To feel extremely depressed about how Brexit is limiting the lives we once knew.

[Persiantrio]

Presumably now, if you want to go shopping in Paris on the Eurostar, you will have to declare, queue and pay customs on any clothes / goods over a given amount at the border. How crap and inconvenient is that?

Same with any holiday purchases from anywhere in the EU? Not worth it.

Also if you order anything online that happens to come from the EU and costs over over £135, you get hit with massive customs charges of about 40%. Companies like Etsy etc are taking a massive hit as a result.

How is this “taking back control?” Its so depressing and backward. The only reason nobody is kicking off about this yet is because nobody could go anywhere anyway. People don’t realise the freedoms they had and that are now gone. What a shit and insular place to live this will be.

And I don’t wait to hear any predictable ‘vaccine nationalism’ waffle either (because that has nothing whatsoever to do with what I’m asking in this instance and we could have done exactly the same within the EU anyway).

It was a UK choice to open up the way they chose to when the EU expanded, not an imposition from the EU.

This was very much due to Blair completely underestimating the numbers who would want to come. One can speculate that if Germany hadn't imposed a limit on numbers many would have preferred to go there. Maybe not - coming to the UK was a good chance to learn English which has become a global language.

@Hoorayforsunshine the price of everyone’s food shop has gone up in the last five year, that’s not at all related to the fact that aside from some oddball adding on 9p to the price of milk, everything else has stayed the same. My bread is still a quid, my milk has been £1.09 for the last year, same brand bin bags that I’ve bought for donkeys years still a quid (though they did go from 79p to 99p just before my youngest was born a few years ago. Thought that was a rather large hike in the price at the time!)

My point is still the same. Brexit has had no impact on me and in all likelihood never will. I just don’t have the finances for it to impact me. By the time I get around to having a job well paid enough to be able to afford things like buying a house Brexit will be a decade in the past. I could sit and whine about how expensive houses are, but I can do that even when I can’t afford a house so again, no impact. I’m not really sure why you’re wishing it will impact me eventually but hey ho, get some screwballs on here!

@bp300

I think this is a very underplayed issue. All economies have to be managed and there is a finite amount of jobs. It is clear to me having lived in a rural area in a European country that this management falls into several categories.

Keep education free and open for as long as possible (lots of Phd students)

Specialise in the detail so that courses are stretched out

Develop a philosophy of education for all to encourage as many as possible to spend their 20s in college

Generous maternity packages for those in secure jobs that encourages mums to extend their time away from work - thus allowing young graduates a chance in.

Specialist trades (like the old mason industries - so, a specialist stone cutter,etc - hence all those Churches in Europe!).

Prepare young for immigrant culture - so there are established links with international universities, businesses, sports culture etc that provide some familiarity to the young so immigration doesn't seem so alien

We have gone the other way in some of the old w/c communities (as far as I can see) where the culture is very much focused on skills for the here and now, playing up local identities and a kind of nationalism and educating children in schools to respond in that same one dimensional way.

The best example I can give is the lest school I worked in, in London that was in a formerly deprived, now gentrified area. It was flooded with up and coming professionals, wealth and a cultural gloss that made many of the older w/c staff uncomfortable. They had attended the school themselves when it was a deprived area and their idea of progress was whiteboards everywhere and lots of loud musical performances (where the children cutely sing out of tune as though they are in Annie). There was none of the structure or good practice I see in more established schools - rather an idea of what m/c education looks like. The more able quickly left as their parents could see what was going on.

So, we are still not preparing children as well as I think we could. Another thing I noticed are school camps, community camps and scouts groups etc. It is common to go away on these age centred outdoor camps in Europe and I loved them - they are great at teaching independence and practical skills and for me, opened up a whole world of opportunity. Once you step away from your immediate environment you can see who you really are, who you want to be, what is possible - everything opens up and then you realise the system is actually good at accommodating you back in (there is a structure). This, imv, is where the private schools succeed as they encourage this and the pupils realise that the space is out there for them and don't feel restricted. Just getting out of built up London into the countryside and physical space is a mental release. So, the roads that lead to success ere there but not integrated at the level most needed (there is no Duke of Edinburgh scheme for primary). In the now gentrified fairly psoh area I am from in London, there are little camps in the summer for young children, nice environmental projects, etc but the reality is the councils could have done more in the past I think, but didnt.

