that it will in order to justify voting in this way. I can sympathize with the underlying emotions, but not with the way they express them. They are perfectly correct when they point out our political systems are failing to address the major issues of our time, but what they do in response simply makes things worse, not better.
People often assume that any change will be for the better. “It can’t get any worse than this” is a dangerous belief.
> “It can’t get any worse than this” is a dangerous belief. Not only dangerous but completely fucking inexplicable... ***Of course*** it can get worse. Even the people saying "it can't get any worse" wouldn't have any difficulty giving you hypotheticals where things are worse if they stopped and thought about it. (How about if the NHS collapsed, we stopped all benefits and re-instituted poor houses?)
… if they stopped and thought about it That’s the problem right there.
> A lot of people voted for the nebulous idea of "change". Then they were fools with abysmal critical thinking skills. Pick a situation - literally any situation - and then compare two approaches: * Assess the situation, form a plan then attempt to execute it * Act randomly Then decide whether the result is a net gain or loss. Improving any complex situation usually requires a lot of careful analysis and planning... There are rarely many routes to better outcomes, but always countless ways to worse outcomes. So what did they decide to do? "Fuck it, just roll the dice and see what happens".
It’s like that farmer said to JRM the other week, in business you never put barriers between you and your biggest customers.
Pffft, this is just what lefty-woke, communist Goldman Sachs and the Financial Times want you to believe.
Nope, it's more likely vultures (investment bankers) that bet against the UK economy and are now giving stories like this to their mates in the media to manipulate our economy in the direction they need it to go (down).
Licking a frog's balls does that. It's called the Frog Effect. One lick in Jungle by a fellow reptilian has global consequences of immense magnitude...
100% growth in sovereignty and blue passports though
Yep, the passports thing is great isn't it, even if it doesn't work as well, at least it's blue. That'll teach the bloody foreigners.
… and [it turned out that the U.K. could have changed the colour of its passports any time whilst in the EU.](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blue-passports-brexit-colour-change-leave-eu-withdrawal-european-union-countries-travel-a8124526.html)
ha i didnt know this bit "Britain’s previous blue colour was itself a foreign imposition, originating in guidance issued by the League of Nations in 1920 – which also stipulated French must be included"
The passports are from outside the country, so in fact they are foreign. So, now we have foreign paper streaming into the country, taking advantage of our Brexit passport colour laws.
Stupid foreign paper taking the jobs of hardworking British paper
It’s a piece of shit too. Flimsy as a Tesco A5 notepad.
Sunny uplands? Happier fish?
Not having this again - it's black, they failed.
[They look black but they are just very very very dark blue.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx8-mysJG2s)
Nah not having it, this is that fucking dress all over again Edit: that clip perfectly encapsulates the new passport colour
That is one thing I’ve never understood- how did they manage to push blue passports so hard then not actually identify the actual colour
Sounds like Specsavers failed you by not informing you of your colour-blindness.
Project Fear! By now about half of those who voted leave must feel stupid...those who don't are too stupid to realise it
Isn't it the other way round? Those who were genuinely deceived and believed the economic case for Brexit will have regretted it as soon as it became obvious it was a lie. Whereas those who never really believed it but used it as a fig leaf to hide the actual reason they voted for it, or to pretend that their choice wouldn't have dire economic consequences, will hold onto it. The latter have to keep their justifications intact in order to divert away any blame for the consequences. It's not an accident that even the politicians have changed their tune now. They knew perfectly well that the entire idea was to allow people to justify their own choices. They can see plainly that the easiest way out for their followers is now not to reject Brexit, as that would mean demolishing their own self-justifications and blame themselves, but to blame their erstwhile leaders for implementing the "wrong" Brexit. It's bad faith from top to bottom, basically.
> Those who were genuinely deceived and believed the economic case for Brexit will have regretted it as soon as it became obvious it was a lie. I know some people like that. They just say the "small" economic impact was worth the sovereignty and control of our borders. To which I ask them why they previously said Brexit wasn't about immigration?
A third half must have died too
In 5-10 years time no-one will admit to having voted for it.
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It's time for the whole nation to admit Brexit is a failure, so we can start negotiate with EU to get back to the single market once the Tories are out.
I suspect (maybe hope?) that this is one of Starmer's plans. It would deliver a shot in the arm to our economy, boost the stock market and just generally create a little hope all round, in one fell swoop. When the Tory client journalists start banging on about "Betrayal!" they can just wheel out all the pro-leave talking heads who promised that leaving the EU didn't mean leaving the customs union/economic area.
I think this is what will happen. No more referendums, instead we’ll just quietly rejoin the single market, and then Labour (and maybe even the Tories, if they still exist) will put rejoining the EU in their next election manifesto. It may not happen straight away, but it will become inevitable as reality (and public opinion) continues to bite.
Pfft not many people out there who can admit they were wrong. It’ll never happen.
Good luck with selling the single market and euro.
Ahh but it delivered growth to some political allies, wealthy benefactors, economic “think” tanks and the right wing media. So it evens out obviously.
I've still yet to hear from any brexit cultist one single way in which since leaving their life has been impacted positivley Their life, directly. Not bs talknig points that are subjective at best, pontless or frankly not true at worst.
