please can you tell me any benefits of brexit

[battenburg100]

Hi everyone
I am desperate to find any advantages to brexit as I can't find any.
I am willing to hear of any success stories.

Travel abroad has become much harder - the issue with any extra months on a 10 year passport and the right number of months left on the passport - think 3 or 6 months.

Hiring a car abroad is harder - so much more extra paper work.

Much harder to live abroad due to the demand of certain amount in a bank account.

My sister who lives in Spain has had alot of barriers due to Brexit, in relation to coming back to living in the Uk and even her driving licence, in Spain now is not transferable - which wasnt the case before brexit.

I also find that travel abroad is even harder than ever - especially with this upcoming October when we have the implementation of the new ETIAS and the visa issue for whatever country we want to visit.

Has anything good from Brexit? Am I missing something?

Technically it was c27% doing that, unfortunately the other 73% of us were standing close enough to be gutted with them.

As for benefits, I'm quite enjoying watching the collective amnesia many brexiteers are displaying now, as well as the weird dance they're doing with all the U-turns.

A particular highlight this week has been learning of the existing of BI4Farmers, a group campaigning for a universal basic income for farmers because they've lost access to the EU subsidy package, the UK government haven't replaced it, and none of the amazing opportunities they were 'promised' have materialised.

This is almost always the first thing that comes up when Brexit is mentioned. I don't for one minute support Brexit but people do get this slogan wrong, so it's important to clarify.
The actual slogan read: 'We send the EU £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead'.
Now, at the time, I took that to mean that if we were not giving money to the EU, we could use that money to fund the NHS. Which, we could! Merely a suggestion, not the 'promise' that people claim.

However, as it is, the Brexit 'divorce' bill was in excess of £25bn in 2022 and it's estimated we'll be paying this settlement until 2057. Had people known this - and other such details - beforehand, many may have voted differently.

I’m not enjoying watching anyone suffer doesn’t bring me any joy at all

I always hated the division it caused

I blame every single politician whatever their party that voted to support the UK having a referendum with so little discussion about how the outcome would be managed if we voted leave, how the process would happen

utterly disgraceful

We got to take back control of making our own laws.

We can legislate gender recognition legislation without johny foreigner telling us what to do or how yo do it.

We are now free.

Oh, come on. It was a slogan clearly designed to make people think the NHS would get more money and it worked in a lot of cases. People would stop being upset about it if there was any evidence of any public services benefitting at all though. But there’s nothing.

Jobs like lorry drivers had had pay driven into the ground by free movement. After Brexit skilled drivers have started getting a fairer wage and have been less exploited. However many people won't like this as increased transport costs causes food inflation.

We could have done that with the vaccine whilst in the EU, shame we then wasted that advantage by not rolling out fast enough.

And the EU following the rules for third countries, many of which we wrote, is not them being pissy, it's them upholding the integrity of their trading block. It is not to punish, we asked to be a third country!

I take it the col crisis hasn’t hit you then op if you are having so much difficulty travelling abroad?
I usually manage one holiday abroad each year; can’t say I’ve noticed anything being more difficult since Brexit.

The Uk was a net contributor to EU budgets during our 40 year membership. Hence the rebate negotiated by The UK government many years ago.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7886/

in all of this discussion about benefits vs losses of EU exit, it’s a shame when it slips into abject insult throwing and labelling all those who voted to leave the EU as thick idiots. People from across the political spectrum voted to leave the EU, labour supporter as well. For many I’m sure it was quite a finely balanced decision based on a number of different considerations (and an acknowledgement of a number of unknowns), from political to economic, cultural and social.

There seems to be a level of ‘fading effect bias’ taking hold whereby the level of general discontent and concern about the growing encroachment of the EU as a political and economic project over the past couple of decades, has been conveniently sidestepped, and instead all those who voted to leave the EU are labelled as somehow lesser able to have come to a rationale decision than those who chose to vote to remain (in what was a once in a lifetime opportunity to affect change). Insults are cheap.

Being pissy um do you mean following the rules we wanted, knew would happen and apparantly left the EU for?

You can’t not be in the EU and have all the benefits. We pretty much had that before and apparantly decided we didn’t want it. So life being harder is what we asked for and got. Those of us who voted remain, did our research, saw how shit it would be and voted accordingly. Others were hoodwinked by Boris and believed his lies re all the money going to the NHS.😂

Is our now shit and massively underfunded NHS which hasn’t seen the money or transformation we were promised due to pissy Europeans too?

The supposed benefits to the Australian trade deal posted by the government are hysterical and show how out of touch they really are.

-easier to travel and work in Australia. Um the vast majority of average Brits would rather it was easier to travel and work easier in Europe ( you know the continent next door you can drive to). Very few families can afford ££££ in flights to Australia even if they wanted to go. I think the burning planet would rather we holidayed in Europe too.

-apparantly there will be lower prices on crucial things like Timtams ( yes they actually listed these)and Jacob’s Creek. 😳Doesn’t Europe sell a shed load of wine we could get with far less damage to the planet.I don’t want Australian meat or products that have millions of travel miles which cost more , we can get closer and have a bigger carbon foot print. Trade with somewhere closer to home would be my priority- and then we get back to Europe again…..

