Brexit rage

[holeinyourhead]

What's happened in the last 10 days has really affected me. It's all I think about tbh and I feel so enraged at seeing the politicians lie to us so lavishly then bail on us so swiftly, yet I'm completely powerless to do anything. I marched, I wrote to my MP, I've signed petitions. I'm obviously one of the 48% who wanted to remain. I can't find fault with the 52% who voted to leave, it's not their fault. It's a democratic process, I understand that of course. Everyone's entitled to their view and it's not that I'm a sore loser. But the catastrophic fallout isn't what even the most hardline leave voter would have wished for, there's no Brexit plan, and the future looks very bleak. I was at a conference today and a Conservative MP and a Brussels Eurocrats both agreed a recession in the medium term is now inevitable. People around me seem to be getting on with things - I wish I could too - but I've been very tearful and sleepless and worried sick. I run a European business just out of start up phase, employing a handful of people who by chance are not British born and who are now very nervous themselves about the future. The more I read the more hopeless I feel with each passing resignation. AIBU to feel like this? Does anyone else feel the same? Am I going nuts?!! I feel very alone.

"Please can someone give me concrete examples of how the UK has been dictated to by the EU?"

Vat on sanitary towels.

The EU is not a dictatorship anymore than Westminster gives the Scottish no say. There are 508 million people from 28 countries who all have different ideas about what they want. Many European countries want greater integration, where as the uk public does not. We are not in the euro, and don't want harmonisation of tax systems.

In a marriage there are times when both parties are best to go their seperate ways. It's a bit like if one person wants children and the other one wants to be childless. The U.K. does not want ever closer union.

The UK is widely known and praised for being a leading liberal nation

I wonder how that's working out for the people experiencing increased racist attacks since the vote.

YANBU OP. This whole thing is absolute insanity.

Strictly well I feel less alone now! Bloody Rossindell has a lot to answer for. I shall take comfort as I look out across the market now, and know that somewhere out there you are, another of the three in ten!

that is if you know where home is blowing. If your family all happen to hold the same passports, for example. Applying for British naturalisation is very expensive, and involves tests. It's not just getting under the duvet and snuggling down, not for all of us.

Bloody rossindell indeed fell. This vote was the first time he's actually written directly to me. Well you know, included me in a mailing list. Normally it's just dh. Given his views on returning mums to the workplace I never found that odd nor did I feel he could represent me. I was purple when I got his leave letter. I'm good enough to bother with now am I? I may be an incapable of work mother but hey, immigration right?

Sorry, drifted off there. Back to attempting calm now.

Points based immigration system
the jobs that are currently filled by EU migrants are predominantly of the shitty variety.
So, what is the points requirement for ....

• Picking veg for supermarkets in the freezing rain in January ?
• Cutting up chickens into pieces for the supermarkets?
• sorting recycling rubbish
• mopping the toilets in Wetherspoon pubs
• digging the groundworks for new "affordable homes"

as if immigrants do not do those jobs then Brits will have to go back to it - something they have not done for 100 years.

We had plenty of reasons to try and improve the EU from the inside - we weren't alone in having misgivings. Now, we can't do anything about it. We will have to pay to get a portion of the access to markets that we had before. We are just in a much worse position. It's not about saying the EU was some paradise, of course not (though I think the democratic deficit had much more to do with the attitude of the members states than the EU itself - it was the member states (or their governments) that built the EU, after all), but just that we have moved ourselves into a really bad position, when there was absolutely no reason to.

I have not yet seen one concrete advantage to leaving. I don't mean rhetoric about self determination etc, which is just words and actually is just emotional guff and means nothing. I mean an actual, proper, advantage..

Because I would really love to stop feeling so depressed about what we've done! It's only the facts that are making me sad.

Europe is full of the unemployed
That is because many European countries have stupid employment laws that make it impossible to fire people so companies do not hire.
They can sort that by changing their employment laws - France is currently trying to.

Greek and Spanish unemployment will not go away because of Brexit.

Thanks ReallyTired. Yes so it's about getting our voice heard at the table which we will apparently no longer have a seat at - can't get my head round that one. That's what has always baffled me about the dictatorship comments - how can you be dictated to when you are one of the decision makers?

European countries want greater integration, where as the uk public does not.