Brexit has had no impact on me and in all likelihood never will.

I think you'll be surprised - next time you do a food shop, look where the items are grown.

To be fair, I imagine a lot of minds were already made up because ‘Leave’ already had decades of campaigning under its belt by the time the referendum was announced. I can remember the DM frothing about EU regulations in the 90s. Far from reading comments like this as showing how independently-minded leavers are, I just see them as an absolute failure in this country to counter these arguments until it was too late.

I agree. The government (both national and local) were happy for the EU and Brussels to get the blame for unpopular policies for years. It was easier to stay silent when the papers were demonising the EU than to be honest about their own policies. Then they were surprised when decades of negative press by the tabloids led to a leave majority.

I have ordered from europe frequently in the past few months. The delays seem to be sorted now and I have not had to pay extra so yabu.
Not many of us can afford to travel to Paris for a shopping trip anyway.

[quote Hoorayforsunshine]@bp300 - I’m too young to have been engaged in politics when Labour wanted more people in university. It doesn’t make much sense that it would have been done to counter the unemployment to be caused by influx of EU migrants though.

Two things:

• do you mean that it was an attempt to upskill the populace to avoid a race to the bottom/ people competing for unskilled work? Isn’t that a good thing, if so.

Second, the UK had the option to delay the opening up or otherwise stagger it. It was a UK choice to open up the way they chose to when the EU expanded, not an imposition from the EU.

The latter bit I learned when studying about the EU and UK laws at university. Not something that most people would have been aware of - that the UK chose to make the benefits system accessible etc to migrants rather than having limitations like you have to be resident for 6m or any other restrictions on people coming in.[/quote]
I think there were multiple factors at play. Part of it would have been upskilling the population, some people it helped but for every success story there are multiple people with degrees working in call centres and other low wage jobs. I also think boosting house prices was a factor and a short term boost to gdp and tax receipts. There were skills shortages in some areas which needed to be filled. The government definitely overestimated the number of Eastern Europeans who would take advantage of freedom of movement.

@CatsHairEverywhere2 obviously not wishing it will impact you. I am surprised that it hasn’t, I’ve noticed a big increase in butter, rice and a few things over the last few years. Yes, some price rises are to be expected but those things have been far in excess of general price rises.

To be honest, the things you have mentioned - bread, milk etc are classic loss leaders precisely because people note the price. So you need to look across the whole basket.

It doesn’t need any one individual to suffer a negative impact for It to be true that lots of people are and are likely to be suffering. As I said - supermarket leaders and people involved in food say this quite openly.

Hoorayforsunshine

I don’t know what the relationship between owning property and voting leave/ remain is. Not sure what point you are making - as others have said it’s about how people feel, not facts

It was because the Remain campaign were saying if we left the EU then house prices would fall which was a plus point for leaving especially among those that couldn’t afford to buy or those that were thinking of their dc, gc being priced out of home ownership.

I don’t understand how you can say that your leave friends are happy because Europeans have left and they can get jobs. That can only have been in the last year...during Covid. What jobs were they getting? Jobs in warehouses and delivering packages

It was directly after the referendum when a lot of people left the U.K.
What is wrong with working in a warehouse or delivering packages.
It is a job. It brings more money into the house than being on UC. If you couldn’t get a job before hand then suddenly loads of people leave then to them it is a positive not a negative.

@Peregrina I don’t know but it sounds entirely plausible that it was a decision because of an underestimate about how many people would come.

Doesnt take away from the fact that it was a UK decision - which has been blamed on the EU. Just like the shellfish thing and countless others.

@Hoorayforsunshine

I remember discovering two key things when I was abroad.

1/ Each EU country paid a set amount for each of its citizens to be in their country - so for example, the Latvian government paid the Uk government x amount for each Latvian working/living in the UK. This was reciprocal.

2/ The right to council property was borderless. So , a UK person in council property had the right to exchange their property for a council property in say, Denmark. A polish person could move to London. In practice, I don't know how this worked out but I remember working in a council dept and being told this.

Not sharing the first bit of information (which led to lots of 'how dare the Polish come and get all these benefits') and widely circulating the idea of the second online and in those w/c communities (alongside the idea that British soldiers would be recruited to join an EU army and that war was inevitable against Russia) all created that tension and fear.

@Bythemillpond -there is nothing wrong with those jobs. They are the only jobs that have increased during the pandemic.

