To ask for the tangible benefits to you from Brexit, whichever way you voted

[Bunnyfuller]

I genuinely want to know, what’s improved? Specific to you/your family?

is Brexit as it is what you thought it would be, or if you voted Remain, has it been more positive than you expected?

anyone calling it ‘goady thread’ is possibly saying Brexit isn’t going that well?

Better pay before I qualified pay was shite , some agencies are now paying £16-£19 per hour for complex care workers/ autism LD. It was a minimum wage job before obviously they can't find people with that skill set.

Awful lack of staff in care homes and home care... Impacted my family greatly.
Awful lack of staff in hospitals, heartbreaking to see nurse friends exhausted and upset.
Awful availability of building materials and fixtures and fittings, and much more expensive (before Ukraine invasion made it even trickier)
Heard from friends about hideous queues for non European holidaymakers.
Overwhelming sadness we no longer have the EU freedoms.

Can we (either side of the issue) avoid the snarky comments - Leavers, I genuinely want to know the tangible benefits the Brexit you voted for has brought. ‘What’s the point’ etc just fans the flames of the view that there are no benefits to you.

@outlanderfan88 well done for being honest with your first post. That view is often denied by Leave voters, but if that’s why you voted Leave, then you should own it.

I’ve deliberately not posted my stance, because I truly want to hear what I’ve asked for - tangible benefits to you, that was part of your decision to vote as you did.

Very interesting to hear about fruit picking, fishing, building, hauliers and agriculture - have those changes affected you personally? What effects have they had (like the posters citing pay rises etc). So, focus on YOU, YOUR FAMILY - what positives has Brexit brought to your household.

Yeah, your typical Brexiteer doesn't give a fuck about any of that. Why would they?

They care that the site they used to work on hired three EU migrants and wages stagnated. They care that their mate John hurt his back and the company didn't care but replaced him with more EU migrants. They care that the factory shut down and moved operations to Poland or Germany.

That's what they saw and nobody give them any kind of explanation as to why leaving the EU wouldn't make it better. They just called them thick racists.

Can only think of one benefit, which is insignificant compared with the disbenefits. Now that so many European workers have left, there are more low-skilled job vacancies in my area, and they pay rather better than they used to. This is the sort of job my teenager will be wanting to take up in a few years, so her prospects have improved.

However, if I remember that those low-skilled job vacancies also extend to local care home work and hospital support staff, my blood runs cold thinking of the terrible conditions being suffered by residents/patients and staff. And I expect the big local factory will close, which would send unemployment up again. I'm surprised they are still here: they get parts from the EU and then export their products to the EU, which has become an expensive hassle for them.

Deferred benefits (if there are ever any) were not what people were promised.

well done for being honest with your first post. That view is often denied by Leave voters, but if that’s why you voted Leave, then you should own it

I can't imagine why Brexiteers think remainers and patronising holier-than-thou pseuds.

After 10 years in the UK, my ex left to go back to live in their home country....so I guess I no longer run the risk of bumping into him in the supermarket

I also got a stamp in my passport when I went on holiday...

Sorry that's all I got.

As hubby is a builder his rates have shot up from £200 a day to £400 a day
I am a partner in a house developer company we are selling more now than ever before
My buddy is a teacher she says it is easier where she is as she has very few kids who cannot understand or speak good English which means she spends more time on other kids - she is in London not sure about other areas
Brothers business has certainly benefitted from Brexit

I quite enjoy a good row so I've got to have plenty of them.

I also like the term gammon as it is both amusing and accurate so thanks Brexit for bringing that one into every day usage.

Brexit could have been avoided if the EU allowed a cap on unskilled migrants from poorer countries. It definitely did have an affect on poorer paid jobs. Minimum wage workers with families and homes were expected to compete with people living in HMOs.

But if I notice events, draw random unsubstantiated conclusions without bothering to understand or research for myself or listen to any of the numerous commentators on the subject....then yes, you would be accurate in calling me thick.

I don't see how you can twist that into being someone else fault for not explaining things to them. There were plenty of explanations...and plenty of stubborn headed people who wouldn't listen and thought their anecdotes made them experts so that they wouldn't listen to actual experts.
I think that is the definition of thick to me.

They can't have done that as that is the point of the EU. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it exists to do.

What is the explanation then? What is the answer?

Tell me.

There are a few benefits so far but the government hasn't exploited the opportunities to the maximum yet.

Obvious benefits to me are:

• Reduced traffic from Ireland travelling to Europe on British roads. Pre-Brexit, it was easier for the Irish to put their lorries on a ferry to Britain, travel on our motorways to Dover and then cross to Calais. This meant the Irish were causing traffic delays and wearing out our roads. Since Brexit a lot of them seem to have vanished, presumably it's easier for them to go straight from Ireland to Europe directly.


• End of freedom of movement. I can't afford to travel abroad so anything that inconveniences the travel of others is a good thing. People need to travel less.


• Scottish independence is more likely. Now, I don't want Scottish independence, but if that is the price we must pay to get rid of the SNP thugs from our political system, so be it.


