Brexit reinforces my very controversial belief that pensioners should not be able to vote. The future is not theirs. Elderly wisdom is a terrible cultural meme. People grow wiser as they age, but are not wiser in the absolute. Also, a young mind ingests many orders of magnitude more information about the world than a person with declining mental faculties and ossified beliefs.

/rant

On average, young people see the world, see that it does not work, and want to change it. Hence, they chant: "Change things!"

On average, old people see the world, they already settled on a routine that mostly works for them ( genuine survivor bias ) and do not want to change one thing for fear of losing what little they have. Hence, they chant: "Stop changing things!"

It is a question of balance. I always said that the biggest problem with democracy is its weakest link as it depends on a well informed voter. Fear is not a great advisor, but it is a great motivator.

Additionally, the other issue is that the best people with the expertise to solve a country's issues are exactly those that couldn't be bothered to get into politics. Likewise, career politicians tends to be absolutely inept and unqualified to run a country.

Democracy is the least worse form of government, but it still is very very bad.

Despite family protestations he still drives.

There is no law in my state which demands he undergo yearly driving tests to ensure he still has the capacity and mental faculties to do so.

This is not going to end well for him or more importantly someone else.

It is crazy.

Also we're not allowed to remember that just a year ago the UK was crushing Europe in vaccine access so badly the EU was openly talking about seizing British assets to try and catch up; the unique performance of the UK in this area was due to it ignoring the EU joint acquisition programme. That's all been memory holed a long time ago, of course. The EU is best at everything.

The point about inflation and recession is not that it isn't happening elsewhere: it's just that it's worse in the UK. It's also kind of obvious that putting a tariff on all your exports (leaving the common market) is bad for the economy.

I suspect brexit is more a symptom than a cause. The UK has had horrible economic growth for over a decade now, largely driven by a political system that concentrates power in the hands of not particularly competent people.

Eurozone inflation in September: 9.9%

I've seen some wild claims circulating that, for example, 80% of the UK's inflation is caused by Brexit but those don't seem at all plausible. No EU member has inflation that low, France's is about the lowest at 6.2% and that's with some fairly substantial and expensive energy price subsidies keeping it down. In fact I don't think there's any country in the developed world with inflation as low as that would imply the UK's should be if not for Brexit.

It's also not the only stat that looks bad. Foreign direct investment, for instance, fell off a cliff. Exports have basically plateaued, probably because it's actually really difficult to get things in and out of the EU now.

On a more fundamental level, leaving the single market is essentially declaring a trade war on your own economy. It's never going to be a good economic proposition, and the hard brexit we've ended up makes it pretty onerous to do anything over EU/UK borders.

[0]: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/uk-inflation-compare-european-coun...

Inflation is only part of the problem. The economy is not in a great shape overall. And the forecasts are terrible. If you read a bit more on what the BoE says, you’ll see there is more to it than the sound bites you get from politicians. Also, Labour is lucky not to be in power right now, but they will still have to do the thankless, dirty work when they get their majority. Expect some vocal disappointment in the near future.

For context, whilst the BoE forecasts the longest recession ever in the UK, the ECB adjusted its forecasts for 2022 to 4% and 2023 to 2.7%. The British economy really is not behaving like the EU’s.

Things had started to change beforehand as various actors tried to adapt before the shit hit the fan, but yeah, the effects were not being felt that much, on account of the thing not having actually started yet.

Other countries in Europe have pharma industries, most obviously France. And the mRNA vaccines were partly developed by a German company (BioNTech) so, this doesn't work. It was a surprise and the reason the UK got better access much faster because the EU insisted on doing everything as a single bloc, in a heavily centralized way, and the EU institutions are slow.

"The point about inflation and recession is not that it isn't happening elsewhere: it's just that it's worse in the UK."

As pointed out by makomk, this isn't true.

"The UK has had horrible economic growth for over a decade now, largely driven by a political system that concentrates power in the hands of not particularly competent people"

This talking point is also made up. UK growth has been similar to the EU for the last decade - sometimes a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower. See for yourself:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-growth?tab...

If the UK has had "horrible" growth due to "incompetent people" then the same is true of the European Union as a whole.

There's a real problem with pro-EU misinformation here. Both your talking points about economics are completely false. It's not even like Europe is the only place with inflation, the whole world has it right now thanks to the massive money printing that went into lockdowns and other attempts to mitigate COVID. I thought everyone knew that.

I loaded up the csv in visidata, and the graph you sent me shows the UK trails the EU growth average by half a percentage point since 2008. Against a relatively well-performing economy like germany, it trails by 0.94% over the same period.