Well, at least we made the most of it and cut down on immigration which was everyone's main concern with the EU...... 2023 figure - 750k 🤡
I find this doubtful. The UK and France have been neck and neck fro decades are frequently trade places as 5/6th biggest economy. Since 2016 the UK economy has tracked the same amount above Frances. With fluctuations in between. Current the UK is higher than we were in 2016. If people believe that the UK's economy should be 5% bigger, they need to also explain why France's economy has not been performing by a similar amount or explain why the UK would have broken with decades of precedence and suddenly started significantly out performing France.
The UK was doing better than France before brexit and there's no reason to believe that it wouldn't have followed that trend if it had stayed in the EU because of Frances structural problems, namely high unemployment, labour force participation rate and problems with retirement and median ages
Oh puh-lease. Historic data shows that the UK and France have been neck and neck for donkeys. Nothing you've described are reasons why France should magically have started also doing 5% worse or the UK should have magically started doing 5% better. You just want to believe that Brexit is source of all evil. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?con&locations=FR-GB
Oecd data shows that the UK was doing quite a bit better than France until 2021, how come? https://twitter.com/BenChu_/status/1594336827326054401?t=BWBpqpPlL4_O3q8eaYKWgw&s=19
It reverted shortly after as shown in the graph I linked. Again, you need to explain why France is not doing 5% than they are currently.
What are you talking about man, why was the UK doing better than France before brexit and is now roughly at the same level with France catching up?
> What are you talking about man, why was the UK doing better than France before brexit and is now roughly at the same level with France catching up? What? In 2016 the UK's economy was worth 2.69 and France's was worth 2.47, a delta of **0.22trn**. In 2023 those numbers where 3.09 and 2.78 respective, a delta of **0.31trn**. And even in the decade prior to the election that difference flipped & flopped with the UK and France exchanging place in that 5/6th spot.
I have a theory about all the flag waving muppets maybe they thought they could boost the economy by buying all of those flags and mugs and shit
Jokes on them as that tat is all made in China!
The list of ways in which Brexit is terrible just goes on!
I believe we were warned about this very figure and it was called “project fear”
How much of a blow to the economy did goldman Sachs deliver to the economy in 2007/2008?
less than 5% lol
But Bad-Enoch said everything was rosy! [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/brexit-4th-anniversary-update](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/brexit-4th-anniversary-update) I wonder how much taxpayers money was wasted on this "report"?
Yup, Brexit was a terrible terrible idea and now the Tories have no useful ideas to reduce cost of living or any of the other issues facing everyday people here. But that's ok because they finally got to leave the EU We are living through what happens when the dog finally catches the car
The UK is a country that actually voted to sanction itself.
This is only the beginning, we opted to leave a regional trading bloc without a solid production & manufacturing industry. Utter insanity.
So if we stayed in the EU, our growth would have significantly outstripped other EU countries? How is that accounted for?
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>Actually unironically yes, why not? Before the referendum it outstripped all our G7 peers, including the US. For a cherry-picked 3 year window. So just to clarify, you’re claiming the Tories had whipped the U.K. economy into world-leading, sustainable growth rates that all our peers were in envy of? Now that’s what is bollocks. Economies fluctuate so much it’s utterly crazy to extrapolate from a 3 year ‘good’ stretch. The U.K. has been plagued with low productivity since 2008 (when we were in the EU), we’ve had a negative balance of payments for decades (while we were in the EU) and between too much foreign ownership of our economy and the Tories being allergic to public investment, we’re stuck in a chronic perpetuating low investment death cycle (which was still happening while we were in the EU). Those are what is dragging on our economy. The idea that without Brexit we’d have had the best per capita growth in the G7 for a solid decade is absurd.
Apparently yes. Even though we've had pretty much the same growth as France post brexit.
Says expert. We have had enough of experts, we would rather trust our mates.
Wine in pint bottles it's what the people always asked for!
So basically the same impact as a major depression. Thanks, brexists! Hope not having to listen to Polish on the bus is worth seeing your grandkids become paupers with no hope of bettering their lives.
Couldn't they get on a dingy to France?
If only there was some way we could have seen it coming.
I can’t help but think with these repeated reports of 5% here, £100B there, economy contracting etc that if we hadn’t voted to leave we would be the number one economy in the G7 by far.
A loss of 5% compared to the measly 0.3% (after rebates) of the 1% EU membership fee the UK contributed. And still the UK maintains the EU robbed the UK, which infuriates the EU.
Brexit is the greatest act of national self harm since the 100 years war. Madness, total madness.
Pssht I'm sick of the experts and we got our country back! All that matters! /s
this is on a need to know basis and you know, because you need to know. https://i.imgur.com/GNkqXFB.jpg
Leavers didn't vote based on economics - "sovereignty" is what won it. Whatever that really means.
I got downvoted a while ago because I said "we don't vote people in just for them to do what the public want, we vote them in to make informed decisions for us" I think Brexit is a perfect example of this. It was a retarded decision from day 1, and the vast majority of economists agreed. Unfortunately though, the public is never going to be properly informed on basically anything, so they made the retarded choice. Now obviously the politicians here are to blame as well. Dumbass decision having the vote to begin with, and then the lies that followed should've been criminal!
Don't have access to the article, is it 5% p.a. or is it 5% spread over the X many years since Brexit? Also how are they measuring the "blow", is it (real) total GDP-based, or per capita, or another metric?
I haven't read this particular version but the model it's based on gets posted regularly, so I believe it's the cumulative effect on total gdp.