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The Brexit Thread

Comments like that do make you scratch your head. I think there was a fundamental misunderstanding about some of the debate amongst MPs.

There were a couple of instances during the referendum campaign and subsequent chaos where several MPs didn't know the difference between the customs union and the single market, for example. That's pretty terrifying.

Would recommend Chief of Staff by Gavin Barwell.

I'll save my "Brexit was a completely nebulous concept" rant, I'm tired.
 
We have reached an incredible place in the UK.

The Labour leader won't mention it. The BBC don't speak of it. Even the "remain" papers stay fairly quiet. Brexit is taboo.

Yet, day in, day out - the lack of staff across dozens and dozens of sectors is continuing to bite. The Irish Sea border fiasco is a can being kicked down the road time and time again. Red tape and bureaucracy for thousands of small business trying to export to Europe. A 14% fall in overall exports - in contrast to 8.2% for the rest of the world. Invisible walls between the UK and Europe. And everytime? The government just tell them to get on with it. They tell us all to get on with it.

Tell me - where is there a benefit? I still wait for one.
 
AstroDan said:
We have reached an incredible place in the UK.

The Labour leader won't mention it. The BBC don't speak of it. Even the "remain" papers stay fairly quiet. Brexit is taboo.

Yet, day in, day out - the lack of staff across dozens and dozens of sectors is continuing to bite. The Irish Sea border fiasco is a can being kicked down the road time and time again. Red tape and bureaucracy for thousands of small business trying to export to Europe. A 14% fall in overall exports - in contrast to 8.2% for the rest of the world. Invisible walls between the UK and Europe. And everytime? The government just tell them to get on with it. They tell us all to get on with it.

Tell me - where is there a benefit? I still wait for one.
Click to expand...

There never was one. It was a campaign fueled by racism and xenophobia.
 
I don't think Brexit has become a taboo, it is simply the fact that the media has moved on, Covid, Ukraine, and world demand for energy have all become more relevant in the news for the vast majority of people.
Good old Capitalism (P&O in particular) being slow to react to rapid market changes means tough titty for those who want to return to flying and foreign travel, go get in the queues if you want to.
Trucks have queued up occasionally towards Dover for at least three decades before Brexit.
Fewer people able to burn essential fossil fuels for inessential travel overall...
Excellent for the planet in the long term.
 
rob666 said:
I don't think Brexit has become a taboo, it is simply the fact that the media has moved on, Covid, Ukraine, and world demand for energy have all become more relevant in the news for the vast majority of people.
Good old Capitalism (P&O in particular) being slow to react to rapid market changes means tough titty for those who want to return to flying and foreign travel, go get in the queues if you want to.
Trucks have queued up occasionally towards Dover for at least three decades before Brexit.
Fewer people able to burn essential fossil fuels for inessential travel overall...
Excellent for the planet in the long term.
Click to expand...
Conveniently for the swines in power, the war in Ukraine has further muddied the already soiled waters from Covid thus making it easy to drop absolutely no blame on Brexit or apportion the appropriate amount of blame on it.

I doubt small businesses who export to Europe have moved on.

Alas.

Sent from my SM-G991B using Tapatalk
 
Adapt and change, or accept the consequences.
What is good for all the world's population, rich and poor, is that we use less fossil fuel overall.
Those with access to hazardous quick transport methods need to travel less until the industry finds less toxic ways to fuel the industry.
That way everybody benefits, not just the "travel rich" in the west.
If logjams at ports and long queues at airports are all part of that, all well and good.
Yet again, shop local, think global.
Reduce needless damaging travel, the queues will go away.
 
Someone I live near hailed Brexit as the dawn of a new UK, said this was what the country needed to 'get back on track' and we would all be better off.

in the months and years since, he has blamed everything else on the current state of the country than Brexit

- The last labour government are to blame, they didnt future proof and the conservatives are still picking up the pieces (its been 12 years this isn't labours doing)
- The EU are still annoyed and 'refuse' to do anything with the UK (We left the EU, cant then expect favours from them)
- Remainers are stopping it all and refusing to work
- Back bench conservatives are refusing to work with the government and should be sacked for their opposition
- The young generation won't work for little money, they all expect to be on too much and have no work ethic
- its just teething issues

But won't say that it was the wrong decision. Its laughable at the flimsy arguments they have. When the govt asked foreign workers to come drive HGVs because no one here wanted to do it, they kicked off saying this is how it starts and they should just force people to drive them
 
tayspru said:
Brexit was fuelled by racism and xenophobia and instigated by the super rich who wanted to avoid new EU tax rules that would have made them have to declare their earnings including offshore accounts
Click to expand...

