To think Brexit has robbed us of so much?

[elzober]

A friend of mine from America recently obtained citizenship of an EU country due to family links. She's now ready to look for a job and open to anything as she doesn't have a degree but worked in the family agricultural business back home. She's fluent in English.

A few years ago I would have been able to invite her to stay with me here in the UK, help her get established and set her up to apply for one of the many jobs over here. But now I can't do any of that.

The ridiculous part is I know local businesses that are really struggling to recruit, can't find people locally and have struggled with the lack of EU workers since Brexit. Particularly in hospitality, agriculture and travel.

Why did we close the door to people who filled these vacancies and contributed to society and paid taxes?

She would have been a decent tax payer, nice member of the community but she's not allowed in.

She's probably going to Ireland now as apparently there's lots more opportunities there since we became an isolated island.

I will never forgive the Conservatives for this shambles. Don't get me started on the fact that a British passport is now worthless and we've lost our right to live in 27 countries. Madness.

Why blame only the Conservatives? Only the LibDems pledged to stop Brexit in 2019, and no-one was interested.

In some cases, sure… but we had the luxury of freedom before, and no so many hurdles. And we could trade without paying duty / taxes.

I don’t understand - truly - how anyone thinks that brexit is any sort of gain.

Also, Australia is VERY far away. Hardly the same as being a neighbour linked by the eurotunnel!

Fruit picking is seasonal work. If we want British people to do it we need to make it possible for them to take on work that will only ever be temporary and not guaranteed. It’s like asking politicians for rocket science, isn’t it? It was hard 30 years ago when I did it for a few months, I can’t imagine what it’s like as a long-term proposition now. You would need to rebuild the 50s - 80s welfare state - council housing with growing areas and benefits with no questions asked or sanctions - or the citizen’s basic income.

So many middle class seem to regard work as a bit of fun or occupational therapy now, they forget that most people have to actually live on it and have no other source of income. Change that, if you want the work doing.

YANBU OP and its only halfway there at the moment. It won't be complete until the nutters have reduced the working population of UK to a dependent peasantry fighting for every poorly paid vacancy. See Liz Truss for further information.

YANBU. Brexit was the stupidest shot in our own foot we've ever made.

You've offered insults instead of valid argument. I can invalidate everything you say about me with one simple fact: I voted remain.

Getting back to the point, the migration into the UK was dominated by people from former communist countries, the legacy of economic difference/damage caused by communism is why it made economic sense for them to come to the UK. I see no economic reason why a disproportionally high number of UK workers should be travelling the other way.

All the talk about migration surrounding Brexit has been about Eastern Europeans coming to the UK to work, and Brits going to France and Spain to retire. Therefore a statistical claim about migrants in response to a post about workers was either dishonest, or more likely, just a bit hard-of-thinking. The point of my post was just to point out their statistic was irrelevant, I knew they wouldn't be back. The point they made was true but irrelevant as an argument, and if made relevant by changing it to be about worker migrants, would then obviously not be true.

Re-reading your post, I think you are possibly a bit hard-of-thinking yourself. Your last paragraph about their not being a single metric to measure Brexit by gives me the impression you don't even know what you were disagreeing with me about. It's as if you're "Brexiter" detector alert was (incorrectly) triggered and you decided to reflexively post some random abuse.

While being told to stop whinging and get on with it (whatever 'it' is supposed to be) at the same time.

Remainers still miss a key point as to why people voted leave. Many leave-ers didn't travel to or work in the EU to begin with. Many parts of the UK have been transformed by an influx of mostly eastern Europeans over the last couple of decades. Many people saw Europeans benefitting from unrestricted movement by coming here, whilst free movement was of no real benefit to themselves.

That is true, but at the time i remember we all spoke a lot about how it isn't only membership of the EU that is driving wages down, although clearly a vast pool of labour that is prepared to work for less money was always going to be a problem.

I fervently wanted to believe that Brexit would lead to better T&C for workers. But we are seeing what happens when they ask for that. Idiots like Grant Schapps wanting to tighten the already very tight regulations about who can strike and when. Since the late 70s Trade Union membership has been drastically reduced, partly due to very successful brainwashing anti-Union campaigns by government after government. I saw yesterday that workers at one of the bus companies have called off their strike because the union successfully negotiated an 11% pay rise. So years of "meh I'm not joining a union, they're just luddites" has contributed to this. Collective bargaining and negotiation with employers is the way to go. It won't solve all the problems of the last 40 years, but it will help.

As for "oh now they're telling students to pick fruit" who the heck do you think picked it before? Students did. (not all of it, but there were plenty of student fruit pickers back in the day). Some even did it as what you might now call a "gap year" when they did backbreaking seasonal work and saved up money for their future lives at uni or wherever. There is absolutely no reason now why an able bodied student couldn't get a summer job in the fields.

No, I don't work in a chip shop now but did as a teen for a while. The point I was making is how stagnant wages have become over 20 years with an influx of cheap labour.

When we had the first referendum in 1975, my inclination was to vote leave. Then I read and discussed, including the original precursor of all things EU, the Schuman Declaration (May 1950), which spoke of avoiding war in Europe by economic integration as making war between member European states
“not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible” … in other words, by setting things up to make it economic suicide for any state to leave once joined.

