Not British but asking, is there anyone in the U.K. defending Brexit at this point? I mean it sounds like we're just debating how bad it was, not whether it was bad.
What a lot of the pro-Brexit crowd finally admitted is that Brexit was always going to be a bitter pill to swallow and they knew it. Conveniently none of them wanted to say that in the lead up to the vote. 5 years ago when they began admitting this, they claimed it was going to be a 10 year process before the "benefits" of Brexit can be felt. Here we are. I guess Brexit benefits will be like Fusion Energy or Full-Self-Driving; always a few years into the future.
What do you mean by this, concretely? Or in other words, if we check back in 5 years, what would cause you to say 'yeah I was wrong, eu newfascism {doesn't exist || hasn't progressed as badly as I expected}'?
edit: to the downvoters, what do you object to here?? I'm trying to pin down the meaning of the parent comment, because without some kind of definition, a phrase like 'eu newfascism' is all heat and no light. My 'in other words...' framing was not based on the assumption that the parent commenter will be proven wrong; I'm just asking 'what would it take to falsify this?'
Ahem, in 5 years Nigel Farage will have persuaded the idiots to willingly up their human rights, as enshrined in the ECHR. Churchill’s great achievement to prevent the horrors of the Nazi regime happening again.
But the British public, or at least the flag-waving hotel-arson subset, really want to separate families and send people to countries where they face significant risk of torture or death.
They would've been better off if they could have set up an agreement with the EU, but they didn't get one that satisfied all parties - plus they had a weak negotiating position.
It was particularly weakened by obvious issues with the UK's political leadership - the EU knew that the UK didn't know what it really wanted and didn't have negotiators with the mandate to get it.
A lot of people voted for it as a point of 'control'. The UK might be in a pretty messed up place politically right now, but it does have full control over its laws. The buck stops with someone you can reasonably drive to and shout at. The EU was a slow and constant move into more and more centralised control in Europe.
Some of these people think this means they can influence the country more for their own gain; some think it protects them from people influencing the country unduly.
Either way, its hard to argue against brexit having given the UK has more on paper long term control, and its hard to argue against brexit being costly both theoretically and in practice, and its hard to argue that the UK wouldn't currently be better off in the EU. Its hard, but people are doing it.
Its mostly a matter of identity. Do you feel European or British? Its much like any secessionist movement. This partly explains the high ethnic minority vote for Brexit, because its hard to feel European if you are not of European origin.
It is also a matter of class identity. Being a remainer is a lot posher than being a leaver.
> That said, I am staunchly pro EU, and would always vote for further integration. In truth, I even think that EU federalization would be a good idea.
It is necessary. Having a common currency without a common budget has been a disaster.
> I have no idea why immigrants of all people would have a nationalistic stance on this.
How is it a nationalistic stance? You are preferring one identity over another - either way is just as nationalistic.
Immigrants from outside the EU do not like immigrants from the EU being given preference from their countries of origin, often places with strong historical links to Britain, where English is widely spoken, etc.
English first, European second. Indeed, the people of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland likely feel the same, and it’s unclear why that union should be considered worthwhile when a larger one is not.
> its hard to feel European if you are not of European origin.
All British-born people are of European origin. That is a simple geographic fact.
My daughter was born in Britain, but her ancestry is only partly European.
Lots of people are British born who are not of European ancestry. Unless you are defining "European origin" to mean "born in Europe" in which case your claim is tautologous. The other possibility is that you are defining "British born" to mean ethnically white British which does not really need any comment.
Even if it is not what you meant, European has strong implications of European ethnicity.
I would invert your question. Why do many people consider the larger union worthwhile but the smaller (and more workable one) not worthwhile? The only areas outside London that had a majority remain vote, are those where the vote was swung by Scottish or Welsh nationalists. In general the supporters of one union oppose the other.
To be clear, I think both unions are a good idea, or neither are. You can’t pick and choose though - the arguments for one are largely the arguments for the other.
Your statistics are also trivially falsifiable by simple counterexample - the town I lived and voted in during the 2016 EU membership referendum is not London, or the London area, is in England, and voted remain by 57.9% to 42.1%. The major city next door did so by an even more overwhelming margin: 61.7% to 38.3%. Not too many Welsh or Scottish nationalists in either…
So you’ll no doubt forgive me for not taking you too seriously when you spout horse shit dressed up as thoughtfulness.
By the way, I do indeed consider anyone born within the borders of the geographic boundary of Europe to be European, just like anyone born in the United States of America is American. The only arguments against such ideas are dog whistles (or let’s face it, full on soccer whistles at this point).
There are. The rhetorical strategy is to argue that Brexit was a good idea, but it has not been implemented properly. Look for the phrases "Brexit means Brexit" and "proper Brexit".
It seems to have become a taboo topic. There are too many people who voted for it and now realise it has been a mistake and want to forget about it, anyone who reminds them, will be seen negatively. It also can't be reversed anyway so there's no upside in this discussion - reversing means becoming "just one" of the EU states because the Union has been explicit that they won't allow any perks, not even keeping the pound - which is just too much for public to stomach.
Yes. Many people still support it. Even if Brexit is objectively bad this is self-evidently obvious, people are very bad at changing their minds and lots of people voted for it.
Maybe over half would now vote to remain, but most pundits thought this would be the case before 2015, so who can say for certain (e.g. Nigel Farage is more popular than ever and he is Mr Brexit).
It is way too early to judge the success or failure of leaving the EU, and part of it will be down to chance. There are also intangible reasons (e.g. feeling of national identity, distaste for bureaucracy) people voted leave and, while I don't think they make up for the loss, I don't think they should be poo-pooed.
I personally would have liked to remain in the EU but I don't think the EU is obviously good, or leaving the EU is obviously a terrible idea.
