The UK is a great country. Over the long term it'll probably be fine, if it manages not to disintegrate. Even I, as a European, could see some possible upsides to Brexit. Not worth the downsides, but still. However, it requires playing it well and subtly, which the current government (and the couple of previous ones; Britain has been terribly governed for a long time)seems intent on not doing. It requires pragmatism, not ideology. At the moment it is looking weak and desperate. For example, I really cannot understand how someone would think that the UK was exploited as part of the single market, but the Australian farce is acceptable. Or why the TPP is an idea worth antagonising most of Europe.

Maybe it will get worse but the anti-brexit campaigns at the time painted a much much more negative picture than what I am seeing.

Think for a second, for fuck's sake. You could order from China, Venezuela, or Kazakhstan before. Why on earth would have been ordering something from the UK impossible?

The problem was not individuals getting their packages from Amazon.uk or M&S. The problem is that taxes are mechanically going up, that paperwork is more expensive and complicated, and that there are delays at the borders, which make exporting anything perishable a non starter.

Also, you now have to pay additional dues and taxes. This seems inconsistently applied: I have several packages from the UK who went through he border fine, but other did not. But it still is a problem when it happens, and illegal when it does not.

Also, it now takes weeks where it used to take days.

Also, a lot of things cannot be exported plain and simple if standards diverge. Which they will, otherwise the UK won't have a deal with the US.

> Maybe it will get worse but the anti-brexit campaigns at the time painted a much much more negative picture than what I am seeing.

You should not have got your points for remaining from the Telegraph. Even the Grauniad never said that nothing whatsoever would be going to cross the border.

And again, we are only 6 months in.

Who said you can’t. I also ordered there but stopped doing because customs handling adds high fees now. I get charged a flat 10 EUR on top of every order and 20% VAT. Many online stores already charge me UK VAT first so I end up paying VAT twice and the refunding process is burdensome.

> I can go back to live there with little problem if I want despite being told otherwise.

Lucky you. I’m a EU citizen and either in the UK for a few years. I’m not settled and I can’t go back. I would need a corporate visa sponsor and would end up coupled to said employer with no legal protections.

> They did so much better at vaccinating because the EU didn't screw things for them like for all the member nations etc.

Maybe. But right now we’re pretty even and the situation looks better in the EU. Definitely have more freedoms than my British friends right now.

I have yet to see something positive to come out of Brexit. Even the good vaccination program happened while EU rules were still in effect.

Things like roaming charges are much less significant than travel restrictions and quarantine requirements; travel and tourism has fallen off a cliff, so we can't separate out the Brexit impact.

We've another critical Brexit event coming up in the form of the end of the settled status transition period.

This was true in the Trump era. Prior to the pandemic, by most metrics America was doing very well in Trump's first few years. The economy was doing well, unemployment was low, and even metrics like African-American unemployment were reaching historically low levels. For the average American who didn't pay attention to the news, that time period was probably one where you had a job, it paid well, and things were looking good. But if you listened to the media you'd think that America was literally burning to the ground.

No, they do, but in most cases the effects emerge in the long run. Most laws take several months or years to go into effect, and then more time for patterns to emerge, and even more time for them being actually measured.

Take taxes. In the UK, the budget is approved in Spring (let's say 2020). Any change in income tax or corporation tax will go into force a year later, so April 2021. Individuals must file their returns the following January 2022, with nominal penalties for delaying an extra month. Statistical aggregation then takes place, which can take several more months. So basically, you won't know the immediate effect of a tax policy until almost 3 years later - and that's just for short-term effects! Actual long-term patterns might not be visible before 5 or 10 years have passed. In the meantime, we'll already be debating further changes, while we've not even fully absorbed the previous ones.

And taxes are as straightforward a field as you can have! Legislation on things like building standards typically carries some slack to give people time to adapt, and measuring effects of changes can be very hard even over a decade.

Both very substantially influence the day-to-day, but usually on very different time scales.

- Channel 4 heavily criticised the PM and pulled an ice-statue-replacement stunt after he failed to show for an interview, so they're being sold off.

- Johnson wants to strip electoral watchdog of prosecution powers

- Threatening to reduce the power of the Supreme Court

- Department of Education strongly encouraged schools to make children sing a One Britain, One Nation song (it's as bad as it sounds)

- Heavily trying to push through a Bill to ban protest, including single-person "protests"

- Government often completely bypasses Parliament, by making announcements outside of Parliament, much to the chagrin of the Speaker. This is weird as they have a whopping majority, so it's very deliberate what they're doing.

- Gov is looking at withdrawing from European Convention on Human Rights

- Priti Patel

- Taking control of BBC with cronies in top jobs

- Requiring ID for voting (blatant voter suppression). We do not have a fraud problem.

I could go on...

