To be getting more not less depressed about Brexit as time goes on

[teneastereggs]

It all seems so pointless doesn't it, I feel sorry that some- probably many- people were duped into voting for it, I feel annoyed that the 48 percent who voted remain have been completely ignored, annoyed about all the divisions it has caused our country and all the rows, and overall just really fed up with the state we are in now. I thought it would be getting better by now but actually feel worse about it now than I did at the time.

I suppose it means adapt to the situation we are in as right now, there is no changing it.

Well people are adapting as best they can, but it’s shit for very many. And perhaps it can be changed if people pressure MPs and use their vote wisely. Why on earth should people just settle for a situation that was engineered so dishonestly and that has been so damaging?

I wonder how this will pan out, years down the line?

I am absolutely devastated still. All my plans for my life fell through at that moment that we left.

I totally get it, it is so depressing and makes me incredibly angry.

Well one of the biggest cheerleaders, Jacob Rees Mogg thinks it will be fifty years before ordinary people see any benefits. Meanwhile he’s moved his assets to Dublin and is raking it in. Leaving the EU means not abiding by EU laws on closing tax loopholes, so he’s far better off. For most of the rest of us it will pan out very badly. We’ve lost 4% GDP and that bloody stupid trade deal on the other side of the world is only going to bring in 0.08% except that, whoops, they’ve realised that even that is an over-estimate. It’s an absolute bloody shitshow and people have every right to be furious.

Yes and that was TBlair stuffing it to us ‘racists’. We probably lost a lot of skills over the next decade/s as cheap polish plumbers and brickies did all the work.

For anyone interested in this topic, there's a book that is an essential and gripping read; The Assault on Truth by Peter Oborne £6.99.

https://amzn.eu/d/5LsyBxX

* THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER *
'A clinical and merciless account of Johnson's mendacity... gripping' Guardian
When Peter Oborne wrote The Rise of Political Lying, looking at the growth of political falsehood under John Major and Tony Blair, he believed things had got as bad as they could be. With the arrival of Boris Johnson at No 10 in 2019 began a new and unprecedented epidemic of deceit.

In The Assault on Truth, a short and powerful polemic, Oborne shows how Boris Johnson lied again and again in order to secure victory so he could force through Brexit in the face of parliamentary opposition. Johnson and his ministers then lied repeatedly to win the general election in December 2019. The government’s woeful response to the coronavirus pandemic has generated another wave of falsehoods, misrepresentations and fabrications. Oborne has brought the book fully up to date, to the end of Johnson's time in No 10.

The scale and shamelessness of the lying of the Johnson administration far exceeded the lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and other issues under Tony Blair. This book argues that the ruthless use of political deceit under the Johnson government was part of a wider attack on civilised values and traditional institutions across the Western world, especially by Donald Trump in the USA. The Johnson and Trump methodology of deceit is about securing power for its own ends - even when they get exposed for lying, they shrug it off as a matter of no consequence. Oborne assesses whether their time in power has tainted their successors.

It matters because all Western institutions are built around the idea of integrity and accountability. This means that an assault on truth is an assault on the rule of law, state institutions and the fundamental idea of fairness, and even democracy itself.

I would have voted remain but didn't vote during the EU referendum because I had to work late that day but everyone in my family who voted for Brexit has not changed their minds to this day so I doubt we will ever rejoin. The grey vote vastly outweighs the working vote after all.

Some of them probably have realised it was a mistake but the staunch Brexiteers are too pig headed to swallow their pride and admit they are fools. At this point you’d have to be either very stubborn, or very ignorant/thick to not understand the damage it has and will continue to wreak on the country.

Well, years down the line Europe as a whole will be a spent force. The average age across the continent is 45 and protectionism can only take you so far against countries with an average age of 15/16 in increasingly good health and with marketable skills learnt performing tasks in semi-slavery conditions in the gulf regions and beyond.

The next decade is Africa's, shored by investment from Russia/China who will be the the long term bankrollers/investors (they are already on the verge of setting up their own banking bloc) and Europe as a whole will decline. The countries within it that have a broadly flatter distribution of wealth will see less upheaval and a gentler downward slope. The others, it'll be rockier, especially the ones that are already verging on fascism and/or have oligarchs in place. For the UK, we've lost our buffer so are on the skids.

I know of a number of people who regret their Leave vote. Polling also shows a strong move towards Rejoin. Maybe not enough yet, but getting there. Once we all have to have our fingerprints taken at the borders as well as passports stamped there may be even more regret.

The thing is it doesn't really affect the older members of my family (they're the Brexit supporters). They don't work or have to worry about their children's futures because they're already established or have already moved abroad. They just sit at home all day and they're guaranteed an inflationary rise in their state pension. They also get a lot of money from their defined benefit pension schemes.

Probably not true. Covid has had a bigger effect on inflation and pay than Brexit.

In any event, it’s not really the point is it. The country as a WHOLE has been set back 15 years and at a point when the world is polarising between the Western democracies and BRICS that is probably optimistic. Living standards - purchasing parity - may never be the same as they were for a generation. Best save some of that pay rise, don’t spend it all.

We will almost certainly end up back in Europe eventually, but with less influence.

This country is in a complete state because of Brexit.
A few lorry drivers and such getting a pay rise isn’t going to help our economy as a country !
People hoping for a revote are delusional if they think we’ll have the previous benefits we had in Europe.
I remember my aunts, uncles and parents all celebrating as they voted for Brexit. They all died before the pandemic and non of them saw or experienced the utter mess we are now in. Younger people should have had the vote on something that ultimately affects them more.

