Thread: Brexit - It's Still On!

Originally Posted by Troy

The UK will take years to recover from the disaster Brexit has become.

Carry on, chaps! Full steam ahead.

The pro-Brexit crowd has certainly diminished or has become silent . . . difficult to defend absolute fuckwittery for years and years. But then 'two generations from now...'

Originally Posted by panama hat

The pro-Brexit crowd has certainly diminished or has become silent

We achieved our goal so why not leave it as it is. Our goal was to pull the UK out of the EU. Job done.

Originally Posted by Seekingasylum

Brexit is the greatest single act of self inflicted stupidity ever perpetrated by the English in modern political history.

Your opinion so why was it voted in?

Stupidity, of course. It’s why Trump was elected, why Russia invaded Ukraine and English men wear short trousers in winter.

Originally Posted by panama hat

fuckwittery

As an answer to the birdflu thing in Europe, the EU recommends that cats and dogs are kept inside

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

Fuck

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

Fuck

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

Fuck

Knowing you, I won't see this as hatred

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

I quite like the Scandos

We'll take the Orkneys and Scotland off your hands any day.

(might swop it for Sweden)

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

We achieved our goal so why not leave it as it is. Our goal was to pull the UK out of the EU. Job done.

Yup, and Continental Europeans rejoice . . . and now Brits are suffering because of lies and ineptitude. The vitriol thrown about by the Brexiteers, check out this thread, was/is the cause for debate.

Plus, it's not 'job done' yet for the UK as the whining about how terrible the EU is and how the UK has to get rid if thousands of laws etc...

Thus is a discussion about a topic like any other.


Gems, the lot of them, from just one page (I've excluded one of yours where you say that you were only given the chance to get out after 40 years . . . when you could have done so at any time. Also, you had the option to never have joined in the first place.:

Originally Posted by buriramboy

As I said I really hope we just walk away and when you want access to our markets on favourable terms we will listen to your proposals. It's going to be fun watching French garlic farmers go out of business.

Originally Posted by chassamui

waiting for EU tantrums to give UK the excuse to walk away and get on with running their own country, free of interference from the quarrelsome children over the water.

Originally Posted by buriramboy

We are leaving, anything we signed up to was based on us being a member of the EU, we are leaving so owe you nothing.

Originally Posted by buriramboy

You just can't reason or discuss things rationally with these EU buffoons, sooner we're out the better.

Originally Posted by panama hat

Yup, and Continental Europeans rejoice . . . and now Brits are suffering because of lies and ineptitude.:

I'm currently waiting for a visa to come through for work in the EU and the process is now in its 3rd month. So far it has cost me around 500 quid. When it arrives, I will be another month before it is cleared as I will have to take HIV, TB tests etc.

Previously, I was able to pretty much turn up with my good old red passport and start work the next day.

The whole thing is a fucking mess and the sooner the idiots who got us in this hole swallow their nationalistic pride and beg for us to be back where we belong, the better.

So that's a number of posters now who have had their job prospects hampered by BREXIT.

And a total of zero posters who are better off in any concrete way.

Shouldn't toots/strigil/whingey/MM be popping in to remind us what a big success it is? After all, he bleated on for years as to how good it would be.

Originally Posted by hallelujah

I'm currently waiting for a visa to come through for work in the EU and the process is now in its 3rd month. So far it has cost me around 500 quid. When it arrives, I will be another month before it is cleared as I will have to take HIV, TB tests etc.

Previously, I was able to pretty much turn up with my good old red passport and start work the next day.

The whole thing is a fucking mess and the sooner the idiots who got us in this hole swallow their nationalistic pride and beg for us to be back where we belong, the better.

The entire project was an accident. No one actually expected to win the referendum vote to leave, certainly not Farage or Johnson who both were using the issue as a vehicle for personal ambition - Johnson famously had drafted two speeches to cover either outcome placing him as a spokesman for the majority, he had no principles as such. But no one actually thought the English could be that stupid. Brexit was always the purlieu of the right wing dinosaurs, the eccentric, the racist, the bigoted, the deluded, the ill informed, the credulous, and the merely stupid, and together they totalled 17.6 million.