If people left after the referendum, that wasn’t as a result of Brexit or any actual policy changes at the time. Which shows that you didn’t need Brexit to do that.

Brexit happened 31 Jan 2020, and the effect of Brexit has only been since 31 Dec 2020 when the interim period ended.

@Smurfsarethefuture

Those who disseminate misinformation win if their objective is to make people fearful and to spread hate.

Those who try to correct misinformation have a hard time because it is dull and technical and even once you correct it- if you can- the ‘feelings’ have been had and have had their impact.

I do not know how to correct this. It is a serious problem.

Eg. even once people know the £350m was untrue, the impact of it was felt (the idea that we send all this money to the EU and get nothing back, and that it would be available for us cost free afterwards).

So no one will accept that the £350m had an impact because now they just think well it was part of that general feeling about wasting money with the EU. Which is not based on anything, but the feeling generated by that lie- which sticks even when the lie has been disproved. The feeling shifts to CAP subsidies or whatever next red herring.

It is manipulation by oligarch and billionaire owned newspapers and the politicians they support and I do not know what we can do about it.

If people left after the referendum, that wasn’t as a result of Brexit or any actual policy changes at the time. Which shows that you didn’t need Brexit to do that.

It quite was. Many people felt unwanted, hate crime risen MASSIVELY and so some said "fuck it" and left for countries with better quality if life.
The people I know who left. Few worked warehousing jobs, number of academics, some hospitality staff and number of business owners who shut shop and left.
Uk lost number of net contributors (it has been shown that EU immigrants are net contributors into the treasury here) and imho more jobs than it gained.

@Hoorayforsunshine,

'It’s also only been 3 months, and in the context of a global pandemic. For all those who say it’s happened, it’s been fine get over it, it’s just too soon for any of that.'

I think that this is a very weak argument. A pandemic (global, by definition) would exacerbate Brexit effects, not lessen them. It is not as if the EU has granted the U.K an extension of free movement to deal with the pandemic.

With regard to the three months, people are very hypocritical. If they are seeing a delay to importing something from the EU, they claim that this is a permanent effect of Brexit rather than, which is much more likely, teething problems as businesses adjust to the new need for additional forms. On the other hand, when something bad has not happened, it is 'oh, just wait and see, it has only been three months'.

We see the same with regard to fruit picking. It seems fine to ship in cheap Eastern European labourers and allow them to pick fruit in appalling conditions for a pittance. If, however, the UK wants more relaxed union laws than the EU in certain areas, it becomes 'a race to the bottom'.

We will genuinely have to wait and see how Brexit plays out over time. Neither side knows what will happen, as a lot will depend on geopolitics and how we can position ourselves between the EU, the U.S and Asia. There are clearly significant disadvantages to Brexit but there may also be significant advantages.

even once people know the £350m was untrue,

There's a bit more to it than that - also because they know that we value the NHS. £350 million a week for Trident wouldn't have had the same traction.

Similarly now, Johnson and cronies are bigging up the vaccine debacle - look at what a mess the EU is in. Why are they not bigging up the triumph for the NHS rollout - because it shows up the failed track and trace system in the hands of cronies, and because they still want to privatise as much of it as possible.

...that the UK chose to make the benefits system accessible etc to migrants rather than having limitations like you have to be resident for 6m or any other restrictions on people coming in.
Our benefits system has always been out of line with most of the rst of the EU though. In many EU countries the benefits systems are more generous but they are contributory. Most of our benefits don't rely upon the tax/ni contribution record of the worker. Changing that would have been a massive and expensive change - just look how difficult the implementation of UC has been.
A lot of these "but we could have done x" arguments aren't founded on things that we could have realistically implemented (especially in relation to costs).

@TheReluctantPhoenix in the context of a global pandemic was intended to mean that the impacts can be hidden or misattributed.

There are the facts of what is happening and there is perception.

With imports there are the short term impacts - issues as people come online to new systems, teething problems like the queues of lorries and people not having log ins for government systems. That stuff you would expect to overcome in a couple of months as people re route, get used to new things, and adjust.

The longer term impact of increased barriers is that it drives up costs and complexity and reduces the ability to do business and sell goods and services at a competitive price.

That first bit has happened - but in the context of the global pandemic and when there was a fair amount of stockpiling beforehand by suppliers in anticipation. We’ve all got used in the last year to the shelves sometimes being empty - so you wouldn’t know whether to attribute that disruption to Brexit or the pandemic.

