To ask if anyone still thinks Brexit was a good idea?

[KimberleyClark]

Genuinely curious. I can't see how it has improved things at all.

YANBU - Brexit was a terrible idea
YABU - it was a great idea

Yeah lots of the promises by leave were hot air but so were a lot of the claims from remain. The banks haven't left London a ghost town. The car manufacturers haven't left the UK. The UK is not in recession (unlike some EU countries). There has been no jump in unemployment. Yeah there are some rough edges but the UK is doing fine with Brexit.

@CaramacFiend Never really used a trade, we can do most stuff ourselves or we ve friends that can, don't really want to pay £250 per hour for a plumber as i might a surgeon...... do you?

Lorry drivers wages have not stagnated for decades and decades (partners best friend is a driver) and he says wages have risen BUT because of the extra distances driven and overnight stays, lorry reat areas are terrible too, he is trying to get a better paid job with Open Reach.

You can bet all you like, you ve not a clue what anyone does with their money, its just a guess.
EU nationals live here, they have kids in schools, husbands. wives, cars, pay council tax, belong to gyms, book holidays in Scotland or Wales.

But you just keep posting uninformed 'Express style rants, got a horrible cold & i'm bored lol.

And there we have it. Brexit wasn’t done right. Bloody bureaucrats could solve it all the stroke of a pen, we can have the same deal despite EU ruled saying we can’t etc. The fact we were told that it would be shit is irrelevant.

It sounds like your partner's friend just has a shit job. The money is in ADR tankers, supermarket/agency work, and people like DPD. My mate got paid £400 for a shift the other day, admittedly doing 13-14 hours but she now has four days off as she works 4on/4off doing a compressed week, so it was only a few extra hours.

Sleeping out is known as 'tramping' and is usually associated with general haulage. GH pays notoriously shit as the hauliers have driven down the prices in a race to the bottom. There's not much money in haulage. The money is in companies where haulage is a secondary function, especially 'own account' work.

The wages did stagnate. I know somebody getting paid £20 an hour at the same company I was paid £10.50 an hour six years ago. Exactly the same job. And ftr I never did a single night out in almost six years of trucking.

Also, are Openreach Engineers really earning £60k+? Or even £50k, which any half ambitious Class 1 driver can earn (basic salary before bonus and O/T is around £45k at the big supermarkets, with O/T usually paid at 1.5x rate).

Tbf I didn't even vote for Brexit. 😂

It's just funny winding up the people that create and indulge in these endless threads aimed at creating a pile on.

Always goes the same way. They create a thread with a title like 'if you voted for Brexit please explain the benefits' (as if you couldn't have just googled it). All the usual suspects pile in and start frothing and then somebody trolls them all and they end up getting massively butthurt, making the entire thread a massive home goal lol.

And the people who actually voted Brexit don't care one iota because they already got what they voted for. They're probably lurking and smirking.

You know that the remainers who refused to accept the democratic decision and spent years frustrating the process and challenging and delaying the democratic wish of the people were the reason we now have this government. Think on how much damage that has done. The only reason we got Borris is because he sent out a message of getting brexit done which was what people wanted. It would have been done well before if it wasn't for the illiberal elite trying to stop a democratic decision and creating division by labelling and vilifying people because they couldn't accept not everybody has the same life as them.
So can you name anything positive for trying to stop Brexit once it had been voted for. That has caused the most damage to the UK.

What?!

The delay was because brexiteers had zero plans for what to do if they won.

And democratic wish of the people - 52%, many of whom wanted a protest vote. Give me a break. There has been a pro remain majority since the referendum and it only gets larger.

Brexit has failed, it's the fault of the twats who pushed it through, not the people who voted against it.

That's a fair point tbh. People voted for him because he made all the right noises about finally 'getting it done'.

And now we're stuck with the Tories as a result.

@ClareBlue

I am afraid the Leave campaign lied and lied and lied.
They didn't have a plan. I will say that again They. Did. Not. Have. A. Plan. There was no 'oven-ready deal,' probably because they didn't think they were going to win.

Blaming the remainers for the shit show that has followed is misdirection.

Anyone who knows even a smattering of how EU trade works, knew that divorcing these decades old arrangements would take rigour, process and detail - attributes none of the leave MPs had. It was all slogans with no substance.

The joke is that the UK is, because of the proximity and size of the EU and it's commercial significance to us, unlikely to derogate away from its standards in any significant sense.

Business doesn't want that. Yes maybe technically these decisions are ours, but in most cases we are rule followers.

All this stuff about lorry drivers and goods is pretty old fashioned. Yes that's a part of the economy but the major part of the economy for the U.K. is services. And we were doing really well at that before we decided to leave.

The absolute best deal for services is the EU. It is was easy.

Repositioning our economy so we should prioritise goods and manufacturing is the mentality of some time in the 19th century. It is stupid. And it's not going to grow our economy which we desperately need.

I cannot help but feel a lot of people had no idea why the UK was a rich country but it's our services and IP. Not small business, farming, or light manufacturing.

I've seen it likened on here to leaving a controlling partner where you're better off just getting out than 'waiting for the right time' and never leaving. You may have been financially better off with the controlling partner but escaping coercion and having your freedom is more important.