I do take your general point that the stats do not make such a dramatic picture as one would expect given the recent coverage. The general picture, though, is of a country generally underperforming, even when compared against an underperforming region. This is, in my eyes, totally in keeping with what you would expect from the haphazard policy-flailing that has characterized the UK government in recent years.

Comparing UK growth to the EU average isn't so useful because the EU contains a lot of countries still catching up from decades of Soviet rule. Poland posts 6% GDP growth but that doesn't mean it's a richer country than the USA, obviously. That sort of thing skews the average upwards. That's why I plotted the EU line but also more comparable non-ex-Soviet countries. German GDP was historically boosted by their fixation with subsidizing the rest of the EU with cheap exports, leading to their massive Target2 imbalances. That is nearly a sort of broken windows fallacy style of growth so those figures also have to be taken in context.

But these things aren't anything to do with Brexit, and the UK isn't really so different to comparable western European countries. Their growth is all within narrow bands on that graph, especially from 2017. Indeed the poor growth rates inside the EU were one of the arguments made for why leaving is a good idea! EU policy leads to poor growth, so went the argument and therefore by leaving, the UK can change policies to go faster and catch up with the USA. Of course the mere act of leaving doesn't make that automatic - it's necessary but not sufficient, and it's unclear if the other conditions will ever be satisfied (primarily social attitudes towards capitalism are the problem, imo). Brexit actually taking effect happened simultaneous with the appearance of COVID and then the government was dominated by that, so very little of what's theoretically possible has been done, and now of course the economy is trashed due to lockdowns so who knows when or if the a more US style approach can ever be implemented. But it is at least now theoretically possible.

I have the opposite opinion. I think the UK has been historically hamstrung by its desire to ape the US. The US is a continent-spanning superpower, the dollar is the world's reserve currency, and the US economy is the largest in the world. That means that a lot of the things the US can do, vis-a-vis policy, the UK cannot. Copying a nation that is on basically in a class of its own in every particular is a quixotic project that will never work.

With the EU, the UK had at least one US-level advantage: the unfettered access to a gigantic market. Now, there's regulatory doubling, at the very least, if you want to sell or buy things in that market. I think you'd need some spectacular advantages to outbalance that, going forward - and I have no idea where they are supposed to be coming from. From a business perspective, the most perfect regulatory framework is inferior to a bad regulatory framework that allows you access to a much bigger market.

Moreover the EU had and still has a completely imperial attitude towards the UK, as they perceived leaving as impossible so figured they could do whatever they wanted to Britain. See how they were constantly attempting to screw with or outright steal the City financial industry, like by trying to forcibly relocate it to other areas of Europe. That sort of thing was also happening before the referendum even got started. Most people in the UK don't have a good view towards the EU for this sort of reason. Remain had to rely heavily on fear-based arguments in order to shore up the 'natural' level of positive EU support which would otherwise have been far too low (~a third, iirc).

"From a business perspective, the most perfect regulatory framework is inferior to a bad regulatory framework that allows you access to a much bigger market"

Yeah? Tell that to all the people and companies fleeing China after years of arguing that there were no limits to what made sense to do, to get access to the world's largest single market.

I don't think it's very hard for the UK to follow in America's footsteps. Most of the big economic differences are a combination of legal and cultural, not anything fundamental. US culture is to some extent a derivative of British culture after all!

When roughly 50% of the imports and exports of such a piddling island, services included, are directed towards the EU - obviously, from a very great distance, it makes no difference at all if those goods are subject to tariffs, and if the industries producing them get no input into the regulations they will have to adhere to.

If you were observing, say, from Pluto, you would probably note that the little smudge of the EU is a mite bigger than the little smudge of the UK, and 50% of the UK's import/export economy, while no big deal on the cosmic scale, probably matters a bit to the people who live there.

It's only you guys that made this a competition in the first place. If anything it's good for you this whole episode has been memory holed since it made the UK look like a bunch of selfish pricks. Meanwhile the UK had the highest number of total COVID deaths per capita in Western Europe.

Actually, the issue was that AstraZeneca had simultaneously signed a contract with the UK with a clause that it would give them priority access to vaccines, and with the EU with a clause that it doesn't have any other contract that would prevent it from fulfilling its requirements.

Naturally this eventually went to court.

https://www.fieldfisher.com/en/insights/eu-v-astrazeneca-les...

But there are many reasons why the EU could fare better over the long term. More people (and a bigger unified internal market), more land (and natural resources), more industry, for a start. The thing with the UK is that a lot of that is self inflicted and mind bogglingly stupid. Why are the conservatives still in power? The whole political system is holding the country back.

