I'm fed up with everyone tiptoeing around Brexit having been rubbish

[paddleboardingmum]

We can all see how it hasn't stopped immigration, we don't have the more money for the NHS that was promised, and everyone is worse off. I'm sure even many who voted for it - who were conned at the time- also can see it was rubbish. Isn't it time for people to stop pretending it was a good idea. That doesn't mean we need to rejoin right now or blame anybody, but I think it's time to just face facts and stop trying to pretend it was a good idea.

Not conned. It has not worked out due to incompetence of our politicians to get a grip with any given situation & Europe doing all they can to be difficult. I agree it is not great at the moment ,do we have any real benefits?

It is a comprehensive analysis of the impact of Brexit.
Full analysis attached.
Are you better equipped to analyse the data than the NBER?

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34459/w34459.pdf

There’s no way it’s not brought up, but it looks like it might come up at next GE. It’s hard to extrapolate as EU countries and growth not high but trade has more friction.

It’s worse to have this rumbling discourse of blame so have it as manifesto and vote to get past the stuck issue.

What exactly did you think our politicians were going to do to make it a success? It’s not a success because there was no scenario in which it could possibly be - putting up a trade barrier with your richest and closest neighbours was never going be a triumph - and if you believed all the sunlit uplands and amazing trade deals crap then really you’re lucky it’s as good as it is - and it’s shit. The EU has don’t nothing more than treat us as a third country, exactly the same as other countries whom they don’t have a trade deal. We’re no worse off than them - the difference is, those countries need the deal less.

I mean, we had the best negotiators and civil service expertise available at the time. The reality is Brexit was always going to be an almost impossible task trying to leave a deeply integrated economic and political system while somehow keeping all the benefits And it’s interesting you say the EU was being “difficult”, because from their perspective they were negotiating in the interests of the countries that stayed. That’s exactly what any bloc or country would do.

Also, people weren’t sold Brexit on the basis that things might be a bit worse but philosophically worth it. We were repeatedly told things would be better by Farage and his ilk, who plenty of people are still putting their trust in now.

They have skin in the game, as do most organisations who did a pre-analysis of the impact Brexit would have.
Unfortunately, everyone’s pre-Brexit behaviour means we have no legitimate objective analysis options. And even if we did, I’d remain certain that Brexit repercussions would be impossible to disentangle from everything else that has happened since.

How does the NBER have skin in the game? They regarded as a highly respected economic research organisation rather than an overtly political or campaigning body

I'm not even sure it will come up at the next election. It's interesting because the politicians do seem to do all they can to avoid upsetting the people who voted for it, but not seeming to care at all for everyone who didn't. Even after all this time.

Because when 30% of the public say they still support Brexit (and I think it’s probably higher due to what pollsters refer to as they “shy Tory”, but equally applies to any group you label negatively), that’s a massive chunk of the electorate to piss off before you’ve even started your campaign.

It is the only trade deal in history designed to make trade harder, and therefore it placed greater burdens on business and our economy. The stupidity is biblical and the effect predicted.

The alleged future benefits are still far away, in the sunlit uplands which we are no closer to a decade on.

People cannot face they were conned. Nobody wants to admit the stupidity, so the benefits are always just around the corner, like when you tell a child that you are nearly home on a long car journey

Indeed. I get that it's political suicide to suggest that the electorate may not know what's good for them and the country.

Because when 30% of the public say they still support Brexit (and I think it’s probably higher due to what pollsters refer to as they “shy Tory”, but equally applies to any group you label negatively), that’s a massive chunk of the electorate to piss off before you’ve even started your campaign.

I do get this, but what about the pissed off 70%? are they going to get ignored forever.

OK - I am going to have a go at one benefit I can see of Brexit.

When the UK joined the EU (or EEC as it was known) in 1973, it was in part out of economic necessity. The UK economy was in a mess and by joining the EEC it helped improve trade and the economy.

Then other poorer countries joined firstly Spain and Greece and then the Eastern European countries. The UK went from being a net beneficiary to being more of a net contributor.

This in part was one of the drivers behind Brexit in that the UK paid in more than it got out.