I disagree with this statement. We now know that in a massive opinion poll in which most people (on both sides) did not know enough as the issue is massively complex, when asked an over simplistic question, following some dubious claims made by both campaigns:

37% of the electorate voted to leave, just under 35% of the electorate voted to stay and 28% did not vote at all. EU citizens who have settled in this country were not allowed to vote. Nor were 16 and 17 year olds.

These results and the fact that we live in a representative democracy now mean, IMO, that the whole issue has to be turned over to parliament for debate.

To the leave voters on this thread:

If an OP said, there's been a huge incident at work. It's had a massive effect on morale and there have been racist incidents since. The financial future of the company is uncertain and my pension has been affected already. I worry I'm going to lose my house and my job.

Would your response be, "stop being a whiner and accept it."?

If not, and you would have slightly more empathy than that, why can't you accept that some people feel like that now and leave us alone? Why are you here with your gloating posts?

I couldn't make the analogy work for the security issues and the fact that people will be spending years trying to resolve this when we could pour all that energy into working on other problems in society. But the analogy we do have is bad enough.

Yanbu. I've been teary and know many others who have to. The economic consequences are terrible but for me I feel like my identity and what I assiciated with being British is being ripped away. Being European is so important to who I am and who I want to be and what I thought Britiain was. The only thing that's kept me happy in the last week or so has been discovering that I can get a German passport, and though that have learnt a lot about my family heritage and have had more contact with my extended family than I have in years. Having said that I would much rather just remain British and an EU citizen

Sorry awful typos

It isn't in anyone's interest to see the UK fail
Might have been true IN the EU…who gives a toss outside the EU. We've let down our closest allies and trading partners, and bragged about how desperate they will be to negotiate trade deals with us. They won't. They're looking to hoover up the businesses and skilled migrants that are exiting Britain already.

"We had plenty of reasons to try and improve the EU from the inside - we weren't alone in having misgivings. "

David Cameron tried to get reform and failed. Getting agreement between countries to allow change to happen is next to impossible. For example sorting out stupidity of the EU parliament moving between Brussels and Strasbourg once a week had proved impossible.

The EU us just too turgid to be responsive to its citzen's needs and desires.

you can't fix stupid

And that there is exactly the problem. The leave voters have a different viewpoint to you that doesn't make them all stupid. Shouting that and racist at people is driving them into the arms of those that will listen to genuine concerns and turn them into something nasty.

Debate points fine, but shout down and sneer isn't helping anyone and is absolutely feeding the division of this country.

Like Bengal I'm a bit of a liberal, I am in a mixed religious and race marriage. In actual fact I have now lost a job that would have improved my families fairly dire financial situation due to an EU funding application now being put on hold. AND YET. I still am swinging towards leave being the right choice as I see a more secure future for my children.

I will say it again, I believe in a different economic and societal approach to you that's all. That doesn't make me stupid. But saying I am makes you look pretty silly.

^To the leave voters on this thread:

If an OP said, there's been a huge incident at work. It's had a massive effect on morale and there have been racist incidents since. The financial future of the company is uncertain and my pension has been affected already. I worry I'm going to lose my house and my job.

Would your response be, "stop being a whiner and accept it."?

If not, and you would have slightly more empathy than that, why can't you accept that some people feel like that now and leave us alone? Why are you here with your gloating posts?^

This.

David Cameron tried to get reform and failed.

Not actually true. What he got (in one weekend?) was beneficial and promising - but it's gone now.

Strictly I wrote to him about the working mothers bullshit too and got a patronising response saying he had been misquoted and basically he loves the wimmin cos his Mum is one. Knobhead. I gave him a mouthful on my doorstep circa the last GE and he was so slimy. I'm ashamed he's my MP.

Not actually true. What he got (in one weekend?) was beneficial and promising - but it's gone now.

I agree. The changes he got, which just because they were not an emergency break on free movement were still changes, were not given time to have an effect. They were not nothing. Sorry for the double negative.

exactly, achieving reform was going to be more than popping over for a city break, but if he had marshalled the other premiers who were like minded, he would have had a chance of making a real difference.

Most other MS governments are used to working in a proportionally representative parliament, so they can do the horse trading and negotiating on an international stage as well as a national one. The Thatcher model of "no no no" really looks like a toddler tantrum from the outside, but that seems to be the way the British public likes their premier to act. And if that doesn't work, we flounce. Marvellous, that gets us a long way.