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.

  • HexesofVexes
    link
    English
    1310 hours ago

    Brexit was a mistake? Who’d have thought it?

    The real irony is that age was a huge factor in voting - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36616028.amp

    So the folks getting a lot of the flak today are more likely to be remainers, I wonder how that’s going to pan out in the long run (spoiler, it’ll go as well as Brexit).

    The ones cleaning up the mess in the UK are not the ones who voted for it - keep that in mind.

  • @keyboardpithecus
    link
    English
    221 day ago

    The problem with the modern media is that they frame everything in the context of money. Thus they ignore that the Britons joined just for the economy. They are a staunchly capitalist country that never managed to fit within the EU spirit. They kept resisting the integration and asking opt-outs for every initiative. During the exit process they acted as spoilt children, they absorbed all the attention and time of the European council and brought all the other activities nearly to a standstill. All of that tedious process ended up with a partial exit, the UK is still standing on the edge with one foot in and another out.

    At this point I think that the best thing to do to stop crying over the spilled milk and do not even dare to think to come back, it would be just a pain for everybody.

    • @CheeseNoodle
      link
      English
      211 day ago

      Nah let us back in but as a standard new member without any of the special shit, please our government needs adult supervision.

      • @Valmond
        link
        English
        310 hours ago

        What about abandoning the pound sterling?

        • @locahosr443
          link
          English
          36 hours ago

          The more old bullshit gets erased in the process the better.

          Those old twats and the dumb younger voters fucked everyone over… However maybe if there is a silver lining it’s that if/when the UK rejoins (pretty much if it wants a real future) it should be on equal terms and forced to behave as such.

          Maybe we could finally elevate our status from the shit stained toffs of Europe.

        • @CheeseNoodle
          link
          English
          610 hours ago

          Not sure why people are so hung up about it, it’s been gradually losing ground to the euro and usd anyway.

        • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝
          link
          fedilink
          English
          91 day ago

          You underestimate how fucked Hungary is.

          The UK would need to dissolve, London would need to be sacked by the Scottish taking the whole British museum, have this event define politics for the next century. 40 years into this, it would need to lose a world war, with the Russian army raping and pillaging through the land. Then live under Russian occupation for another half a century.

          England then would be close to Hungary, not quite there though.

      • @keyboardpithecus
        link
        English
        31 day ago

        Nah let us back in

        Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

  • @wurzelgummidge
    link
    English
    282 days ago

    Brexiteers promised a new age of British sovereignty

    And now farage wants to flog the country off to trump and musk

    But half a decade on, and by many metrics, Brexit appears to have missed the mark

    What mark? There was never a mark just a whole pack of lies.

      • @Valmond
        link
        English
        310 hours ago

        Yeah, crazy right? Almost like the Kremlin was behind every shitty thing in the entire fucking world.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    120
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    And almost six in 10 Britons (59 per cent) think that Brexit has gone fairly or very badly, with just 12 per cent believing it has gone well, according to a YouGov poll in October.

    Right-wing politics is a scam that people fall for again and again. How often do we see these polls saying right-wing voters are disappointed when exactly what everyone told them would happen happens? Then they fall for the next right-wing scam and do it all over again. No learning ever seems to occur.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      532 days ago

      No learning ever seems to occur.

      Not so surprising when you remember that leaning left correlates with higher degrees of education.

    • Snot Flickerman
      link
      fedilink
      English
      41
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      Because no learning has to occur. The most anger inducing thing about right wing shitfuckery is that to fight against it, it pushes us to do shit that’s… tantamount to right wing shitfuckery.

      In other words, the only language they have understood is power and we’re failing by refusing to accept that the reason they don’t learn is because we haven’t sufficiently dickslapped them into next fucking Thursday over it.

      We do a lot of glad-handing right wing crime and acting like it’s not a big deal while swiftly cracking down on left-wing… anything, not even crime. There was that guy in Florida who did nothing but posted online after Jan 6th 2021 that all leftists needed to be armed and prepared, and he was arrested and put away for longer than anyone who actually was at Jan 6th.

      I know I’m speaking in USA examples, but I’ve seen the same of britain, using kid gloves with white people and cracking down on brown people. Like the whole shebang about “grooming gangs” in the UK is a firestorm of racism and blaming it on immigrants while the statistics and numbers actually say its widely white british people organizing grooming gangs.