While there was some element of this in the votes it was not the sole reason for people voting to leave and it’s wrong to think that.

The main reason was that people were fed up of being governed by Brussels and so reliant on others. And if it’s one thing Brexit has shown us is that how vulnerable we have become to things such as not having enough workforce without relying on other countries, how poorly paid people are that they don’t want to work, how little we make and grow in the country relying on imports, how poor our own energy provision has become, and how little investment we put into training our own so they go on to have decent jobs.

As other EU states are finding, big changes need to made in the future so all countries become more self sufficient. Brexit will be tough for a few years but it will make us stronger as a country and less reliant on others. Whether this is right or wrong will be seen in the next couple of years.

And as for staff shortages around the U.K., this isn’t primarily due to Brexit but more so down to Covid absences. Why should we need to rely on the EU to fill nursing posts when other states are also having problems filling posts due to covid at the moment.

Problem is as a country we had become used to everything being cheap. Cheap labour because it was easy to come by and meant we didn’t need to train our own, cheap goods because they could be imported cheaper than to make them, cheap energy because it meant we didn’t have to invest in more local schemes - those days are gone. And whether that’s down to Brexit or Covid or the war in Ukraine, whichever was you look at it, we have to become more self sufficient and that will take a few years to achieve.

Covid couldn’t have come at a worse time economically but we’ll get there.
 
rob666 said:
I don't think Brexit has become a taboo, it is simply the fact that the media has moved on, Covid, Ukraine, and world demand for energy have all become more relevant in the news for the vast majority of people.
Good old Capitalism (P&O in particular) being slow to react to rapid market changes means tough titty for those who want to return to flying and foreign travel, go get in the queues if you want to.
Trucks have queued up occasionally towards Dover for at least three decades before Brexit.
Fewer people able to burn essential fossil fuels for inessential travel overall...
Excellent for the planet in the long term.
Click to expand...
Not sure how you can react to something which you don't know how will play out, nobody knew what sort of Brexit we would get. Can plan for worst case scenario but I think we got worse than that.

We should also be encouraging the development of cleaner and sustainable methods of travel rather than regressing to the rose tinted glasses state of everybody taking holidays in the UK and barely ever leaving their town, worked local and we had factories producing local goods for local people and certainly were not pumping huge amounts of pollution in to the air. People wish to travel regardless of how essential it is. Sadly, I don't think Blackpool will become the 'in' place to go again anytime soon :p
AstroDan said:
We have reached an incredible place in the UK.



Tell me - where is there a benefit? I still wait for one.
Click to expand...
£350,000 a week for the NHS? Oh............Wait.....That was a lie wasn't it?

I recently had one of my neighbours spouting rubbish about all these eastern Europeans coming in to our country being given houses and jobs as soon as they got here and taking thousands of £ each week in benefits too. He genuinely believed that this is what happened and couldn't be any further from the truth if he tried. That is one of the more extreme examples I have heard over the years, but whilst those sort of attitudes are entrenched and encouraged by the likes of the Mail & Express with support from the Government of the day, it won't change anytime soon sadly
 
GaryH said:
Problem is as a country we had become used to everything being cheap. Cheap labour because it was easy to come by and meant we didn’t need to train our own, cheap goods because they could be imported cheaper than to make them, cheap energy because it meant we didn’t have to invest in more local schemes - those days are gone. And whether that’s down to Brexit or Covid or the war in Ukraine, whichever was you look at it, we have to become more self sufficient and that will take a few years to achieve.
Click to expand...
So at a time when there are people struggling to pay their bills and feed their kids, you are suggesting we should all just pay more for things than we did before?

An uncomfortable truth... a society has to have low skilled and low paid jobs. Take an example like picking fruit and vegetables. This is a role that we used a lot of EU workforce for. Without that workforce it has to be filled by the domestic workforce instead, except nobody in the UK wants to do it. You might suggest we just pay them more? Well, if you do that then suddenly the price of your fruit and vegetables goes up. In turn inflation rises and everything becomes more expensive. We're already seeing inflation at a record rate.

This also create a jobs market where people leave one low paid job to go to another that you've now increased the pay for. The manager at a pub restaurant near me had this issue where they now cannot recruit chefs because they all retrained to become lorry drivers! Should we increase the pay for chefs as well? Which industry would that poach jobs from next? It just becomes a cycle where people might get paid more, but everything becomes more expensive so nobody actually becomes better off in real terms.

However, I can tell you one thing that would help people pay their bills... a functioning economy. Our economy has not recovered from the pandemic unlike other G7 members. I wonder what we've done differently to them? 🤔

1649413409752.png
Source: FT

Or an alternative version if you consider "World" and "Advanced enconomies" in the above to be a bit selective and/or biased.