• No more Nigel Farage on TV (unless you watch GB News, but that's easily avoided).


• Better pay since Brexit.


• A better vaccine programme when the rollout started.

It's a mistake though to assume that the benefits would all come immediately. I knew that it would be at least a decade before we were better off leaving than remaining. I hadn't factored in it taking three and a half years to actually leave, then the pandemic happening of course, so we're probably still about ten years away from feeling the real benefits.

The biggest long term benefit will be our removal from the ever-increasing scope of the EU. Integration there will grow, until it is effectively a United States of Europe. We weren't voting to freeze things as they were in 2016, we were voting to cede ever more power to Brussels or say "no thanks" and go our own way.

A key thing Remainers ignore is that most of the EU hated us anyway. They liked our money, but despised us. (Remember France blocked us from joining for years, de Gaulle never forgave us for sheltering him during WWII.) We weren't an equal partner, we were a cash cow to be exploited.

Did they even want us to remain? They could easily have made enough concessions to David Cameron that vote would have swung in favour of remain, but chose not to.

The one and only benefit for us has been to be forced to relocate to our home country in the EU as we can no longer do our jobs from the UK. Quality of life massively improving. It's a pity for the UK as we used to pay big taxes whilst not using state schools or NHS... (we are not an isolated case - we know so many people in the same situation)

Well that's why the lower paid people voted for Brexit! I'm not happy about it but that's the cusp of it. The EU was inflexible There should have been some quotas, total freedom of movement should have been between countries with similar wealth.

Exasperatednow
Deferred benefits (if there are ever any) were not what people were promised

Future EU enlargement was discussed. I don't mind giving sanctuary to a few hundred thousand people (mostly women and children) during the war, but free movement with an extra 40/45 million people is an all together different matter - Ukraine was the poorest country in Europe even before the war.

Indeed. Ultimately the writing was on the wall from Thatcher. It only works if poorer people see the benefits in other ways like robust public services and government intervention in things like housing.

None at all. I have just been speaking to the daughter of one of my friends who got a degree through covid and is on a study exchange on Spain before she graduates. She loves it there and does not want to come back yet . Before Brexit she would have got a job of some sort and stayed for longer. As it is she will need to come home. Not a massive thing but just an indication of how we have narrowed the opportunities for our children

😄

People do know that the government had rules that they could apply to migrants whilst in the EU but chose not to? Other countries do.

Now they're planning to extend visas to thousands of people from countries outside of the EU to address the issues that we face.

So nothing much has changed except UK citizens have lost FoM.

Posters on here saying "it was a long time ago, it's in the history books now, it's time to move on" etc: the referendum (not the actual leaving) was in 2016, which was only 6 years ago. That's the same length of time as WW2 lasted. It's a pretty short time really, but long enough for a lot of devastating things to happen and definitely far too short to say "that was then, this is now, just forget about it". And my word, has this been an eventful 6 years for a lot more reasons than just Brexit.

I may add that DSis is no fan of the EU, indeed she would have been delighted to see us leave, but voted Remain in the referendum as she said she couldn't trust this lot not to turn it into a disaster. (I was firmly Remain, but agreed with her that it didn't have to be a disaster if it were handled right. Such a big if!) Which reminds me, here is my Brexit benefit, the one and only as far as I can see: British politicians can no longer hide behind "Brussels made me/won't let me do it". Now we know it's all them. Not that it will stop them trying to blame bleedin' foreigners, of course. They're still blaming a Labour government that wasn't even elected for things they might have done worse if they'd had the chance...

p.s. The Common Agricultural and Common Fisheries policies were a bit shit, to be fair - though not nearly as shit as their reputation, and potentially not nearly as shit as not having them. It all depends who's working on the replacement. Liz who, did you say...? OK, we're fucked.

Well yes but the visas will be subjected to quotas for specific job shortages so harder for employers to exploit and depress wages. My workplace (healthcare) we recruit mainly from Nigeria for oversees staff , wages are still rising. Freedom of movement devastated the building trade which was a traditionally ok paying job.

Exasperatednow
People do know that the government had rules that they could apply to migrants whilst in the EU?

Yes - I was reading about that the other day. This was bad timing a week before the referendum, highlighting EU meddling in our domestic policy;

June 14 2016
The British Government is within its rights to restrict benefits to some EU migrants, the European Court of Justice has ruled.

In a move that will be greeted with profound relief by David Cameron and the Remain campaign, the court threw out a challenge by the European Commission to the Government’s benefits crackdown.

The Commission had argued that the UK's decision to restrict payment – such as child benefit and tax credits – to migrants who were "economically inactive" on the grounds that they did not have the right to live in the UK was discriminatory.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-court-backs-uks-ability-to-restrict-child-benefits-for-migrants-a7081046.html

But Vote Leave said it was "absurd that the UK had to run every nut and bolt of domestic policy" past a court in Luxembourg and engage in "lengthy and expensive" legal battles.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36526158