That’s a helluva lot of stupidity to swallow and in the end the voters are simply too dumb to do anything other than simply limp along with consigning themselves to a third country status.

I said years ago Brexit would fuck the country without a single advantage and that’s what has happened.

Free movement and rejoining the customs union is imperative but does anyone think for a moment the likes of the ERG will abandon their idiocy?

Britain’s fucked. I foretold stagflation, increased debt and lessening public expenditure was the dividend and that’s all come true, as indeed has the continuing devalued £ - remember the drivel spouted by the Brexit morons that it would bounce back in a couple of years. Well here we are a volatile £ anchored in the range of $1.25-$1.31.

But every cloud has a silver lining ……….no other EU state is now toying with an exit. Britain has strengthened the EU immeasurably by its stupidity and the refocusing of the relationship between the US and the EU, sidelining the stupid English, is testament to that.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Shouldn't toots/strigil/whingey/MM be popping in to remind us what a big success it is? After all, he bleated on for years as to how good it would be.

Even some of my Brexit-voting family have recently realised that they've made a huge fucking mistake.

What amuses/saddens me the most is when people start railing against the EU for implementing the policies THEY VOTED FOR!

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, so I have a biscuit instead.

Originally Posted by helge

As an answer to the birdflu thing in Europe, the EU recommends that cats and dogs are kept inside

We'll take the Orkneys and Scotland off your hands any day.

(might swop it for Sweden)

I'll swap Southend for Bergen.

&, we'll take the Norwegian oil fields, you can have the Scottish oil fields.

Can't say fairer than that!

Originally Posted by hallelujah

What amuses/saddens me the most is when people start railing against the EU for implementing the policies THEY VOTED FOR!

Just look at most of the pro-Brexit posters here to see perfect examples of the mental capacity they have

Originally Posted by panama hat

Just look at most of the pro-Brexit posters here to see perfect examples of the mental capacity they have

Most have flounced from this thread.

Originally Posted by hallelujah

The whole thing is a fucking mess and the sooner the idiots who got us in this hole swallow their nationalistic pride and beg for us to be back where we belong, the better.

I doubt that will ever happen (Though, I think it should).

Originally Posted by DrWilly

I doubt that will ever happen (Though, I think it should).

Sadly, it won't - definitely not under the same privileged status as before. Of course it'd be better for the UK (a dpossibly the EU) should this happen, but nah . . . no gumption in their political ranks.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Most have flounced from this thread.

Yea, I guess the most telling post was by our resident geriatric saying that 'two generations from now will benefit' . . . when before it was supposedly an immediate explosion of success, wealth and happiness. Again - just look at the posters.

Originally Posted by panama hat

Yea, I guess the most telling post was by our resident geriatric saying that 'two generations from now will benefit' . . . when before it was supposedly an immediate explosion of success, wealth and happiness. Again - just look at the posters.

They've made their beds.

Let's blame everything on Brexit, nothing to do with covid and two years of lockdown....

Brexit isn’t to blame for our current problems; it is still an opportunity

This article is more than 8 months old
Larry Elliot





The UK economy is clearly struggling. Growth has stalled, interest rates are going up and the Treasury is softening up the public for a new dose of austerity measures.
For some, the explanation for these horrors is simple: Britain is paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union. Forget the impact of the most severe pandemic in a century. Forget what Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has done to energy prices. Brexit is the “gorilla in the room”.

