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?

On this basis, logically, we should have embraced the pandemic as an opportunity to kill some people off.

If we rejoined it wouldn’t be on as good a terms as it was before, the deal would not be as good I don’t think

Are you actually claiming that even if people did listen to the debates, it was made clear?

June 3 2016
5 takeaways from David Cameron’s first Brexit TV ‘debate’
3. Single market, single market, single market
If Cameron had one job Thursday night, it was to bring the debate back to the economy.
The Remain campaign clearly believe Gove and Johnson have committed a major strategic error by calling for Britain to leave the single market, with Cameron returning to it again and again. “I keep going on about the single market, but it’s so important,” he said at one point, in a sentence that summed up his entire debate strategy.

Mudslinging?

Do you mean the commentators and audience members who were incredulous that anyone in the UK thought Brexit was a good idea?

The more Brexiteer posts I read, the more I understand how people are caught in romance scams.🙈

And what does “single market” mean to most people? It’s just more words, like “European Union,” and means whatever people they want to listen to tell them it means. What people listened and responded to were what they were told the potential benefits of leaving the EU would be. People were told the single market meant straight bananas, and money going to bureaucrats to make unnecessary red tape rather than money being spent on the UK in the UK. They were told we didn’t need the EU because the UK was a country the world was clamouring to do business with and that the EU was just holding us back. They were told we were being ripped off by the EU. They were told that the remain campaign was just sticking with something inadequate due to cowardice and lack of vision. It’s easy to sell a fantasy. Reality is always harder to sell.

And the fact we can't send asylum seekers back to France (or other European country they came from).

And we can't retire and go to European hotter climates for more than 90 days (even if you own there).

I can’t read a Brexit thread without thinking of the Emily Maitless quote

“It might take our producers five minutes to find 60 economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice who espoused it.
“But by the time we went on air we simply had one of each; we presented this unequal effort to our audience as balance. It wasn’t.”
She added: “I’d later learn that the ungainly name for this myopic style of journalism: ‘both-sideism’, which talks to the way it reaches a superficial balance while obscuring a deeper truth.”

We were absolutely screwed over!

Ment to say the £350 million a week that would go to the NHS instead. Even printed it on a bus and the Brexit voters fell for it.

No, not at all. That's not mudslinging, that's just putting forward an opinion/having a debate.
Perfectly fine to disagree. Unfortunately, those in Remain camp seemed unable to debate like adults - just issued lots of snide remarks, name-calling and insults-whenever Leavers spoke - which is, ultimately, what swung it for Leave.
It was all a bit embarrassing, frankly.

Hmm... Now, see, this is something that people keep getting wrong...

The exact statement made on buses during the Brexit campaign was: "We send the EU £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead."

What is incorrect about that statement?
Surely it stands to reason that, if we're not sending the EU £350 million a week, then those funds could be available to put towards our NHS?

However, at no point did ANYONE categorically claim that: 'We WILL put the £350 million a week we're not sending the EU directly into the NHS'.

So anyone suggesting they did say this is, frankly, lying.

Oh right. You think people voted Brexit, which was a stupid thing to do, because Remainers told them it was a stupid thing to do before they voted for it.🤔

I find the lack of responsibility taken by ardent Leavers along with their sheer stupidity and unwillingness to engage with the reality and enormity of the result very embarrassing, frankly.

They damaged the UK massively and now they're blaming Remainers for their choice? Typical Brexiteer whinging.🙄

you may have been a lone sensible voice in the wilderness. But the vast majority of remain voters were not.

And that is why you still occasionally hear the whinging cry of "why won't brexiteers engage with us?"

Op you know there is a Brexit topic where you can post on this subject?
It has loads of different of posters and all views - pro and anti - are welcomed.

A lot more than £350 million extra a week must have been spent on the NHS during covid. I realise that isn’t quite what people had in mind though.

Yes but that wasn’t a direct benefit of Brexit as it was peddled to be; it was the consequence of a pandemic.

I’m surprised Emily Maitlis said that.

It is a remarkably stupid statement.

Perhaps, but any deal will be an improvement on the no deal - or barely any deal- we currently have.

That's politically unsellable though

No it isn't. She is right. Some ideas are spectacularly shit and have to be treated as such. Doesn't mean you can't talk about them of course - but you should not over-represent the shit idea for the sake of a misconceived idea of balance.
Don't confuse opinions and facts. All opinions are equal but all facts are not.

There are all sorts of problems with that.

One of them is that the pro-EU economists must have been very poor at making a case against Brexit if they didn’t say - assuming it’s true - that barely any economists took the other view. Even Maitlis herself could have put the difficulty of finding a pro-Brexit economist to an interviewee.

Another is that if you think that no economist should have been allowed to present a pro-Brexit view, which according to Maitlis is the logic of interviewing any EU-supporting economist, it would be an admission that no argument against EU membership can be tolerated at all.

Another is that if you think that no economist should have been allowed to present a pro-Brexit view, which according to Maitlis is the logic of interviewing any EU-supporting economist, it would be an admission that no argument against EU membership can be tolerated at all.

No, that's not what she says. Her quote states very clearly that they had 60 times more luck finding pro EU economists than pro-Brexit ones. What she means is that it tells you something about the ratio of pro v anti in the economists community. But if you present a 1/60 ratio as 1/2 you are clearly biased. That's her point. It's not about allowing an opinion, it's about reflecting a fact (ie. that only 1 in 60 economists that they talked to was in favour of leave). Journalists should be about reporting facts, not opinion.

I'm not sure economists should be necessarily be bracketed as pro or anti EU.
Surely they would be putting forward economic arguments rather political ones.

It isn't. Most people want closer economic and defence ties with the EU.

Anyone suggesting the UK was going to save £350 million a week as a result of leaving the EU was quite frankly lying.

The economic consequences of leaving the EU absolutely had to be addressed. Even now, they should be seriously (re)assessed. So it was absolutely relevant to ask economists about the pros and cons of leaving the single market and customs unions.