Gosh it was nearly 10 years ago, 5 years since we officially left. Let’s not relitigate and try and get on with it
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Except that apparently one of the key people who lied to us all then is looking to be the favourite to run the country in 2030…
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And one of the key people who wanted to overturn the largest democratic vote in our history is currently prime minister, and he’s got over so maybe you should too
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I never understood the idea that you could overturn democracy with more democracy.
Heck, we do it every 5 years!
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The Quitters whinged, yapped and whined for 40 years and eventually got their way. Why shouldn’t the remainers/rejoiners do the same when the example of how to act has now been set?
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The opposition in parliament don’t just sit down and shut up for 5 years. Brexit, or any other political topic, shouldn’t be any different, that’s part of democracy.
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Especially when now it’s not all theory, we can point to what actually has happened.
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What you can’t point at is how much worse Covid might have been if were still in the EU, with delayed vaccination approvals and slower procurement.
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I can point to that not being true though
“Could have” but we all know it wouldn’t have. One of the reasons for Brexit was that the UK Civil Service always used EU rules as an excuse not to do stuff like that.
This also doesn’t address the point about EU vaccination procurement.
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Is that really what happened? Or did most people accept joining the Common Market and then the European Economic Community, but got increasingly sceptical about political union, particularly after the significant changes (rejected in multiple referenda when it was called a constitution) slipped into the Lisbon Treaty?
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I think most people who voted for Brexit knew nothing about any of that. Most people who voted for Brexit saw a big red bus promising millions more to the NHS. Or some equivalent advert that resonated with them, but ended up being completely false.
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Do people honestly think that we aren’t spending £350m+ a day more than we did pre-Brexit on the NHS?
Yes, and characters.
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Spending an extra £350M a week on the NHS was surpassed long ago, not because of Brexit but because the NHS is a behemoth that absorbs tax funding like a sponge.
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More, yes. Extra, no.
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Not to mention the huge inflationary impacts of Brexit itself. (Admittedly alongside other inflationary things like the war)
I don’t think this is true & really irritates as it’s dismissive of those who did vote & trys to put them in a box rather than look at the complexity.
Some of those were (in no particular order):-
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the relationship at the time was fractious with both sides unwilling to negotiate. TheEUs bureaucractic nature meant that any negotiation became problematic. The UK side couldn’t really articulate what its end goal was (this probably should have been the end of free movement of people but not labour but no matter).
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there was & still is an abdication of responsibility- every issue on why we couldn’t as a nation go forward was blamed on EU rules. A lot of this was internal laziness blaming the EU in the same way for blaming the council.
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people wanted change, things weren’t working & something needed to mix it. The UK needed to take responsibility for it own issues & action rather than blaming them it elsewhere.
If you alway do what you’ve always done then you will alway get what you always got.
There are other aspects such as where commonwealth countries where we have strong ties linguistic & cultural ties having greater bureaucratic issues than EU members where there was no affinity at all.
The fundamental failure of not taking responsibilities for our own issues & problems & blaming things on the past or or others is unfortunately still an issue within our nation - rather than blaming the EU we now blame Brexit or the far left or the far right or just a “them” in general because “ them” isn’t “us” so it’s not our fault so we didn’t do anything wrong.
The biggest failure was within the leaving process - we should have worked with the EU to establish a membership suspension process which would have then eased the EU in keeping some of its more troublesome members in line.
At the end of the day if you don’t want to be part of an organisation or membership is no longer working then leave.
Otherwise you end up in a similar relationship to one involving domestic abuse where you have the dominant partner going “look at what I’ve done for you, you will never make it on your own without me”
So please let’s not assume that people who voted for Brexit were idiots, naive or racists.
More people wanted change than things to continue as they were.
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…but without realising the ramifications.
As I tried to explain to my work colleagues at the time, it’s better to be somewhat frustrated with the EU, sitting around a table together albeit only getting 20% of what you originally asked for, rather than being outside the locked door, & getting absolutely zero. And, throw in complicated (expensive) conditions if you ever want to get close to what you had before.
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What ever happened to that £350 million a week for the NHS…?
Edit
Just seen that this was done further up.