Convinced, on balance I voted remain. Remain won by over two-to-one. Later the Union we voted for was changed somewhat, including by Margaret Thatcher; essentially Schuman's point about economic suicide was strengthened over the years.

OK, I thought, that's now done. We had a contract made with our country - to be European. A contract made democratically, two-to-one majority. Fine. We lived in peace and prosperity. So we (partner and I) brought our children up as Europeans. They learned to speak other European languages, got otherwise educated and qualified, plied their various trades here-and-there across Europe, and, eventually, some of them got partners from other European countries; some settled in other European countries, had children.

Fine, we thought, we can easily visit, cousins (our grandchildren) will benefit from this cosmopolitan extended family; we worked at facilitating contacts across the EU for this next generation. Lovely.

Then our country betrayed us. Betrayed us. What we thought had been a once-and-for-all decision was put in jeopardy by that Etonian fucker Cameron in a failed attempt to glue the Tories together; another Etonian fucker, Johnson, 'got Brexit done' for his own venal narcissistic ambition. Betrayed.

The first referendum, two-to-one. The second, a majority within the margin of error. But still, economic suicide beckoned and we had just the boy for that in that lying Etonian pig Johnson. Democracy, schemocracy: what does it matter if you put Etonians in charge?

And now, the economic suicide Schuman predicted having taken place, my English grandchildren post home-made trinkets as birthday presents for their European cousins ... to have them returned undelivered, again and again, as non-compliant in various ways. And so on and so on. Our family is split apart. Betrayed.

You voted to leave? Well, you are one of those who took part in this betrayal of people like me who trusted our country to stick to its word to its citizens. I for one will never forgive this betrayal; it's no excuse that you are so stupid you can't see what you've done. No excuse at all. Fools.

How can a British passport be worthless ? Have you been on holiday lately as you need it. That's the most ridiculous thing I've seen on mumsnet and that's saying something. It's done Get over it. Move on. Stop moaning on and get in with your life

Sorry but the vast majority of people in the UK wouldn't be earning enough on a waitresses salary to live, not unless they lived with a husband/partner earning a good wage too. Especially if they have a family.

It was a disastrous decision for our country. I lay the blame at David Cameron's door. It should never have been put to a referendum.

I did. But admittedly it sometimes meant living in sharehouses, which was totally fine.
Had quite a few colleagues with kids as well. Do you all think service staff starves or can't live without benefits? Millions do just fine.

The only benefit I have noticed is duty free from Uk to Ireland. I don't even drink though.

Otherwise I have missed a flight and had to buy a new ticket because of my almost useless uk passport. (non Eu passport holders had to wait in a huge line to get passports checked to board a plane and they wouldn't let those of us who had flights very soon skip)

I can get a european passport, I just need to get around to it!! Luckily most of my kids have Irish passports. (The best European one, since it allows you to live in the EU and the UK.)

One of the interesting things about Mumsnet is how people with such different cognitive levels interact.

As here. noclothesinbed just didn't understand the point about the worthlessness of a British passport. In real life her lack of understanding would be unlikely to come to light. Here it does.

(Perhaps this is true of all social media? I don't look at any other than Mumsnet.)

I vacillate between depression at the relative ubiquity of the hard-of-thinking and happiness at the democracy of self-expression the medium allows. Then I think again of Brexit ... Oh well.

Not if you're bringing up a family/paying ridiculous rents/paying for childcare and the ever rising cost of living. It's not even just families, it's single people too struggling to pay the bills, not everyone can/wants to live in a house share.
If we could all live happily and survive on a waitresses salary then there wouldn't be the cost of living crisis we have now.

"i'm alright jack"

Yes thank you. The poster was making valid points yes, but appeared to having a different conversation to the one I was having and then getting worked up insinuating I'm stupid, when in fact I was talking about apples and they were talking about oranges.

I remember when the EU made the UK clean up its beaches. No one can deny this was a good thing.

I didn’t expect our waterways to turn to shit right after Brexit, but I suppose I was naive.

The government have told employers not to give pay rises because of the dreadful Inflation.🙄

The Conservative Party have fucked up the UK with their arrogance, incompetence and corruption. And Brexit has and is causing a massive amount of damage.

Those who say it has no costs for them are wrong. It's costing every UK citizen a fortune and it isn't over yet.

So several points.... when we voted to leave the EU wages were being compressed. Unemployment was much higher and the impact of unlimited immigration was really impacting the lower levels of society.... limited housing increased rents
Your mate is American has got EU citizenship in another country....why should they be allowed to live in the UK, perhaps claim benefits, use the NHS, library and schools without first paying in.
Can she speak the language of the country?

It wasn't just the result of the referendum, it was also the overwhelming majority who voted against the LibDems in 2019, the only remain party.

Because Brexit is the Conservatives' fault.

Of course if Brexit means that wages go up for fruit pickers etc (if EU workers were driving down wages)then I’m sure no-one is objecting to the higher prices in the supermarket 🙄