Really? Or is this a classic case of confirmation bias, where someone starts with a preconceived view and then finds evidence to back up their argument? As in: I always said Brexit would be a disaster; the economy is in a bad way; Brexit is to blame and here’s the proof.
There is no dispute that the UK has some serious economic problems – including a chronic trade deficit and a poor record for investment – but they predate the Brexit vote in 2016. Britain has not run a surplus on trade in goods since the early 1980s, and wages adjusted for inflation have barely grown since the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. Had the economy been firing on all cylinders in 2016, it seems unlikely more than 17 million people would have voted to leave the EU.
Britain is not the only country facing labour shortages. The German government said earlier this year it was cutting red tape to make it easier to recruit workers from Turkey, and its big industrial sector trade union, IG Metall, has put in a claim for an 8% increase. France reported 300,000 unfilled vacancies in its hospitality, with a similar picture in Spain. According to the Office for National Statistics, at the time of the 2016 referendum there were 2,335,000 people born in other EU countries employed in the UK. At the latest count, this total stood at 2,389,000. The number is down slightly on the peak of 2,508,000 in early 2020 but there has been no mass exodus of EU workers.
Nor is the UK alone in facing cost of living pressures. The annual inflation rate for the 19-nation eurozone currently stands at 10.7%, higher than the UK’s 10.1%. US inflation peaked at just over 9% in the summer.
The European Central Bank is pushing up interest rates because it is worried that tight labour markets will lead to a wage-price spiral; so is the Federal Reserve in the US. The upward pressures on inflation are caused by the pandemic, the supply-chain bottlenecks that followed the pandemic, and by the failure of central banks to act quickly enough when problems first started to emerge. The whole of Europe is facing recession this winter, with Germany in particular paying a heavy price for its dependence on Russian gas.
All sorts of dire predictions were made for the UK economy at the time of the Brexit vote: house prices would tumble, unemployment would rise by 500,000 and the economy would sink into an immediate recession. None of it happened. The economy has trundled on.
Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, takes a dimmer view. He has argued that Britain’s economy was 90% the size of Germany’s before Brexit but only 70% the size of it today.
Prof Jonathan Portes, an economist at King’s College London who is no fan of Brexit, has described this comparison as “nonsense” because it involves measuring the value of economies at prevailing exchange rates. This is not the normal method economists use to assess the relative performance of countries, because comparisons are heavily influenced by movements in currencies. The pound, for example, is almost 10% higher than it was during a recent trough against the US dollar, but that doesn’t mean the UK economy has grown by almost 10% relative to the American economy in the past month.
A recent paper by Briefings for Britain, a Brexit-supporting body, offers a different perspective to Carney’s. It notes that the UK’s cumulative growth has been slightly higher than Germany’s since 2016; that trade with the EU – notwithstanding the extra red tape burdens facing small businesses – has recovered, and that Britain continues to attract more foreign direct investment than any other European country.

Of course, it might be argued that the UK would have had still more investment and even higher exports had a different decision been made on 23 June 2016. Over the years, the argument from the anti-Brexit camp has changed. Where once it was “Brexit will crash the economy” it now is “the economy would be performing better were it not for Brexit”.
The Briefings for Brexit paper (a comprehensive piece of work, worth reading whichever side of the argument you are on) says these counterfactual analyses are flawed. It concludes: “A careful reading of the evidence shows that while there is little evidence yet that Brexit is doing much to help the UK economy, neither is there evidence of much harm.”
That rings true. There has been no Armageddon. The economy is adapting, even if that process has been made more difficult by the pandemic, the war, and Liz Truss’ brief period as prime minister. If the effects of Brexit have tended to be exaggerated, then the impact of the pandemic and the lockdowns that accompanied it have tended to be downplayed, perhaps because the most fervent anti-Brexiters also wanted longer and more stringent lockdowns.
After six years, the argument for Brexit remains what it always was: an opportunity to look at an under-performing economy in a new light and to do things differently. Whether that opportunity will be seized or squandered remains to be seen, but there is no gorilla in the room, just a mouse with a loud squeak.


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/06/brexit-blame-uk-economy-opportunity-eu

Originally Posted by DrWilly

They've made their beds.

Unfortunately it's one bed and we all share it. My four children all have narrower employment and other choices outside the EU. They never voted for this. I am ready to recognise the benefits of Brexit when someone can show me a list. A list of delivered, measurable benefits that are more than vague promises about how many unicorns my grandchildren will have to play with.

After six years, the argument for Brexit remains what it always was: an opportunity to look at an under-performing economy in a new light and to do things differently.

Well, that seems very nebulous and modest, compared to 'Let's save the £350 million we give the EU every week and spend it on the NHS instead' and all the other shameless bullshit like 'Save the UK from being invaded by turks'.

You know, the reasons why the credulous and simple minded actually
voted for it.