Brexit MegaThread - part 14

[Peregrina]

Thread 13. We had a debate about whether there should be a new one but if no one answers this the whole series after 8 years plus will come to their end.

Brexit happened, although one time Leavers do not seem to appreciate this.
It's worth noting I think that Brexit was a Tory initiative and the Tory party has just received its worse electoral thrashing since 1832. Could it be entirely unrelated?

What next? A gradual rapprochement with the EU? A Norway style agreement?

Actually @Spandauer and @pointythings : it just illustrates how insular some supporters of Brexit are

They genuinely can't see how a country benefits from other countries and how immigration and emigration has enriched us all.

FWIW: I'm a British citizen - have been for over 50 years - and have contributed well as a higher rate tax payer to the country. As did my dad, who committed his life to the NHS and refused to do private work. And my mum was a brilliant English teacher. The country lost the skills of my brother because of Brexit as he made the choice to leave with his family for an EU country following the vote.

But that's irrelevant as we are all human beings who should be valued - and whose opinions should be valued - wherever we come from and how much money we do/did or don't/didn't earn.

@prettybird I know, it's just that as a Dutch person who was taught extensively about the harms of blind nationalism, it still surprises me that some people have the blinkers on so hard and won't take them off. It shouldn't, I suppose, but it's sad.

The only surprise is that it is a revelation to Louise

Their views however are not.

We really need to have some sort of sweepstakes as to which MNetters are also Elven in features. 😎

I'm "indigenous" if that helps? Anglo-saxon/viking through and through. Brexit is a clusterfuck, project fear turned out to be project fact.

I know ! It's terrible isn't it ?

We should have a word with MN towers and swap these pesky EU parasites for some nice non-doms, eh ? You know where you stand with them. It's hard not to respect people whose dedication to the UK stops short of paying tax.

I'm old and as English as they come. Brexit was a big mistake and some sort of (minimum) economic realignment is a must, and soon. Starmer, I'm looking at you.

Not that sort of Briton ...

English here. Can trace my roots back well over two centuries (is that good enough?). Brexit is and continues to be an epic mistake that has hamstrung our young people and industries without addressing any of the problems that pushed people to vote for it.

• Migration (official and otherwise) has increased
• Our attempts at British standards have failed (c.f. EU kitemark and CE mark)
• London stock exchange has suffered
• No new trade deals to replace the vume of trade lost
• Government has not replaced EU funding for the deprived regions

We've caused irreparable harm to the UK for nothing.

@CassieMaddox - both Anglo-Saxons and Vikings came from Northern continental Europe, so you're admitting that you're descended from immigrants - if not even invaders

Begone with you!

To be fair, Louise has shown herself to be a xenophobe on several occasions, so this isn't news. Apparently, all that needs to happen for Brexshit to be a success is that it upsets a few forriners.

Totally British here (part English, part Scottish), and Brexshit has proven to be even more of a catastrofuck than even I thought it was going to be.

Identifying that nations are a crucial unit of human societies is one thing (which I'm entirely happy to admit I do)

Treating people differently on the basis of where they come from is another.

Neither is equal to the sort of "blind nationalism" I understand you are talking about.

FWIW my roots are English, there is some Scottish in there, I think, but you'd have to go back further/wider than I've gone to find it. We went back 800 years and found nothing.

This contention that being "insular" is a bad thing fascinates me. I don't think I am btw, though I'm in no position to judge myself. I see how Britain benefis enormously from many of the people she welcomes from other places. The difference is that I can see that not everyone in Britain benefits equally. Who's calling who insular.

It's amazing how people can say with one breath "everyone should be valued [equally]", yet in the next, if I disagree with them, they're straight into attack mode, funny isn't it 😂

@LouiseCollins28 you're the person who wants all EU derived laws scrapped, and where they function perfectly well, replaced with absolutely identical UK laws. Forgive me for not seeing you as a rational person on the subject of Brexit.

I believe you are mischaracterising that poster.

They are happy to accept UK regulations that are inferior to EU regulations purely because they are UK regulations with some specious waffle about "sovereignty" that has never made sense.

😂

So did the Normans ....

It seems that there are actually quite a lot of us on this thread who are British born and bread including me, and as far as I know, stretching back generations

@SerendipityJane - @CassieMaddox only mentioned being descended from Vikings and Anglo-Saxons She didn't mention the Normans, but yes, they were invaders too

I think I can claim Irish, German, Swedish, French Huguenot, English royalty supposedly , Australian, Afrikaans, Danish and only recently discovered a smidgeon of Scots in my ancestry. On one side, someone has gone back to the 1500s

CassieMaddox only mentioned being descended from Vikings and Anglo-Saxons She didn't mention the Normans, but yes, they were invaders too

No - I meant Normans are also descended from Vikings. Literally "men of the North". It's why Normandy is so distinct to the rest of France. It's their answer to Yorkshire ....

So unless we can trace our ancestry back to the celts, then most of us were immigrants at one time? And I assume that before the land bridge to the continent was severed most people walked across from there - so we are really all immigrants?

Or picts

Both of which were (I believe) largely wiped out by European invasions

It's why i have no time for the "indigenous" line.

True - I misunderstood your point.

The point is that the world is a melting point - always had been.

There are words in old Scots that are directly derived from Norse words. eg "bing" = big slag heap from coal mines => Icelandic slang word is "bingur" (or something like that).

In fact, an Icelandic customer asked me why a statue in Inverness had an Icelandic inscription on it: turned out it had an old Norse, Gaelic and English inscription, representing the melting pot that the area was/is.

What is sad is that there are some people who want to pull up the ladder so that only the ultra-privileged can have to opportunity to move. And can't even see - or don't care - how selfish they are being

We are in danger of writing Stewart Lee's episode on "Paul Nuttals of the UKIPS" independently if we aren't careful.

Has anyone mentioned the beaker people ? Coming over here with their new style of earthen drinking vessels. What wrong with drinking out of your hands ?

Of course we're all immigrants.
Go back far enough,and you'll find myths of the elves shooting at those pesky new humans to stop them settling down and smelting all that horrible iron.

Like moles, but worse.

#sarcasm.

Since people are stating 'identity' here I should say that I was born in England but I have no idea who my birth mother is or probably was as I was adopted at a few months old by an English couple Via a children's home. I do know my original Birth names so it is likely my birth mother survived childbirth but beyond that I know nothing. At the time many bables were shipped off to Australia or into a convent in England or Ireland, which is not exactly a ringing endorsement of my birth mother.
Temperamentally I am somewhere between strereotype German or French.
I am interested in where people come from as a way of enhancing my knowledge of the world. I identify as European which is accurate enough as the UK is a part of the European land mass, even if so many of it's inhabitants are weird about the facts of migration. Royston Vassey anyone? A Village for 'Locals' only.