I think this (below) is sort of what happened. Apologies if I am talking rubbish. I have only an approximate idea of what is going on.
The leave people told us that the NHS was falling apart because we were paying enormous amounts of money to the EU. They said if we stopped doing that, they they would give the money to the NHS instead. Boris Johnson wrote this promise on the side of a red London Bus, which somehow made people actually believe it.
The leavers also said they would "get back control of our borders" and stop illegal immigration.
However, what actually happened is this:
All the EU migrants who were staffing the NHS went home, leaving terrible staff shortages. We also have terrible shortages of teachers in schools. The UK government had been mis-managing the NHS and schools for years, meaning that a lot of British people are not well enough or educated enough to manage the jobs that are now unfilled. So the people are poor, unemployed and unwell, and they can't get help, because the medics have gone home. That sounds like an exaggeration, but I don't think it is really.
Medically things are hard. We have massive waiting lists for NHS treatment. Many people haven't seen a doctor in person for 4 years.
The schools are in crisis, and a lot of kids are out of school with panic attacks, because they can't cope any more. A lot of teachers are finding it so hard that they are leaving.
Boris Johnson said that we would stop having EU migrants who don't speak English and that instead we would have commonwealth migrants who do speak English. Which was a pretty weird thing to say out loud. I mean how xenophonic is that? From what I can see here, the commonwealth immigrants largely decided to stay home, and who can blame them?
The situation with customs seems to have changed somehow and now there are serious shortages of medicines in the UK
There were food shortages for a while. Now I think the government can't impose proper border controls because we don't have enough customs agents to check all the food coming across the channel. So I think there is currently enough food, but it is not being properly checked at customs, as far as I can tell.
The leavers said we would get better trade deals with countries across the world, once we were free from the EU. But in fact the other countries saw how badly the leavers were treating northern Ireland, and decided to stick with prioritising the EU. We seem to be at the back of the queue for getting trade deals.
A lot of small businesses were making their money by selling to the EU, and after Brexit there was a huge amount of paperwork for them to do if they wanted to export to the EU. They couldn't do the paperwork so they can no longer make anywhere near as much money as they used to. Some have lost as much as 90% of their business.
We used to make a huge amount of money from the work of performing musicians but in order to make all that money, they needed to be able to travel without restriction across the EU. Post brexit, they lost the right to travel freely and were burdened with massive amounts of paperwork for every border crossing. So our music industry has been in terrible trouble post brexit and has lost a lot of money both for themselves and for the treasury in tax that they would have paid.
On consequence of this is that our "economy has not grown as much as it should". I don't exactly know what that means, but I think it means that we don't have as many people trading and earning money as we should.
So we have less tax being paid I think.
So we have less money to pay the NHS and the school teachers.
Also there were a lot of organisation that were very important, which we shared with the whole EU. Things like the European Medicines Agency, for example. It saved us a lot of money being able to share that with all the EU countries, rather than having to have one of our own. There were a lot of agencies like that and post-brexit I think we need to build our own copy of all those agencies which is very expensive.
The leavers promised us that we would leave the EU and then we wouldn't have to abide by silly rules that were harming us, but it didn't pan out like that. For example I think the EU banned the sale of certain kinds of fluorescent and halogen light bulbs, which is a problem for people who get migraines from LED light bulbs. Technically, now we're outside the EU we could go back to making safe light bulbs for those people. But in practice it never happened, because the country has been scrambling to cope with the fallout of Brexit ever since.
Conversely, I think the upsides of Brexit are:
- house prices have dipped a bit.
- There would be less competition for jobs amongst tradesmen, if anybody could still afford to have work done on their house.
- We now have a 1970s-esque excuse to be permanently miserable.
It hasn't happened yet, but I confidently expect brown trousers to become high fashion in the UK soon. (1970s fashion joke)
Sorry if any of the above is total rubbish. I just really want to understand what the heck is going on and I feel like saying what I think it going on might help to draw out information about what is actually going on from someone who knows.
Does any of what I've said above seem about right? I would really like to understand where we are.