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?

Yeah this. ^ Thankfully we left the EU before covid/2020 and 2021 lockdowns, so that £350 million a week stayed in the the UK. Helped us through covid, funding the extra workers and funds the NHS needed, and resulted in us securing 100s of 1000s of covid vaccines.

If we had still been in the EU, they would have prevented us from getting the vaccines. They did their best to do this anyway (and failed.) If we were still in the EU when covid happened, 100s of 1000s more people would have died in the UK.

I know no remainer is going to admit this though. Doesn't suit the narrative.

@TopPocketFind

Arguably it does have something to do with Brexit because it has cut off a safe and legal route to the UK for those with family ties - however Professor Brooks and others are too focused on framing the returns agreement as a successful deterrent for political reasons - when it clearly wasn't working as such. It could also be the case that Albanians and other foreign nationals who were previously using fake EU ID cards to enter the UK had that route curtailed.

Otherwise a combination of reasons:
Tightened security around Calais, the "Great Wall of Calais" -
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37294187
Increasing fines for lorry drivers caught carrying migrants -
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/record-fines-for-lorry-drivers-carrying-calais-migrants-pmjnxzwcw
The deaths of 39 asylum seekers in a lorry in the UK in 2019.
Covid restrictions affecting air travel.
Massive rise in asylum seekers across the EU since Covid (nearly 3 million in the last 3 years).
Previously welcoming countries such as Germany and Sweden taking a hardline approach on asylum - pushing more asylum seekers our way.

Sorry, yes that my reply to you. It doesn't make sense to me either.

I don't know if this helps

https://euaa.europa.eu/easo-asylum-report-2021/236-uk-withdrawal-eu-and-its-implications-asylum

The problem with talking about "how Brexit damaged the UK economy" is that many of the people that voted for Brexit didn't get any benefit from the economy when it was good. Because most, if not all, of the benefits of being in the EU were for the middle and upper classes. For working-class people it just meant having to compete for jobs and houses and resources with the influx of EU migrants.

What about the hotels with swimming pools and pool tables? They did not look basic to me.

It’s not entirely true that we have no spare housing. There are plenty of empty investment properties, second homes, holiday lets, houses with minimal occupancy.

Do you think these properties should be requisitioned in order to deal with the housing crisis?

It’s the single worst piece of self harm and harm to others that the English have inflicted on themselves and others in the union.
I have zero respect for Brexit voters and hope with everything that it’s reversed but Labour would need a bloody backbone.
I suspect Sir Keir starmer the kid starver will
march to the right to chase “reform voting clowns”

I have zero respect for Brexit voters and hope with everything that it’s reversed but Labour would need a bloody backbone.

@beachcitygirl do you think there should be another referendum to decide whether we rejoin, or should the government start negotiations with the EU without a referendum?

As a remain voter, even I know the EU is far from perfect, but you can't fix something from the outside.
Personally, I felt that there were many benefits to being in the EU despite the perceived drawbacks. Freedom of movement is the one that I personally hated losing. Every time I now find myself queuing in foreign airports, I get angry just thinking about the short-sightedness of the leave vote.
Like most people, I have friends and family who voted leave, but their reasons for doing so, in my opinion, were generally jingoistic bullshit or pure ignorance. Even my, very intelligent, 80+ year old mother voted to leave, mainly because my brother convinced her that the EU was the devil, and that England was still the centre of a great empire. Yeah right!
I remember at the time speaking to people and being told that "we were taking our country back". Hmm! How did that work out for us? We're still being inundated with boatloads of "irregular" migrants and are still powerless to send them home. Also, we're still kowtowing to the ECHR, and will still have to follow the EU's rules if we expect to trade with them, except that now we have absolutely no say in it.
As for going back in; even if they wanted/allowed us to, it would be as a lesser partner the next time around. The best that we can hope for now is that we can resurrect old friendships and forge new trade deals with our old Commonwealth partners (yes, the one's that we dropped like a stone when we originally joined the EEC). It appears that we, or anyone else for that matter, can no longer rely on our "special friend", the USA, and certainly not whilst the orange clown is resident in the White House.
The world appears to be coagulating into new trading blocks and individual countries are going to have a much tougher time of things.
Thanks Brexit!