I didn’t vote in the referendum and I’m fairly apathetic about Brexit. I wouldn’t dispute that there are downsides, but I do see the positive as no longer being part of an institution many British people consider deeply problematic.
-Commission’s monopoly on legislative initiative
-Technocratic “fast-tracking” of democracy via trilogues.
-cult-like mentality around ever-closer union making devolution unthinkable within the commission.
-Commission’s direct funding of media and its proposed expansion of the Media+ budget give it the ability to spend money directly promoting the narratives and priorities it wants to see amplified.
-Legislative attrition; passing legislation not through genuine consensus, but through persistence — re-proposing it until the Commission secures its preferred outcome. As we’re currently seeing with the chat control proposal
The way the EU has behaved in defense negotiations has further solidified my thoughts on this. Tying fishing rights to defense cooperation[0] then after the UK made concessions demanding billions with no say on how the money will be spent.
Purely from a sovereignty points of view, it makes a lot of sense if you think your country being independent is important.
From an economic point of view, it will probably never make sense because the UK was shielded from most of the EU most stupid decisions through carve out. They were out the disastrous currency union. They were not fully in Schengen. They had a lot of leeway with regulations.
Coming back would probably be a mistake however. They would most likely be forced to join the eurozone.
You can write it without the quotes you know, it's an actual word.
I think it's a real argument personnally and the heart of the issue. That was the main question of the Brexit referundum: do you want to be a part of this pan-European union of people and surrender some of your country power to this union?
You can argue that the subsequent trade agreement and the alignment that followed have reintroduced some of the same constraints, which is true, but practically and conceptually speaking it is a very different kind of situation.
I do defend it, no point here because I always just get downvoted and people cannot grasp the points made because they do not want to.
Compare how the UK has done since 2016 compared to either the government forecasts of what would happen in the event of a Brexit vote, or to the other big western European economies and you can see the problems. The fact that one estimate is double another gives you a clue to how uncertain these estimates are.
Reform UK is still technically defending Brexit; they've just switched to the no-true-Scotsman argument that real Brexit was never delivered and that they're the ones that can make good on the promises from the referendum.
> allowed the UK to control its own migration policy
Has that helped? Seems like they traded-off Eastern European migrants (who all fled during the pandemic because life in their own country is now much better than in the UK) for Middle Eastern migrants who have nothing to lose and for whom this disaster of a country is still an upgrade over what they had before.
The people who voted for Brexit have moved on to the next stupid bogeyman. In a few years we'll see the fruits of that with Reform in power demolishing what's left of the Uk economy. And still, the masses won't learn.
if the government wasn't incompetent in how they are handling certain immigration issues the anti-immigration parties would not have any momentum. for some bizarre reason the government is pursuing a course of action that is poisoning the well when it comes to immigration in the UK. i think immigration can bring a lot of benefits to the UK but by bringing in poor performing migrants into the UK it can end up turning the public against all immigration.
The anti-immigration parties have made immigration the cause of all our problems when it's the cause of practically none of them. Now the government are wasting time appeasing idiots who believe everything they read on X instead of actually focussing the real problems in the country. Anyone that believes Nigel Farage can come up with a functional plan to solve a single fucking problem is in for a surprise if he's ever in power. Unfortunately it shouldn't be a surprise because the last time they backed him it was a disaster too.
I think that a lot of people will still support Brexit. Leaving the EU allows a (future) government to do a lot of stupid things. Throwing out good fiscal policy, eroding human rights, aggressively stopping boats or changing migration rules, reversing climate change regulation. A lot of people believe, or will be led to believe (because previous governments were hamstrung by the EU), that those stupid ideas are actually quite good ideas.
Brexit was necessary for those ideas to be implemented. An individual's view on whether those ideas are good or not will correlate with their continued support of Brexit.
The EU is undemocratic, horribly mismanaged and reduces sovreignty. The feeling is we were putting in more then we were getting out.
Now i can't accuse the Brexit negotiators of acting with competence. Neither can i claim that it has brought any short to medium term benefits. But the situation wasn't great either way. The referendum was a choice between a bad option (remaining) and an even worse option.
EU Members of Parliament for the UK were elected via proportional representation, whereas Westminster MPs are elected via the comparatively undemocratic first-past-the-post system, where a party with 14% of the national vote gets just 1% of the seats in Parliament (Reform UK, GE 2024), and one with 34% of the vote gets 63% of the seats (Labour, GE2024).
While I broadly agree on this specific point, there is a lot to be said about the overall democratic legitimacy of the EU.
The constitution was rejected by referundum by at least two members states before being plainly reintroduced as a treaty and summarily imposed. Parliament has no power of initiative. Commissionners appointments are frankly opaque when it comes to how portfolios are handed out.
Then, you have the way the eurozone is structure. It's literally a prison. The treaties don't provide an orderly way out of and TARGET 2 ensures that leaving means complete economic chaos so countries are basically stuck. This situation has been used in the past to justify bludgeoning a population into obedience and impose extrem austerity to protect rich members unwise creditors.
Brexit was only possible because of the pound sterling and that's not a possibility the union extends to new comers.
I always ask imbeciles that repeat this bullshit, and they can never articulate this point. They either never reply or change the subject.
Typically they gesture at the EU commission being unelected, but they ignore that the commissioners are nominated by each member state (and all member states are supposedly democracies. And I say supposedly because Hungary exists). The nominees then have to be approved by the EU parliament (which is elected).
Saying that EU is undemocratic is like saying that a country with a prime minister is undemocratic because he was not directly voted for. Which is not an argument that can be taken seriously.
And I say this as someone that dislikes that EU commission is appointed by the member states government. The problem with this is that it mixes internal politics with EU politics - for example, in national elections I may vote for parties based on national issues, but I would vote for a different party in an explicit EU election.