      What actually needs to happen is we need to give them what they ask for. They want more law and order and harsher sentences? Fine, that’s what they will get for their bullshit, locked up with less patience and understanding with severely long sentences to keep these fucking idiots who refuse to learn off our fucking streets. They’re the real street trash that needs to be taken the fuck out. If they want to cry all day about being victims of the system, we can show them what real victims of the system deal with.

      They only understand power, so we have to actively show we have power, hold it against them, make them suffer, that’s literally the only thing they will ever fucking understand. They will force us to play their stupid fucking power games just to have a normal fucking society without them, because they will never, ever stop vying for power.

      It’s like the old saying “a conservative would gladly eat shit if they knew a liberal had to smell their breath.” it’s about using power against someone else, even if the only power you have is to upset them. They don’t care as long as it makes them feel like they have power over someone else.

      They view literally everything through the lens of power, is it really such a shocker so many of them are fucking rapists since rape is about power?

      • @alchemist2023
        link
        English
        72 days ago

        good answer it’s has always been about power

        and being able to wield power without corruption is the human condition

        I’m not certain we’re hardwired that way.

        though I’m hopeful

    • Flying SquidM
      link
      English
      102 days ago

      It doesn’t help in this case that Labour has been doing a terrible job.

  • @blueamigafan
    link
    English
    392 days ago

    My current and former workplace both took huge hits and ended up cutting staff because it suddenly became super expensive to import raw materials, and more difficult and expensive to export finished goods. But it’s ok because some retired boomers get to shout ‘taking our country back’ then blame foreigners for anything negative that happens

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      262 days ago

      But it’s ok because some retired boomers get to shout ‘taking our country back’ then blame foreigners for anything negative that happens

      And then fly back to Spain with the sense of superiority that comes from carrying a blue passport.

  • @FelixCress
    link
    English
    51 day ago

    So which politician have enough balls to say out loud UK needs to rejoin the EU?

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    61 day ago

    The real price the UK will pay for Brexit should not be measured (and will probably not be remembered) in economic terms.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        411 hours ago

        The loss of openness, the limiting of education and work opportunities, the rise of bad nationalism, the fracturing of European unity and community, the isolation of being stuck between the EU and the US, the inability to pop over to France for lunch or Germany for a football game, the loss of stature in an evolving world, the backwards steps to being more insular… I don’t know. All these things and more “may” come to pass.

        I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

        • @Soggy
          link
          English
          18 hours ago

          All nationalism is bad nationalism because it necessitates a narrative of exceptionalism and lessers.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            27 hours ago

            I’d suggest “good” nationalism is having a bit of pride and care for where you live, a knowledge of your history, feeling comfortable in your ethnicity (as opposed to race) and welcoming other folk with similar aspirations and trying to improve life for everyone in your area… but that’s just my opinion.

  • @WhatAmLemmy
    link
    English
    152 days ago

    It hurt itself in its confusion

  • @ATDA
    link
    English
    122 days ago

    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.

    • @orclev
      link
      English
      232 days ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        41 day ago

        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.

        • @Valmond
          link
          English
          110 hours ago

          Don’t forget the kremlin.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            28 hours ago

            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.

      • Snot Flickerman
        link
        fedilink
        English
        112 days ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          37 hours ago

          People remember Chelsea Manning not for exposing war crimes, but for the crime of being trans. Checks out.

    • @OccamsTeapot
      link
      English
      122 days ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        51 day ago

        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.

        • @OccamsTeapot
          link
          English
          31 day ago

          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.

          My future, my son’s future, all now shaped in a more restrictive way because of people’s views like this.

          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

      • @FelixCress
        link
        English
        41 day ago

        basically everything the leave campaign said was completely and utterly wrong.

        Which is why spreading public lies with the intention to mislead the public should be a criminal offence.

        If they were selling any physical goods, that would be a fraudulent misrepresentation. I don’t see why the bar in politics should be any lower.

        • @Soggy
          link
          English
          28 hours ago

          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…

          • @FelixCress
            link
            English
            14 hours ago

            Not disagreeing with you here but I think this is THE action to push, as much as everyone is able to.