To want Brexit be reversed

[BeKookySheep]

I don’t normally post about politics, but this has been playing on my mind for a while. I wasn’t super political before the referendum — just a mum trying to do her best for her family. But now, years later, I really feel like Brexit hasn’t delivered what we were promised. And I think we should seriously start talking about reversing it.

My eldest is 16, really bright, and had dreams of studying languages and maybe doing a year abroad. We looked into Erasmus a while ago, but that’s gone now. And the cost and hassle of studying or working in Europe is so much higher now. She asked me, “Why is it so much harder for us than it was for you, Mum?” And honestly, I didn’t know what to say. It hit me hard.

Everything’s more expensive — our food shop has gone up loads, and don’t even get me started on getting certain things for school packed lunches! Little things, but they add up. My brother runs a small business and he's drowning in paperwork just to send stuff to Ireland. And a friend of mine left the NHS because she felt so overstretched — they can’t recruit enough staff anymore, especially from Europe.

Brexit hasn’t made anything better. It’s just made life harder in so many small but important ways. And if something clearly isn’t working — and is limiting our children’s futures — why shouldn’t we talk about changing it?

We tell our kids it’s okay to admit when something’s not right and make it better. Maybe it’s time we took our own advice.

Would love to hear if others are feeling the same. Has Brexit made life harder for your family too?

Yes, absurd. We didn’t elect councillors from Orban’s lot, or Le Pen’s or Wilders’ or the AfD.

🙄

Asylum seekers are a small portion of the people that have come into the UK in the last couple of years. The vast majority of the people that have come it would have been very easy for successive governments to decline them aand they chose not to.

Freedom - I think it depends on the eye of the beholder. I have not felt that I didn't have Freedom. After all, I've not been locked up.

Would you be willing to ask every citizen to pay £10,000 every year... or even £20,000, or 30,000 or even £1m.. After all no price is too great.

And for the correct use of irony, many of us would regard Brexit as a reduction of freedoms.

The MHRA did actually introduce new regulatory recognition routes for medicines;

Medicines approved by regulators in Australia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, Singapore and the United States will be added to those given marketing authority in Europe by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), making them eligible for the faster MHRA approval route.

https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/news/united-states-japan-and-australia-added-to-uk-fast-track-medicines-approvals-list
https://www.dlrcgroup.com/ready-for-january-2024-a-first-look-at-mhras-new-international-recognition-procedure-irp/
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/mhras-new-international-recognition-procedure-irp-goes-live-from-1-january-2024

Easy to decline them? Clearly not. Besides, what people are clamouring for the Government to decline are the people arriving illegally and being put up in hotels, not the people coming into the country legally, despite the latter being the vast majority. Asylum seekers may not be a majority of immigrants, but they are the ones being demonised and picked on and accused of not being genuine. It’s incredibly inconvenient that it’s expensive and time consuming working out what to do with people who claim to be fleeing persecution. And their numbers will only grow. The legal migrants, meanwhile, clearly come with benefits, or it wouldn’t be so difficult keeping those numbers down.

even more people stated we would be like Norway

Not in 2016 -
February 2016
Leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage has said that he doesn't want the United Kingdom to be a part of the the European Single Market, but instead wants the UK to "stand on its own two feet".

"I don't want to be part of the European Single Market, I want Britain to leave the European Union, be an independent country and trade with the world," Farage said on the BBC, arguing you can have a free trade deal without being part of a political union.

Farage also said earlier in a debate with [Anna] Soubry on Channel 4 News that he wants the UK to be "independent, self-governing, making our own laws", and not a part of the European Single Market and political union which forbids "us from making our own trade deals".

https://www.cityam.com/eu-referendum-ukip-leader-nigel-farage-says-he-doesnt-want-to-be-part-of-the-european-single-market/

Brexit totally happened. It happened on the stroke of midnight 1st of January 2020. I get it didn't deliver the Brexit that you were hoping for, but you didn't vote for a different one, you simply voted to Leave. And that's what actually happened.

To deny the reality of it is ridiculous, more than a bit silly.

The referendum asked the electorate whether the country should continue to remain a member of, or leave, the European Union (EU).

That was the choice.

@zoemum2006

Did you vote leave?