🤣What absolute bollocks. The UK was still paying into the EU as part of the Withdrawal Agreement, spaffing money up the wall arguing about Brexit with its neighbours, not getting great trade deals with anywhere else, making a spectacularly bad deal with Australia, realising how much money it costs to simultaneously protect your borders and have organised, safe and timely flow of goods in and out of the country, and generally showing itself to be chaotically and incompetently governed. Even if in future you believe Brexit will have been a good thing, only a fool would argue it was doing anything other than cost the UK shedloads of money at that point. Only a complete fool would think a long period of austerity running down the public sector, then the massive expense of Brexit leading straight into a pandemic was anything other than disastrously bad timing.

https://www.london.gov.uk/new-report-reveals-uk-economy-almost-ps140billion-smaller-because-brexit

https://niesr.ac.uk/blog/five-years-economic-impact-brexit

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/impact-brexit-uk-economy-reviewing-evidence

You’d be hard pushed to find an economist who thinks Brexit hasn’t damaged the economy. Even the people pushing Brexit to begin with mostly pointed that the economy would decrease initially. Wasn’t it Reece Moggs who told people to think 50 years ahead? I mean it is fairly obvious that putting in trade barriers doesn’t help the economy grow.

Inflation, Covid all these global shocks impacted the UK economy more than it would have without Brexit. That’s why the prognosis for the UK economy is so poor.

The UK has rej-oined the European Horizon science project so there may be hope for Erasmus being available.

The economy since Brexit has impacted those on the bottom the most. Inequality has grown. There is more immigration now and the unemployment rate hasn’t changed much (it was low and it’s still low)

Housing continues to be a problem.

I’m not sure Brexit was the right medicine for people on lower incomes. It’s looking in the wrong direction.

I don’t disagree in principle.

But the report paid for by the Mayor has been dealt with already.

Every time I now find myself queuing in foreign airports, I get angry just thinking about the short-sightedness of the leave vote.

This is not always the case. I was at Prague airport last month and the passport controller was waiting for me in his booth and DH had one beckoning him to come over. We were both through within minutes. Whereas the EU booth had 8 people queuing and it took them longer.

People get het up over this issue, but lately I've found more booths for non-EU and a quick process at the four destinations visited over the past 18 months with Prague being the speediest.

Is it poor? Comparatively against say Germany or France? I mean outside short term Labour policies which might halve growth.

Over time where’s the EU v UK

@Clavinovathanks for those DA posts, it hadn’t made sense on these threads for a while, you’ve explained the report etc

Then you must have been lucky. I visited Prague myself just before Christmas and had exactly the opposite experience. The EU gates had all cleared whilst the Non EU nationals stood in a very long snake-like queue. It took us over an hour to clear passport control.

Over time, but conveniently excluding any inconvenient realities, like the way the country has been and is being run. Let’s exclude Liz Truss, too. And Covid. And Boris Johnson. And the invasion of Ukraine. And Trump. In a vacuum, how are we doing? 🤣

Casual travel is not the issue - even though sometimes I have seen the long queues, but speed at the border depends very much on how the station, port or airport is set up. Took me recently less than 30 seconds to go through immigration checks at Singapore for example, but sometimes 3 painful hours at LAX and in Europe, it varies depending on the destination.
The real issue is the red tape involved in exporting/importing goods or getting visas for staff from the EU when before none of that was required. It's made everything more complicated and more expensive. It's literally slowing us down. Then of course we need trade deals - but all of them come with some loosening of visa rules, which is logical, but doesn't seem to suit the anti-immigration narrative. However we may want to though, we can't be self-sufficient, so we're going to have to restore some form of freedom of movement with the EU if we want to revive trade with them.

Hi @SouthwesttenI’m genuinely in two minds about this. On the one hand the public deserve a say on such a monumental issue, however
a) a lot of general public are politically illiterate and easily manipulated and selfish, evidenced by surge in reform voting.
b) I’m not convinced the lies told last time wouldn’t be repeated, rephrased
c) we have a system of political electoral representation and we have already given out trust (democratically at the polling station ) to our MP’s.

so on balance, i think let the elected government crack on if they had the sense to do so.

They haven’t been elected on that mandate. Starmer ruled out the CU and SM pre GE let alone rejoining. A gov would need a mandate via a GE at least.

And probably a mandate for a referendum.

Because they're idiotic sheep who believe these liars.

Labour does not need a referendum to negotiate a proper trade deal with the EU.

And to rejoin? Which was the question.

Right. Rejoining the EU would require a referendum but not to start the negotiations - only once the negotiated deal is known. That's what should have happened with the Brexit vote. What should have been is this: Step1. advisory referendum. Ends up Pro leave -marginally, not the sweeping mandate that some would have us believe, there was less than a 2% difference between leave and remain- but ok, on to Step2. We negotiate the terms of departure BEFORE we set a ticking clock over our heads Step3. We know what Brexit looks like and we get British voters to confirm they're on board with whatever deal has been negotiated and its implications Step4. We're now in or out off the back of an informed popular mandate, for good, and we stop bitching about it either way.