This is a good way of thinking about it. Thanks.

Absolutely.
Though we are still better off. This is beginning to be admitted now.

It's a terrible idea but I don't go along with the idea that everyone who voted leave was either thick / racist. I know a few people, who have admitted to voting leave and they're neither of the above but there was so much misinformation about at the time. I can't think of any benefits, there may be some but I can't think of any.

I feel really sad for the future generations, DS really wants to go and study and work in Europe when he's older and it's so expensive and complicated now. It just took away so many things that we took for granted for our DC .

Maybe they'll reverse it when they all come of age.

You are conflating two things.

When businesses copy good ideas from each other and become more similar, that’s fine. It’s beneficial to the business and the customer.

When Govts enforce standardisation that prevents good ideas from competing. It also costs businesses to implement and to demonstrate compliance to enforcers. Quite apart from its abusive nature, this makes products more expensive and less innovative for customers.

But the most important thing is Govt. Govts are nothing but coercion. If Govts co-operate they can be as abusive as they like because there is nowhere for the citizens to run and no alternative system for them to point to. Preventing Govts from merging is literally life preserving.

@fifteen and @ClareBlue no, I’m sorry, that’s just silly. Countries aren’t people and even if they were, Brexit has put the UK under the thumb of a government intent on institutionally gaslighting is on a grand scale with as few moderating influences as possible. It’s much more like choosing to flounce out of the local council where your opportunity to deliberate and equal vote with the other councillors isn’t good enough for you, you actively sought membership in the first place (it’s not like the EU love-bombed us), have consented to all the changes over the years in an active way, even if it means a compromise and the outcome has been an overall rise in standards of living.

One of the most pernicious bits of Brexit rhetoric is assuming the country is a homogeneous bloc of “the People”. It’s not. It’s not “national self-harm” because it’s a group of rich, powerful, corrupt people imposing these decisions on us according to their personal needs and goals, it’s them doing it to us. A country is a group of people who don’t generally have free choice as to where they’re born, with differing opinions, outlooks, priorities, needs. We weren’t oppressed in the EU, we were big power players with special privileges. To flounce out because you don’t want to abide by mutually agreed rules, causing a pretty nasty knock-on impact and diverting interest from what the government ought to be focusing on, which is improving the lives of the populace.
Also, the DV analogy is shite because a country isn’t going to be emotionally damaged by the decisions of an NGO. Btw, as a victim of DV it’s truly offensive as well. And every line @ClareBlue has written has been fed to them by an organisation which has hired consultants, advertisers, strategists specifically to play on people’s emotions and it is so, so tiring to hear the same shit for years on end when it’s nonsense.

We know it's not a good idea in this house as DS wanted to work in Germany and now can't.
I want to retire in Greece but can't. My parents no longer can spend 6 months in the UK and 6 months in Spain as they had been for 10 years and planned to do for decades.
None of that will be resolved before my parents die.
Let alone the fact we can't trade as cheaply and easily with our neighbours.

Not really, its a rather stupid analogy.

When you leave a controlling partner, you don't expect to still have a close working relationship with them & then pay in large amounts of your income to still be able to use the facilities you used to enjoy together.

DV isn't really a nice thing to drag into this debate either.

Infantile thinking, much like blaming remainers in parliament when they were in the minority and that it was the ERG that gave us a poor NI deal, took us out of Horizon and Europol.

We then thought Oh shit and decided to pay in billions to renegotiate and rejoin Horizon.

One big recent example….

People have been hugely emotionally damaged by Lockdown (Govt action), encouraged by WHO (NGO). Personally I’ll never get over it.

All of those issues are being re assessed currently though. It would have happened quicker if not for Covid.
Why can’t your parents spend 6 months in Spain then ? It’s 90 days out of every 180. That’s 6 months a year.
People from all over the world work in the EU.

Lockdown had a lot of consequences for everyone. I lost my relationship, my job, my Master’s degree that I’ve been saving for three years for and I spent three years in a mental hospital. Just because it affected me doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it on a community level or even an individual level (I’ve still got four grandparents alive) or that it wasn’t preferable to what might have happened otherwise. Also, the country was advised or in your word encouraged to take those measures. Not compelled. The WHO has no coercive or even legal powers. The government, who gained a huge amount more power through Brexit, decided to implement lockdown. Your elected officials. It’s a bit like the old question “if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do too?”. You’d be stupid if that was the only reason.

Wait, sorry, it was one year, I was typing quickly. It’s been three years of Covid but I spent ONE year in the mental hospital (and a lot of accumulated time on general wards. Apologies.

This is such an interesting post.

I hope things have improved for you

Maybe it's more like going self employed and losing your company benefits in the short term but having more freedom as you grow the business. 😂 No more holiday requests, you go when it suits you.

They will be dead or too old before it's sorted. They are 80 plus.
The 180 days is rolling. So would have to come home for 180 days before the next 90 so doesn't work as tips into the next year's allowance (180 plus 90 x 2 is more than 365! )
They rented out their house for 6 months to travelling academics, lots of work to get it ready can't do that twice as won't work with seasons etc.