Exactly this! Also, what many people forget is that as soon as we left the EU (January 2020,) the covid pandemic and lockdown started, which completely threw the country's economy (and the rest of the world's) into a tailspin. So we never saw the real, true impact of Brexit, because the results were skewed/messed up by the pandemic. The pandemic couldn't have come at a worse time really! It was several WEEKS after we left the EU!

Hansard - House of Commons Wednesday 15 June 2016
[David Cameron] The Prime Minister
I am very happy to agree with my hon. Friend. “In” means we remain in a reformed EU; “out” means we come out. As the leave campaigners and others have said, “out” means out of the EU, out of the European single market, out of the Council of Ministers - out of all those things -

Wasn't that labeled Project Fear?

Cameron? He obviously didn't want to go through with it as he resigned. Farage and Gove were not bluffing though - Michael Gove was the senior spokesperson for Vote Leave. The ITV link up thread says;

Thanks to Michael Gove we know that Britain's future outside the EU would also be outside the single market.

So we can rule out our future looking like Norway or Iceland: both outside the EU but both members of the European Economic Area which pay for access to the single market and accept free movement of workers.

Vote Leave's future plan for the UK would be outside the EU and outside the EEA.

The question asked in the referendum was, “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” The question on the ballot paper did not specify what was meant by leaving, so self-evidently meant whatever the voter fancied it to mean. The only people genuinely delighted with the result are those who make profit from chaos and division. Most other people either think it’s about as crap as they expected it to be, or are busy coming up with excuses for it not having made anything better, and other reasons for everything actually having got infinitely worse.

This! I think what we're experiencing now is almost solely down to the pandemic. Who honestly thought that shutting down everything for the best part of two years was going to have a positive impact long term, especially on our finances!? Unfortunately, that money had to be recouped somehow and that responsibility, as always, has fallen to the taxpayer.

That was the real absurdity of the referendum wasn't it. It didn't actually define what leave meant. Nobody knew what they were actually voting for.

Very easy on paper, very difficult politically.

People don't like high immigration but we largely have it because our birth rate is too low to sustain an adequate workforce to pay for things like a state pension. Otherwise, we'd be in a similar position to Japan and South Korea.

All developed countries seem to be facing this problem to some extent, and none seem to have found a solution that isn't unpopular.

There was no way through the pandemic without massive costs. Having more people sick and/or dead comes with a cost. Of course it didn't help all the money that got given to companies that failed to deliver...

The question on the ballot paper did not specify what was meant by leaving

Did you watch any of the debates and interviews at the time?

Vote Leave said a lot of things before the referendum

summary

• We end the supremacy of EU law and the European Court. We will be able to kick out those who make our laws.
• Europe yes, EU no. We have a new UK-EU Treaty based on free trade and friendly cooperation. There is a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and we will be part of it. We will take back the power to negotiate our own trade deals.
• We spend our money on our priorities. Instead of sending £350 million per week to Brussels, we will spend it on our priorities like the NHS and schools.
• We take back control of migration policy, including the 1951 UN Convention on refugees, so we have a fairer and more humane policy, and we decide who comes into our country, on what terms, and who is removed.
• We will regain our seat on international bodies where Brussels represents us, and use our greater international influence to push for greater international cooperation.
• We will build a new European institutional architecture that enables all countries, whether in or out of the EU or euro, to trade freely and cooperate in a friendly way.
• We will negotiate a new UK-EU Treaty and end the legal supremacy of EU law and the European Court before the 2020 election.
• We do not necessarily have to use Article 50 - we may agree with the EU another path that is in both our interests.

Yes. Do you think everyone who voted did? Was anyone told it was compulsory to listen to all the debates? Are you actually claiming that even if people did listen to the debates, it was made clear? Or that it was actually clear in the thick skulls of the people running the campaigns? Because they all had a funny way of showing it after the event.

There's no guarantee that would have happened. What was guaranteed though, was that it would take years to come back from. It could certainly be argued that the stretched finances, long NHS waiting lists and inadequate mental health services we have now are costing the lives that lockdown saved.

We don't need a high birth rate. We need fewer people in general. Bringing in more people to pay the pensions of the generation before is utter lunacy, as those people will then need pensions themselves. What do we do then, bring in even more people? You can't keep doing that indefinitely.

This.

I watched all of the TV debates. I still firmly believe it was all the mudslinging coming from the Remain camp that secured Brexit, more than the Leave campaign itself.