The second part is the longer term and it is too soon to say.

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s that things are happening at the short term, medium and long term level with different impacts and consequence at each one - and in different ways in different sectors/ industries.

@bp300

The government definitely overestimated the number of Eastern Europeans who would take advantage of freedom of movement.

Even more, they underestimated how prepared those governments made their citizens. So, teh Polish government provided very good resources on benefits and how they worked which is why so many could send money back. The objective was the circulation of money to build those countries up and London was seen as the distributive base. For many, who weren't used to the kind of invisible regulation we have grown up with it was very different territory to be in. I remember talking to Polish architects who have a view of the Uk and London as being completely law free like some 60s hippy commune. I am still fighting this now with my last housemate, an artist from Berlin with little formal education, pushed into academia without any real support who thinks we don't have to pay any bills ('the Council tax is a violation of my human rights' was the last text I received from her before she disappeared). So, culturally moving vast numbers of those, often ill prepared for the different, capitalist underlying infrastructure, whilst simultaneously removing that from those who had grown up with it and saw it increasing elsewhere was just disastrous.

I know Italian animators brought over from Disney who have such contempt for locals. My neighbour, a banker who smokes weed all day as he works from home, my landlords partner who grew up in a council flat in a wealthy part of London who rents it out for a fortune and despises the British w/c - as I say I straddle both sides so see it. The public landscape was so heavily politicised and ideologically owned by one group that it stopped being a neutral space for people to navigate and use as they needed - it was screw you or be screwed.

And that is not even to mention the violence that went on in those communities - at times it really felt to me like a coup.

f people left after the referendum, that wasn’t as a result of Brexit or any actual policy changes at the time. Which shows that you didn’t need Brexit to do that

Of course it was! The referendum showed what was coming, people started to leave as they knew what was next

Brexit happened 31 Jan 2020, and the effect of Brexit has only been since 31 Dec 2020 when the interim period ended

You think there were no Brexit effects before 31/12/20?

That'd be fucking hilarious if it wasn't so depressing. Are people actually that dim?

@DynamoKev and that is sometime entirely down to UK elected politicians elected by UK voters.

What does it have to do with the EU and Brexit except that we know there were lots of politicians who had a stock in trade in pinning domestic issues (long term lack of investment in something domestically) on the EU (oh it’s because of EU rules that you can’t get a job!).

It seems fine to ship in cheap Eastern European labourers and allow them to pick fruit in appalling conditions for a pittance.

We have been shipping in people for a long long time. The alternative is for people to be happy and be able to pay more for food.

We will genuinely have to wait and see how Brexit plays out over time.

This was NOT what it said on the tin. We held all the cards etc. I think the leaders of Brexit really did think that, and then it was a blow when Trump lost. But yes, we will now have to wait to see what happens. I don't see Brexiters doing much heavy lifting to make things work out - they are mostly crowing about what the EU has done wrong with its vaccine programme or whining about having regulations that we helped to write, which discriminate against third countries, being applied to us who chose to be a 3rd country.

Totally agree. I’m sad that my kids won’t be able to freely live and work in EU countries anymore. Our friends are returning from their lovely home in Spain as, like thousands of ex pats, didn’t apply for residency before the deadline and don’t meet the criteria to get it now. I dread to think where all those returning are going to live!

@Rukaya

There were Brexit impacts before Brexit. Such as on sterling etc.

People who left the UK before Brexit actually happened and freedom of movement actually did so did not do it because of the legal impacts of Brexit but because the UK had by then become a less attractive place to be in. Diminishing future prospects, and a less welcoming environment for anyone that doesn’t look or sound British.

As hominem attacks, or calling people stupid really doesn’t help anything.

@Bagamoyo1

Everyone knows that Brexit was about immigration.

The problem with freedom of movement is that it works both ways. Whilst it enabled Brits to travel and work freely in EU countries, it also meant that EU citizens could travel freely here too. That was fine when it was just just a handful of Italian exchange students working in Costa or whatever, but once thousands of eastern European men came over, the great British public didn't like it. And that's why they voted Brexit.

I'm not saying that's my personal view by any means, but from my extensive conversations with many people from different walks of life, that was the tipping point. Massive own-goal by David Cameron.

Everyone knows that Brexit was about immigration

This is completely untrue.