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?

It was the economic risks that mostly made me vote remain, together with a sense of ‘Europeanness’: I have family connections to France.

But I can understand why others didn’t feel that way. And I do respect the sovereignty argument. The German courts have made clear that acts of the EU that breach the German constitution are unlawful there. If the UK had set out constitutional red lines - via Acts, since we don’t have a fully written constitution - I think we’d still be in.

It does also make my toes curl when the remain opinion is expressed as being clever and educated and leavers as the great, thick unwashed. That view has broken out on this thread.

@BatchCookBabe - have wobbled my head as requested and still find myself to think that the vitriole expressed towards the EU in the build up to the referendum and during negotiations made it an act of violence where constructive negotiation was seriously unlikely to be possible. The whole Brexit party turning their backs on the Parliament when its Anthem was played, the histrionic posters about migration, the focus on fish and anything else aimed at getting a rise out of other EU countries rather than taking the process seriously…. A toxic farce at a time the country could not afford to act in such a facile manner.

Agree with this. My mum and dad left school at 14 and 15. They were smart enough and invested enough in their grandchildren's future enough to vote Remain.

As a previous poster pointed out. the standard of living in France will very much depend on your own location. Nice rural village in Bordeaux is significantly different to less affluent Parisienne suburbs, where poverty is rife and access to state provision is oversubscribed.

Moving on to French agriculture. You are correct they are relatively profitable at present. But only down to the high level of taxation French workers pay to be handed out in CAP subsidies.

Again this was one of the sticking blocks with EU membership. Compared to our farms, French ones are incredibly ineffective and poor producers per acre. It was only every the subsidy system that kept them afloat. Now the net contributors to the EU and it's CAP system are reduced. That level of subsidy is unsustainable.

Sweet cheeks, you bounce around with your opinion - on everything.

Doesn't make you right, on anything particularly given you just shout and bake yourself on so many posts, embarrassingly so

HTH

Imposing economic sanctions on member states is done by the EU itself. While members the UK could not go off and set up a more favourable trade deal with non member states.

If the EU had remained the trading bloc it was intended to be, I believe we would have remained members. It was a parliament not elected by us and making laws that were not beneficial to the UK that was the very issue in the first place.

Many years later, we are all living the results of the referendum. Surely that makes your toes curl?

My take away from this thread, isn't remainers insulting anyone. It is the belligerent who couldn't care less about their country. It is willfully ignorant folk doubling down on a fuck you that has no real destination.

As I have suggested many times before to those who claim it is a disaster, come back and revisit the subject five or ten years from now. The economy of many Countries was ruined due to Covid. I can't tell the future any more than anybody else. But I do suspect the UK will be in a better place than our European neighbours over time because of brexit.

Sigh.
Brexit feels like a painting by an unmentionable Australian- 'can you tell what it is yet'.

It's been and wil continue to be a distraction. Historically, it will probably be labelled ' the lost decades'.

What an incredibly lazy, ill informed assumption.

Yep.

You mean another 5 or ten years to recover from it? It's been 9 years already. Or will it take 50 years as per arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees Mogg?

Not really. I'm pretty well informed and not given to sweeping judgemental generalisations about other people and how informed they might be.

What specifically would you like you know about my knowledge? . If you think I need to jump through some specific hope of your choosing to meet your criteria to have an opinion, I'm sure I could oblige (not that I should have to).

Brexit voters were older because they remember Britain before the EU and what it was like. And they were less educated because fewer people went to University in the past, many left school at 15 or 16 and started work.

This comment suggests that they thought that by voting for Brexit they were voting to turn back time.

Life before the EU is irrelevant because there is no way of getting back to that point.

(And more to the point, before we joined we were the sick man of Europe and spent well over a decade trying to get in, so God only knows what they think they are reminiscing about.)

I think there should be another referendum to see what current thinking is and take it from there. I know that’s an incredibly simplistic way of looking at it but were KS to announce tomorrow that we were rejoining the EU with no consultation then we may as well give Nigel Farage the keys to No 10 now.

For what it’s worth I think it was and is a terrible mistake but lots of other people would disagree with that.

We almost certainly won't be allowed back in though.

Rejoining isn't up to Keir Starmer. It's up to 27 other countries, some of whom would have to put it to a referendum themselves.

At this point Jean-Pierre in Aix-en-Provence has more of a say on whether the UK rejoins the EU than Susan in Kent does.

The lost decades??

Germany, Italy etc all going great guns are they? The entire continent and many other countries around the world are still reeling after covid
Ukraine and even the 2008 credit crash.

It also depends on how much you value political sovereignty
Many ardent brexiters are those who worked in the machine and saw first hand the procrastination, the waste the gravy train.

I also find the comments odd " I voted remain because I feel European and a cousin lives in Spain *

We are European? The UK is part of Europe and always has been. Being part of the political union or not won't ever change that just as it didn't before the construct of the eu which BTW was suposed to stop war.

Political sovereignty is a myth.

Absolutely but I also think seeing what people think about it now it’s a reality would be a starting point. I doubt it will ever happen though.

Why more? If a U.K. person votes no it’s a no too.

But if the UK votes yes and France votes no then France trumps the UK.

Sovereignty's a bitch, eh.

Depends how you’re defining it. I think a Leave voter might be ok with Aus levels of sovereignty.

I'm not sure the average leave voter really has much of a grasp on the intricacies of political sovereignty in Australia vs the UK tbh. It's not all about immigration.