The benefit of Brexit is that our current economic policy seems to be one of managed decline. It won't be long before countries such as Poland and Spain have a higher GDP per capita than the UK.

If the UK then rejoins the EU it would be joining as a "poorer" member and therefore should become a net beneficiary rather than a net contributor.

In short - leave the EU, then trash the economy, then rejoin on financially better terms.

It’s not that simple.
A promise to rejoin the EU could become the new “money tree”, wishful thinking for political expediency too.
It is not clear how and when and what deal we would get - how much contribution, Euro etc

Right now the most urgent thing is to read the IMF report on fundamentals facing the UK. They are all ignoring that and the difficult decisions, because all politicians care about is getting a certain amount of votes.

The EU do not just let countries rejoin. They make demands on economic fundamentals.

The point was we already had a quite unique deal and got out of having to join the euro. It was such a bad idea to leave what we had. There is no guarantee we will rejoin on equally good terms. Highly unlikely. The other countries have voters too.

@1dayatatime this has a certain grim logic but also suggests that our electorate over that 50 year period from joining has basically become extremely stupid. Who voted for Brexit is key in terms of deciding whether the UK’s political class should even try such a move.

It seems that the problem has now solidified into a whole new party in Reform.

The electorate wasn’t specifically asked on joining.
That was part of what some of the elderly voters objected to. It is classic British thinking to vote “out” because you were not originally asked nicely. Plenty of those are now dead or have dementia.
The new class of angry protest voters is quite different. They are simply anti system full stop, anti expert.
There were different types of Leave voters originally.

This x100.

From what I can tell there is no obvious change in the UK GDP levels that can be linked to Brexit. Covid is a lot more obvious as there was a huge downward trend then a recovery.

Real GDP growth since 2019 :

US : 15.2%
Canada : 11.3%
Italy : 6.3%
UK : 6%
France : 5.2%
Japan : 1%
Germany : 0.2%

from the Ai. The HOC library data is slightly different, but not significantly so.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02784/

What the above shows is the UK is certainly not an outlier in the EU compared with similar sized economies and has grown at a rate close to the EU average which is approx 6%. You could argue Germany is an outlier currently.

Of course there may be downturns associated with certain sectors, but overall there is no clearly obvious difference.

GDP and productivity per capita tracking in the UK is a bit difficult since we have been importing lots of people, 3.5 million since 2016 (?) which might be approx. 5% of the population. This level of immigration may or may not be necessary to sustain basic services without significant wage inflation, but you can be fairly confident that the majority of these people are not going into highly productive and average GDP per capita enhancing jobs.

On a countrywide basis Brexit has not been the disaster that Project Fear predicted. In my opinion not anywhere close. Life in the UK is not that much different now than it was in 2019. Cost of living effects are probably more attributable to things like the Ukraine War than Brexit. On an individual basis though some people may have been severely negatively affected and others had their wealth enhanced, which is also probably true if we had remained in the EU.

My personal feeling is that the reduction in trade that we may have experienced with the EU is balanced out by trade with the US, whose economy has been doing well. We are also entering into trade partnerships with new trading blocs and so we are now starting to enter the opportunity phase that Brexit presents. I think it would be mad to go through the process of extracting ourselves from the Eu (and the risks associated with that) and not spend time discovering whether the new opportunities enhance our growth levels. Certainly I see more opportunities for enhanced trade with the US and Asia Pacific than Europe, which appears to be largely tapped out with significant economic issues in the engine of France, Germany and Italy (Italy doing a bit better recently from the GDP figures).

The mistake was to have a Yes/No referendum.

I think this is a bit misleading because the argument was never that Brexit would cause an instant Mad Max-style collapse visible on a GDP graph. The argument was that the UK economy would be smaller than it otherwise would have been.

Even the OBR still estimates Brexit will reduce long-run productivity and trade by around 4–15%, and the recent NBER paper estimated a 6–8% hit to GDP by 2025 Tthe figures quoted don’t exactly show the UK outperforming comparable economies, the Eurozone overall has actually grown more since 2019, and the US massively more. Germany struggling doesn’t suddenly make Brexit a success. And “we’ll replace EU trade with the US and Asia” was always the theory, but years later there’s still little evidence it has offset the loss of frictionless access to our largest nearby market.

