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.
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.
Don’t forget the kremlin.
Kremlin propaganda fell on frugal soil here in Germany. Especially the former GDR. I’d wager most liberals/lefts/social-democrats and even conservatives are pro-Ukraine here. And I’d wager that it’s most of them. I still have hope Musks endeavours can’t break the mental firewalls against fascism German education has tried to build in the heads of people, though it’s definitely broken even in West-Germany.
We really do live in a post-truth era. Zizek was right when Snowden dropped his docs. He said based on the response to the Iraq War torture leaks, he didn’t expect anything to change. That big disclosures mean basically nothing now. God damn it he was so fucking right.
People remember Chelsea Manning not for exposing war crimes, but for the crime of being trans. Checks out.
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.
Yes! I really tried to explain this to people. One guy I saw on the news said he was voting Brexit to “get the Muslims out,” apparently completely unaware of how batshit insane it is to leave the European Union to reduce the number of non European people in Britain.
Yeah it fucking sucks. I left before the official Brexit date, in a year or two I will hopefully have an EU citizenship again. Most of my friends couldn’t have really done that so easily
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.
It should be a hell of a lot higher, but the people with the power to change it are the only people who would be punished, so…
Not disagreeing with you here but I think this is THE action to push, as much as everyone is able to.