1649413643057.png
 
GaryH said:
The main reason was that people were fed up of being governed by Brussels and so reliant on others. And if it’s one thing Brexit has shown us is that how vulnerable we have become to things such as not having enough workforce without relying on other countries, how poorly paid people are that they don’t want to work, how little we make and grow in the country relying on imports, how poor our own energy provision has become, and how little investment we put into training our own so they go on to have decent jobs.
Click to expand...

Pretty certain almost all those issues could have been fixed by the UK government, the EU wasn't holding us back from growing more food ourselves or building new power plants or providing better training & appprentices. A lot of that was due to capitalism in general and the way modern companies operate.
 
Vik said:
Not sure how you can react to something which you don't know how will play out, nobody knew what sort of Brexit we would get. Can plan for worst case scenario but I think we got worse than that.

We should also be encouraging the development of cleaner and sustainable methods of travel rather than regressing to the rose tinted glasses state of everybody taking holidays in the UK and barely ever leaving their town, worked local and we had factories producing local goods for local people and certainly were not pumping huge amounts of pollution in to the air. People wish to travel regardless of how essential it is. Sadly, I don't think Blackpool will become the 'in' place to go again anytime soon :p

£350,000 a week for the NHS? Oh............Wait.....That was a lie wasn't it?

I recently had one of my neighbours spouting rubbish about all these eastern Europeans coming in to our country being given houses and jobs as soon as they got here and taking thousands of £ each week in benefits too. He genuinely believed that this is what happened and couldn't be any further from the truth if he tried. That is one of the more extreme examples I have heard over the years, but whilst those sort of attitudes are entrenched and encouraged by the likes of the Mail & Express with support from the Government of the day, it won't change anytime soon sadly
Click to expand...
We have been developing cleaner and sustainable transport for fifty years now...watched various projects on Tomorrows World over the decades.
Sod all has come of it in fifty years, apart from electric cars that still often end up running on fossil fuel via the plug lead.
I may be a cave dweller, but there is no "regression" here, everyone can take holidays wherever they like, it is the very frequent flyers, continent hopping on regular repeat cheap flights, that for some crazy reason, are taxed less than essential fuel for energy.
And all the while the climate continues heating up, and only the rich can afford aircon.
But people wish to travel, cheap, often, regardless.
And it continues in a hot spiral.
Because... big business.
Stuff COP26.
We must support the tourism industry.
 
Do we have to pay more for things? Yes. The world has changed. We need to get used to it. Even if it were not for Brexit, Covid would have caused a massive global increase in cost of living, and when you also add in the U.K. lack of foresight in terms of planning or our future energy needs then yeah, things are going to cost a lot more. Take Germany for example, where will their 40% off gas from Russia now come from? Thankfully while ours is only 4% we do need to realise that fossil fuels are going to cost us a lot lot lot more now and in the future.

And if we want people to have decent living and jobs in this country we also have to pay more for that and more for hooks in the shops.

Like I said, we have got accustomed to everything being cheap. Those days are well and truly over.
 
GaryH said:
Do we have to pay more for things? Yes. The world has changed. We need to get used to it. Even if it were not for Brexit, Covid would have caused a massive global increase in cost of living, and when you also add in the U.K. lack of foresight in terms of planning or our future energy needs then yeah, things are going to cost a lot more. Take Germany for example, where will their 40% off gas from Russia now come from? Thankfully while ours is only 4% we do need to realise that fossil fuels are going to cost us a lot lot lot more now and in the future.

And if we want people to have decent living and jobs in this country we also have to pay more for that and more for hooks in the shops.

Like I said, we have got accustomed to everything being cheap. Those days are well and truly over.
Click to expand...

The issue is that Brexit is making it harder for the UK to recover from the economic effects of covid compared to other nations.
 
Indeed I don’t dispute that, it’s very unfortunate covid came at this time and which is causing extra economic pressures.
 
jon81uk said:
You could also say that its unfortuanate we decided to make massive changes based on a small majority at a non-binding referendum which is causing extra economic pressures.
Click to expand...

We could say lots of things but its happened and we have to now get on with things.

And truth be told, it’s mostly the younger people complaining, yet at the time of voting 1/4 of them didn’t even bother to go and vote compared to much higher turn out in the older ages groups. Maybe if they had remain might have got those extra votes they wanted.

www.theguardian.com

EU referendum: youth turnout almost twice as high as first thought

About 64% of registered voters aged 18-24 went to polls, study reveals, contradicting claims of apathy among young Britons
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
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