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?

Actually, he passed on every chance he had to stick it to the government regarding Brexit - his entire strategy was to just sit back and get what he wanted (Brexit), without looking like he was supporting Brexit.

That's what cost him both elections - his entire job was to oppose the government, which meant he was supposed to actually take a solid, definitive position. Of course, like all Brexit supporters, he had no idea what that position might actually be, so he just sat in silence.

Corbyn is almost as much to blame as the Tories for the shit-show that is Brexit.

You aren't allowed to post stuff like that on here, even if it's true.

I agree @ntmdino and I think he damaged Labour significantly. He hated the EU and didn't even have effective responses when asked about strategy. "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn" isn't enough to run a party.

The trouble with referencing a document when the forward is by Boris Johnson (serial liar) is that I don't believe a single word of it and nor should anyone else with a modicum of knowledge of how he has conducted himself over this career.

Blair stood on a ticket of EEC (as it then was) withdrawal - Brexit by any other name in 1992, so it's hardly a new thing.

You seem to be ignoring that we'd had a referendum where people (including significant numbers of Labour voters) had voted to leave the EU - so it was a bit more complex than "sticking it to the government on Brexit".

The only major party with a policy of "we know you voted for Brexit but you're wrong and it's a shit idea so fuck off" was the Lib dems, and due to a combination of FPTP and the unpopularity of that message, they lost.

That was 1982/83.
By the time he had honed his political policies, become leader and then Prime Minister, he had moved on from that.

Sorry you're right, it was 1983 and like his hero Thatcher any principles he had that were electorally unpopular were subject to change.

Why? I don’t go on other boards and am finding it an interesting read. Why did you open the thread?

Who's ignoring it?

Yes, the population (barely) voted for Brexit, but nowhere on the card was a set of options for how it should be implemented.

So, while the government were fighting amongst themselves over getting the hardest, most damaging Brexit imaginable, Corbyn should've been presenting an opposition to that approach, one which might've turned out OK-ish. That was literally his entire job. Given the amount of dissent in the Tory ranks at the time, he would actually have stood a decent chance of winning some Commons votes to mitigate some of the worst excesses and foolishness.

Instead, he did nothing. Because, like all Brexit supporters, he didn't actually have the first clue of how to do it and he was hoping that somebody else would just solve the problem for him.

Thatcher wasn't his hero, but he understood that to make Labour electable he had to ditch the ideas of Old Labour and compromise without becoming neo-liberal so that the worst of Thatcherism was gone. She loved the EEC of course with the idea of movement of cheap labour and suppressing the unions. What she didn't like was the supra national role of Brussels.
I could go on! I don't want to go into my role in this, but I was highly involved.

I didn't mean to. The ruddy links jump about when loading. You can hide whole boards on here so it doesn't happen.

There's only so much wailing wall a person can take over something nobody has any power over.

Thanks, insight appreciated.

I have not found that.

I am always a bit embarrassed going through that lane and look wistfully at my ‘old’ queue!

No problem! I do find it endlessly fascinating, how the EEC morphed and evolved, and the UK's involvement.

I haven’t read a Brexit thread for ages. This is a fast-moving board with new people joining all the time. I don’t know why people contribute to threads that bore then.

I don’t care about parking issues so never open or post on threads about that. I can’t imagine posting just to say, ‘not again, this has been done to death, I saw a post like this last month’ etc. What’s the point?

^^This.

That's because we had a shit negotiating team who never believed we should leave. Any negotiator who thought the EEC were our friends and wouldn't try to punish us was living in cloud cuckoo land. It should have been quid pro quo for every deal we struck.
The main benefit though is that in 10 years time when the EU finally bankrupts itself under the weight of massive bureaucracy and financial mismanagement we won't have to chip in to compensate all those accession countries that should never have been allowed to join and whose economies have been ruined

The public purse not paying the Brexit party MEPs a salary. Only one I can think of.

We could have had the vaccine earlier anyway so that one doesn’t count

Seriously?

The deal the EU agreed with the UK was significantly better than it could have been. If the EU wanted to punish the UK, they would have played seriously hardball. However, the EU team were very aware of the implications for Ireland if the UK went with the hardline approach they appeared to want. While the UK were happy to rip up the GFA, the EU bent over backwards to ensure that didn't happen.

There are no benefits to Brexit. It was always going to be a shit show and hey ho if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ...

I do agree with this - let's not forget that Jeremy Corbyn was a closet Brexiter whilst a number of the union leaders were also supporting Brexit. They argued that being in the EU left us at the mercy of the capitalist multinationals and that cheap foreign labour suppressed wages in the UK. They wanted labour shortages so that more jobs would be available to their members at higher pay. Support for Brexit came from both sides of the political spectrum.

If only the Brexit opposition could have been more coherent and worked together but there was huge complacency and a lack of understanding of vast swathes of the electorate and how disenfranchised they felt. It's the 'Westminster bubble' where people fail to understand real life when you couldn't get your child into a school, you couldn't rent or you couldn't get a doctor's appointment because your area had a huge influx of EU migrants. And if people weren't directly affected, they feared they could be.

I didn't vote for Brexit but it's annoying when people ignore why people did vote for Brexit. It's the same disaffected electorate that voted for Boris in the GE - but no one wants to listen to them.

Back to the Brexit benefits - well of course there aren't any really and I see a slow and steady drift back to a more sensible trading relationship with the EU in the long term. But perhaps one benefit was that it made certain sectors of society feel 'heard' and it made politicians a bit more wary of dismissing their concerns (again, see Boris at the last election).

I really hope when this toxic government has moved on, we can find a more consensus way of governing when people's real concerns are addressed, solutions found and that the politicians will actually listen and make decisions that will benefit more of us. Or has that moment passed for ever?

I agree with almost all of this, but am not convinced that being ‘heard’ has done anyone any good. Those peoples’ lives haven’t improved. Perhaps I’m too cynical, but rather suspect that the likes of Johnson and Cummings would see it as an engaging challenge to manipulate the populace differently. They haven’t been heard in terms of anyone in power giving a shit about their living conditions.

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.

Considering something like an estimated 30-35% of Brexit voters have passed since the vote took place it probably safe to assume they weren't thinking long-term when they voted. Unless their long-term vision was to fuck over future generations of course.