Stop shutting down debate with bullshit conversation-stoppers, the GP made a valid point.

All the elements of social democracy - worker rights, environmental standards, democratic representation, a welfare state - will be replaced with profiteering and spivvery.

Of course if Brexit had been sold as that, hardly anyone would have bought it.

The UK is now in a race between fascism and incompetence. Neither is a good outcome, but an economic implosion followed by popular protests might just about turn this around before protest and resistance are banned by diktat.

From another point of view the UK hasn't been a true democracy for decades. This is the country which hatched a number of coup plots against Harold Wilson, who was a rather stodgy and mainstream left-of-centre politician by European standards, but was considered a Soviet extremist by the Establishment - while that same Establishment protected insiders like Anthony Blunt who actually confessed to recruiting spies for the USSR.

Blunt had gone to the right schools, so was given immunity from prosecution. He was allowed to keep his knighthood, and continued to work - for the Queen, no less - until he retired.

If the intelligence services had had their way the public would never have been told. The story only came out in 1979 because a journalist broke it.

The UK continues to be motivated by a very strange kind of class-based nationalistic extremism. Establishment insiders get almost infinite privileges, no matter what they do or how much they damage the country, while outsiders are treated with suspicion, contempt, and abuse.

Brexit is just the latest twist in that story.

The UK could've done exactly what it did whilst an EU member.

Why no other countries did it? Who knows. Maybe they thought they were already paying into the EU-wide scheme so why bother?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_Hungar...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-52380823

> Hungary has been using Russia's Sputnik vaccine for months and and Slovakia has also bought doses of it.

> Germany said in April it would begin talks to secure supplies of the Russian vaccine and Austria said it would buy one million doses, but only once the EU's medicines agency approves the jab for use in the EU.

> The Czech Republic and Poland have entered talks with both Russia and China.

So that's Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland - that would be 5 states, ~20%.

Ironically, a non-brexited UK government opposing the single-procurement EU program would have probably forced more EU countries to go alone. On practical matters, it's much easier to sabotage anything when you're inside the building, rather than outside.

Our success at procuring vaccines was, at best, dumb luck. If we had any idea what we were doing as a country, our death rate wouldn't have been so high and perhaps we wouldn't have needed to be so desperate for vaccines.

It's like setting yourself on fire and then being really proud of yourself when you manage to find a fire extinguisher.

I struggle so hard to understand that perspective. I don't see how anything good has happened as a result.

We now have: - a shortage of workers from the EU - harder to buy things from europe - harder to sell things to europe - more red tape when trying to drive in europe - higher insurance costs when going to europe - no rights to live or work in europe - thousands of EU citizens yet to apply for settled status and will be liable for expulsion - zero extra money for our health service - more expensive mobile phone costs

and that's just what I can think off from the top of my head.

Pretty much sums up Brexit.

Their salary depends on it, so of course they "are".

The UK would've been no different within the EU unless it chose to.

And with good reason, trying to outbid each other doesn't make a great strategy to keep a Union.

I don't get why I'm downvited, btw.

Remember the UK citizens voted on this TWICE in practical effects. They want it. They may not be as stupid as you think they are.

Obvious troll is obvious.

But for posterity:

- Wanting something doesn't make it sensible. - A (slim) majority of people wanting a stupid thing doesn't make it any less stupid.

A sentence attributed to Italian singer-songwriter-intellectual Roberto "Freak" Antoni, or to author Marcello Marchesi, describes this concept in a great way:

"LET'S EAT SHIT! BILLIONS OF FLIES CANNOT BE WRONG!"

https://labour.org.uk/manifesto-2019/the-final-say-on-brexit...

The fact that the Tories are currently whining about the deal they (1) negotiated, (2) signed, (3) won a general election in order to implement, and (4) explicitly denied further parliamentary time to study and debate the consequences of, certainly implies the politicians are dumb, regard of what it says about the voters.

A confirmatory referendum - defined as "undemocratic", because of course a clarifying vote on a complex issue can't possibly be democratic, according to the Brexiters - would have killed it.

The most fervent supporters don't really want "Brexit" anyway. What they want is to put the clever people - the professionals who keep the lights on and the engines running - in their place.

Which is why there was so much cut-and-paste rhetoric about "metropolitan elites" and "We've all had enough of experts."

It was a very calculated campaign of disinformation and populist framing aimed at low-information authoritarians - the kinds of people who will reliably destroy their own country from the inside while convincing themselves they're "patriots."

Not really. After an initial wobble, the most hardcore brexiteer fringe swept to power with very large majorities. Yes, it's FPTP so you can say "not really", but in practice they did - the only strongly anti-brexit party, meanwhile, was soundly battered.

The English masses, for a period, really really wanted it. The only first hint of regret has been this month's byelection, a very small test.