Now I’m not into calling anybody “thick idiots” but seriously anybody who thought something like the Australian trade deal is better than what we had with Europe surely isn’t the sharpest crayon in the box even if they did bother to do any research before Brexit which most clearly didn’t.

I think you are asking the wrong question, and yes it has been done to death.

What we should be discussing is:

If and when should the UK apply to join the single market, and, if and when should the UK apply to join the customs union.

Absolutely. No doubt it will happen eventually.

From 2025 UK citizens will be required to complete the ETIAS, to travel anywhere in the EU. It’s a travel authorisation document but it might as well be a visa.

Also, so far the cost of leaving the EU, for the UK has been around £140 billion!!! This will increase, over many more years to come.

But it’s apparantly easier to travel to Australia now for a holiday! Whoop whoop!!! 🔥 🌍 ✈️ ££££

@ButWhatAboutTheBees the EU being pissy with us ? Are you joking? The two sides had meeting after meeting where the UK could not clarify what it wanted and was unable to properly negotiate due to lack of preparedness and - sorry to say it - lack of understanding of basic trade agreements...

Moreover the EU negotiating team did it all in English to help us, whereas we weren't able to conjure up a single representative who had mastered an EU language.

In fairness no reasonable person would have expected any of the anticipated positive changes as a result of leaving the EU to be delivered in the short-mid term. I think there were plenty of people who voted leave because they were idealistically opposed to the idea of moving towards more areas of life being regulated via the EU vs by the UK. As the EU grew the influence of each individual country on policy got smaller. Some of those people will have understood how the EU parliament worked well & others not at all. We need to stop throwing blame & insults at people who voted differently to us and collectively direct it towards our shit show of a government.

In the long term it’s not impossible the country can benefit from leaving the EU. I don’t personally think it’s that likely but I’m positive that continuing to insult other voters and blame them for whatever we all dislike about brexit isn’t going to improve anything. I’m sad the vote went the way it did and I wish it had been different but it is what it is and it’s unlikely we are suddenly going to rejoin the EU or that doing so would fix major issues like the col crisis (it has too many collective causes some of which are entirely unrelated).

Over the remainder of your voting life please remember the Conservative Party who only pledged to a have referendum to avoid losing seats to UKIP & try to resolve internal party disputes rather than because they believed it was a good idea, made an utter arse of planning the wording/rules of the referendum & were arrogant enough to believe they’d get the result the leadership wanted without bothering about a sensible campaign highlighting all the good things coming from the EU. They didn’t even plan what they would do if we voted leave. Consider if that approach of putting themselves and their party far ahead of any consideration about what they believe is most beneficial for the majority of the country is what you want in a politician. Even if you wanted to leave the EU and we’re glad there was a referendum and you got to vote surely you can still see the issues with how it came about?

@DinduNuffin it was "Johnny foreigner" that forced the UK to clean up its beaches and rivers...we had a few decades of water quality and now look where we are - sewage in every river and stream in England

Do you think our government is less 'weak'? 🤔

I think 4 years is more than enough time to see some benefits particularly when you consider that many of the big negatives haven’t even started yet.

The funniest bit is.... mine looks black to me!

There aren’t any, it’s as simple as that. It’s been a massive self-inflicted disaster, that’s left the country poorer and decimated our standing in the world as a stable, credible world power. All those voted harking back the days when Britain “ruled the waves” have actually done the opposite; Britain’s power (soft and hard) and influence is diminished because of this nonsense.

That said, if I was being charitable, I suppose a Brexit-supporter could argue that it’s all about national sovereignty, that the EU is an undemocratic, unaccountable superstate, and the ability to have complete control over our laws trumps any short-term economic or political hit.

Of course, aside from being bullshit, I’ve not heard any Brexiteers make that argument - I think they still try to argue that there are benefits, or that there would have been benefits if it hadn’t been for Remainer nay-sayers and we’d gone full hard Brexit.

Er...we apparently have a new trade deal with Papua New Guinea? 🍾🥂

It's at least been educational in showing how much genuine vitriol and hatred can be spouted by some against their fellow citizens. I had no idea of the depth of hatred that people can feel towards each other on the basis of vote of this kind. Perhaps the Scottish referendum was the closest we'd previous come. This isn't exactly a benefit but it has been instructive.

I know the people expressing hate for leave voters will claim it's 100% justified but it does make me sad.

I remember two pro leave posters back in 2016, prior to the vote. Recall their names were something like ‘walkingdeadfangirl’ and ‘allaroundtheworld.

Their core motivation for voting Brexit essentially boiled down to ‘we hate Londoners and want to teach them a lesson’. It was like arguing with 6 year olds.

I wonder if they’re experiencing lots of Brexit benefits or are worse off now than back then? I wonder if they still blame Londoners for everything? I wonder if their next plan is to vote to get us out of the ECHR coz obviously this would only harm Londoners!