It is very depressing.
Just lucky we have Irish passports and can live in Guernsey.

Because the effects are felt now and still unfolding. Surely that’s easy to understand?

You'll never get most leave voters to admit the damage they've done as in their heads they haven't done any damage despite the evidence all around them. Apart from that they don't give a kangaroo's backside about later generations.

In this household we're now looking at what we can do longer term about residency outside the UK once we're retired as the UK just gets more and more basket casey every day. We're too old to emigrate for work so this is the next option. Oh, and it's unlikely, now that we're heading back to being the sick man of Europe, that we'd ever even qualify to get back in.

As for Rees Mogg, Cameron, and those more than probably Russian funded stooges Cummings and Farage, I sincerely hope they rot in hell.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65240749

And to add insult to injury it can't be changed as quickly as changing a government.

Not to mention that a lot of EU see Brexit as a good riddance, never mind the Farage & Co BS about "they can't do without us". So if UK ever manages to get back into EU, it will NEVER be at the same conditions - forget about any "special treatment" of the kind negotiated by Margaret Thatcher.

Hear hear op.

I'm not a covid conspiracist at all but it feels like we (collective/ national 'we') have progressed from blaming all our problems on immigration and now all the shit coming home to roost is a direct result of covid.
I don't doubt covid's huge impact but its been a great way to permanently remove and reduce things right under our noses without us noticing.
Hiding in plain sight and cognitive dissonance in an awkward codependent embrace.

YANBU OP. I might feel more optimistic if there was actually some kind of credible plan or vision for the country, but the current shower of shite in charge would get sacked from any professional job in the real world for lack of competency. They’re anything but “conservative”.

Before 2016, the U.K. was a world leader on biomedical research and pharmaceutical research and development. The MHRA was a highly respected government agency, on a par with FDA in the USA and BfArM in Germany. The expertise was so well regarded that when the European Medicines Agency was established, the natural home was London. The U.K. punched well above its weight and made a huge contribution to the science, law and policy around medicine regulation in Europe, bringing together folk from all over the EU and folk from other parts of the world came to learn from them.

Post Brexit, EMA had to leave the U.K., as by the law that established it, it had to be located in a member state of the EU. It went to Amsterdam. May’s Withdrawal Agreement made no attempt to have some kind of work sharing agreement between MHRA and EMA, it was the hardest of exits. As a consequence huge numbers of MHRA staff left just as the work dramatically increased because a) covid and b) now MHRA also have to do everything that is done by EMA on behalf of all member states, with no plan in place and an impossible situation in NI because of the border kerfuffle. MHRA in a few short years has become a shell of itself. Anyone trying to run a clinical trial in the U.K. knows that it’s currently impossible to get approval to normal timelines due to a lack of staff reviewing the paperwork which means that part of the industry is also fast declining in the U.K. as companies will just run them elsewhere in Europe instead.

the UK government recently announced that basically in the future, if a medicine is approved by another “big” agency like EMA or FDA then MHRA will just rubber stamp it and let it be sold in the U.K. Which is pretty much what countries with no significant expertise do, eg most of Africa and the Middle East. The trend worldwide for years is for countries to develop their own expertise, not rely on the big agencies so much and to ask harder questions, like requiring data in patients that match the ethnic makeup of their populations. Not to go dramatically backwards in scrutiny!

I’ve had a ringside seat for the decimation of an industry in five short years. It can’t be the only one, and if it’s indicative of what the rest of industry is going through then it’s an utter travesty, and I don’t have enough swear words to express what an almighty clusterfuck we’ve inflicted on ourselves as a country. It’s a complete abdication of the basic responsibility of government to ensure the country has a sound basis for a society and we should be rioting in the streets.

YANBU op. Anyone who thinks Brexit is done and dusted should read this article about the government's climb down over the EU retained law bill:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/apr/09/tories-in-retreat-from-brexit-bill-to-scrap-thousands-of-eu-laws

The Scottish Gov has published a more detailed explanation:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/retained-eu-law-bill-what-does-it-mean/

Jacob Rees-Mogg claimed this would all be sorted by the end of the year. In reality the bill is now going to be delayed by months if not until after the next election. So "taking back control" in fact means that the UK will have over 4,000 laws pertaining to food, employment rights, the environment, business and trade, that it will thankfully be abiding by, but very unfortunately will no longer have any power or influence over the union of countries that established these laws and who will presumably be amending them in future within the EU too.

No one knows what the implications of this will be either; the uncertainty is very damaging. All in all it's a complete and utter shambles!

We’ve decided that if there isn’t a change of government in a year or so, we’re off to Singapore for a few years. It feels as though life in this country has become too difficult and we’d be limiting our kids’ opportunities if we stayed.

I'm totally jaded. For me Brexit is part of a wider problem. There's so much bullshit infecting our politics and media where do we even begin?

Until we can prosecute politicians for lying nothing will change. They can breeze in, fuck up and fuck off to milk their contacts leaving us to carry the can.

I totally agree with you. I genuinely think less of the people who I know who voted to leave, mainly because they either didn't educate themselves adequately or their little racist undertones found a voice to come to the surface for.

This is literally how democracy works. We have a vote every 5 years to elect a government. The matter is settled for 5 years. We then go to the polls again. If we have changed our minds about the kind of government we want then we vote for a different party and different outcome. Democracy is not a one time thing. Circumstances, needs and drivers change, and one of the main benefits of democracy is about being able to respond to and influence those changes.