I'm fed up with everyone tiptoeing around Brexit having been rubbish

Eh, come to Scotland. No one is tiptoeing around it, and about 98% of us knew it was a stupid,shit, devastating policy to vote for.

Ha ha politicians and honesty

if you believe that politicians are honest
I have a Brexit deal to sell you 😂

To be perfectly honest I agree with her
Spain has given 500k illegal imigrants a “temporary” visa

no doubt that this will eventually be moved into permanent status and if we were in the EU that’s possibly something the UK would have to do as well

I mean enter a country illegally
hang around for a while and get rewarded with a temporary visa - madness

I think a majority of leave voters don’t regret their vote in the slightest and think Brexit is at worst a slightly embarrassing but fundamentally correct campaign of the past, based on conversations I have (I have a community nhs job in a prosperous but not exceptionally diverse county). IMO the country swung away from the EU after Maastricht and stayed there. Farage came top of the ballot in the south east EU elections after that and stayed at the top while EU elections existed.

I’m Remain. I loathe Farage. I loathe Johnson more, except for his pragmatic decisions to sell immigration visas to get trade agreements, his principled agreement to give Hong Kong residents visas and his unstinting support for Ukraine. Neither of them came out of nowhere. I’m probably in the ‘please let’s not do that to ourselves again’ camp. I live in hope that Farage selling his party’s voice to anyone who will pay them and trousering the proceeds will eventually catch up with him. I have no hope that we will ever join the EU again. There might be something that looks not entirely unlike it in some future somewhere.

I think it was utterly rubbish, but I don’t think we can just reverse it. It would be a huge diversion.

What do you mean ‘our’? Because if you are claiming no British political parties have talked about brexit being bad for us, then you are incorrect.

I'm another one who's really puzzled by the whole thread

I feel as if everyone talks about how shit it is. Politicians, media commentators, everyone. Although now I'm thinking politicians are probably very careful about it.

just editing to say they probably talk about it a lot less after 2019 because Boris Johnson largely got elected on the promise of getting Brexit done,

Sophistry at it's finest.

We're losing £100 billion a year. There wasnt a version of Brexit where we are better off.

Not by our political parties it hasn't been.

I agree, it’s ridiculous.

I was listening to a five live phone in about this this morning. Plenty of People on there saying it had been disastrous and refreshingly some people who voted leave admitted they had been mistaken, which is the first time I think I’ve ever heard any leavers do that. Not that it does us any good but at least it was recognised.

Where have you been @paddleboardingmum ?

If there’s any tiptoeing by politicians it’s because they don’t want to call the electorate that voted for it stupid/dumb/thick. Not because they don’t believe they are, but because they want their votes.

@paddleboardingmum

Well aside from inconveniences such as passport control for holidays, the main consequence is that has impacted GDP and made the country poorer, which is a fairly significant consequence.

Of course many leave voters will blame this on being the wrong flavour of Brexit but the fact remains that it has made everyone poorer.

I also agree with your comment that we are where we are, so there is not much benefit in pointing out that it was a bad idea, as you will only piss some people off for what? Just to say I was right and you were wrong? So it becomes a "let's not talk about it ".

In this respect I think it is very similar to Covid, where rational people will view the response and lockdowns as an hysterical collective madness, which long term probably killed more people than died from COVID and for which we are still paying the economic consequences of today (increased debt, lower productivity, inefficient practices, WFH etc etc). Again with COVID no one really wants to admit that they bought into the collective madness, so it becomes another "let's not talk about it " topic.

I disagree with your premise. Brexit has been an enormous success. Great benefits for the national, including blue passports and, errrr, some other stuff that escapes me.

Oh yeah, just remembered, you can buy now Champagne in pint sized bottles. Although that is purely theoretical as no producer actually has gone to the expense of retooling their bottling line for all the fizz guzzling gammons

I am sure lots more benefits will flow through any day now

Google ‘brexit’ and loads of news pops up about it

Look imagine if you had voted Leave and let's not forget 17.4 million did, which is a lot of people. You now have a choice between admitting that it was a mistake or doubling down on your decision and explaining it as the wrong type of Brexit etc etc.

No one likes admitting that they were wrong and especially not having your nose rubbed in it.

Agreed total shit show... It was always going to be a shit show and it is not shouted from the rooftops enough that is was catastrophic. That's because politicians are still very wary of aggravating the gammons et al. I have one friend who voted out because they were farmers and the EU subsidies thing was tricky but she now regrets it... I blame Cameron for creating this by giving a binary vote for a multifarious issue and those who still defend it now are simply liars... It was always going to end like this and we cannot make the best of it because we don't have the ability to do that. It's the most agregious act of self harm this country has ever done to itself. It's a crock of shit with absolutely no upside.

Are you new to MN, OP? The boards are full of hand wringing about how people’s children can’t work abroad, and how they blame the boomers for stealing the lives from their kids

@paddleboardingmum

Would you be in favour of having another referendum - stay out v. rejoin?

Who on earth is pretending it was a sensible idea? I haven’t seen or heard that anywhere.