Trade deals are not a panacea. The rather blunt reality is this. The UK is a very competitive and open economy already in its services sectors. Those terms are already established at the WTO.

Now for the UK to be internationally competitive in services and grow it’s economy it has to offer something better to a partner country via a trade agreement than already available.

The UK services sector is already very competitive. Many other economies would rather not let us have preferential access to their economies because of that. And if they want access to ours, they can use our generous WTO concessions without a deal.

The UK is not a serious manufacturer any more of goods. So concluded trade deals on that offers little advantage for us.

One of the issues that Brexit never dealt with was yes in theory, we could set our own terms for trade. But in economic reality, we had to have at least something nearly the same as the EU in terms of tariffs and access. Those were already quite open and low tariffs. And the UK’s consumer market was going to be smaller and with it our ability to negotiate diminished.

That does not mean the UK can do nothing on trade. But the openness of your economy, its size, and its interdependency via supply chains or services trade flows all matter. The benefits are slight going on your own in economic terms.

"I think this is a bit misleading because the argument was never that Brexit would cause an instant Mad Max-style collapse visible on a GDP graph."

Recollections may vary.

"Even the OBR still estimates Brexit will reduce long-run productivity and trade by around 4–15%, and the recent NBER paper estimated a 6–8% hit to GDP by 2025."

Estimates and calculations. But impossible to prove. And no doubt biased with a political agenda.

"Tthe figures quoted don’t exactly show the UK outperforming comparable economies."

No, they don't show the UK as outperforming. Unless you want to throw Germany into the mix. They show the UK pretty much performing the same as comparable economies. So no disaster there then. Pretty much same old same old. Despite Brexit. Of course there are people out there that would claim that without Brexit we would be roaring along at the 15% increase the US has had. I remain skeptical.

"the Eurozone overall has actually grown more since 2019".

Yes by about 1% over 6 years. We aren't exactly talking huge differences here. If it were the same difference as between the UK and the US or the UK and Germany there might be some sort of legitimate claim.

"Germany struggling doesn’t suddenly make Brexit a success."

Yes. But it does show you that economic performance can vary considerably even if you don't leave the EU. So attributing economic changes unambiguously to Brexit is really hard. If we had performed as badly as Germany over the same period, would people be attributing that performance to Brexit I wonder, and would that have been a reasonable analysis ?

"And “we’ll replace EU trade with the US and Asia” was always the theory, but years later there’s still little evidence it has offset the loss of frictionless access to our largest nearby market."

Well, other than the fact a lot of people said Brexit would lead to poor economic performance - and it clearly hasn't - or not in any way that someone can reasonably prove. So what is the real explanation for that ?

I agree re the benefits of the US/Asia Pacific market are yet to be established. In theory there are better opportunities for growth in trade there. Practice may be something different. Once again it will actually be difficult to prove if economic performance does take off over the next few years whether that is due to US Asia/Pacific trade or maybe other things. As before, I think it would be a bit crazy now we are here not to see how the opportunities develop.

This is so true.

My MIL rang my DP on the day the result was announced, full of glee and saying how fantastic it was that we'd "got our country back". Since then she's done nothing but moan about how dreadful it is that we've got all these people coming over from Africa on boats and how Brexit was supposed to have stopped that. She now has a dentist of south Asian heritage instead of her "nice" Danish dentist and she "didn't vote for that".

She'd spent a few days in hospital soon after the referendum and moaned how "all" the nurses were from places like Poland and Lithuania. She spent a few days in hospital again in Dec 2020/Jan 21 and came home moaning how all the nurses were Filipino or South Asian, and she couldn't understand their accents. She didn't vote for that, either, apparently.

My late DP and I had explained to her several times before the referendum that it was highly likely that the UK would lose essential workers from other EU countries if we left, and that they would have to be replaced by workers from other countries overseas, and she flatly refused to believe us. They'd get British workers to do them and there'd be no more unemployment, according to her.

The saddest thing is that she's not actually racist and is intelligent and well educated, but still fell for all this shite.

I don’t think anyone is tiptoeing around it.
I voted remain and would again but what I don’t want is for us to waste even more time and money re-joining the EU. Maybe in the future but not now