Brexit process and its aftermath was a crazy, crazy case study, once in a lifetime observation opportunity for social sciences.

but there's nothing wrong with pumping money into an economy that you have forcibly restricted (or that is in a recession for that matter)

the issue is that you need to be in control of where it ends up. UK has an extremely financialised economy where nearly everything anyone uses or does flows up to the top. Therefore taxes needed to be increased and targeted on where the money flowed to to avoid even further accumulation of assets by a small pct of the population.

How did Brexit affect the US economy so badly at the same time?

But sure, keep insulting people and crying "no one listens to our reasons." Because all we can hear now is the Brexit voting areas collectively feeling duped. Not by the Remoaners, but by those that promised to take back your bloody borders they so much cared about and now are poorer than they were before.

At least now you get to keep your pints, pounds and bendy bananas, I guess. Worth it mate.

(Nevermind, looks like you live in Illinois, US. Looking forward to hear your informed opinion on British politics and how post Brexit life actually is.)

So when Brexit happened, and all those predictions happened, the only thing really to say is, "we told you so."

The British economy has been hurting so much worse than the rest of the world. The British pound has fallen 14% against the dollar compared to the Euro, which only fell by 10%.

They are completely unable to sell bonds now. At this point, they are being forced to buy their bonds in order to keep the market for their bonds from total collapse. This is only going ot further erode the value of the pound and continue to make inflation in England the worst in the developed world.

The UK is going through everything the EU is, plus a bunch of self-imposed issues. They are in a leadership crisis and an economic crisis, and their near-to-mid term economic prospects are bleak.

None of them happened. There weren't rampant food, fuel, and medicine shortages and mass deportations, and Britain didn't become a Mad Max wasteland.

The pound lost a few cents, and then a couple of years later, when everything was dropping against the dollar (because of US interest rate decisions) and all of Europe is having fuel problems for obvious reasons, these things also happened to Britain. What part of not doing Brexit would have prevented this, and how did Brexit also cause these problems in the EU?

This doesn't make all of the Tory/UKIP lies about the benefits of Brexit more truthful, but time shows Remoaner statements about the consequences of Brexit were at least wild exaggerations, if not outright lies themselves.

I would say that Corbyn's 70/30 Remain/Brexit evaluation turned out to be the most realistic assessment, but he was hated and destroyed for it by both the Remoaners and Brexiteers.

An odd side effect I didn't expect is that we got a worse class of politicians as the smart honest ones who were prepared to admit it was a mess didn't get in power and instead we got Boris and Liz who were quite prepared to say any old nonsense to get the job.

Still, onwards and upwards! Maybe.

Remember when they were considering a Norway-like agreement? Or perhaps like Switzerland?

There were many ways of adapting to this new life outside the EU, and they've decided to go for the hardest, stupidest imaginable version, just to appease an extreme fringe of ultra nationalist pillocks that took over the entire Conservative party.

And to appear a reasonable alternative to these imbeciles, Labour is adopting the same party line, because anything apart from the hardest Brexit imaginable is politically toxic.

No one even dares to build a pragmatic platform trying to make the best out of a terrible situation. 48% voted to Leave and only a smaller subset of that wanted to completely burn all bridges. If you wanted to stay or wanted a softer Brexit, good luck, no big party is representing you right now.

The self-interested groups who were trying to deny that the vote had happened were some of the loudest voices against any sort of soft Brexit. therefore all but guaranteeing chaotic Brexit.

Look at the indicative votes in early 2019 at a time when the government was paralysed and desperate to get any way out. Those voting against single market / customs union were nationalists, green, change uk and right wing labour MPs.

https://ig.ft.com/brexit-second-round-indicative-votes/

This isn't true though. there is still large over-subscription on guilt auctions. https://www.dmo.gov.uk/data/pdfdatareport?reportCode=D2.1A

interest rates are higher that is true.

yes there was a period of buying guilts, but Bank of England has reversed this now and is going through policy (incorrect in my opinion) of quantitive tightening and selling what it 'bought' during QE https://www.ft.com/content/64e5dcdd-42a8-4013-a3bd-75a62cf8e...

Also, there were plenty of opposing voices in the UK (I realise we're party of the World, still!). Financial experts unanimously agreed it would damage our financial system; they only differed in whether it was worth it. Those for Brexit agreed that there would be up to a decade of economic damage.

Those for Brexit never argued such a thing before it was obvious things were going to be bad. The day before the referendum you had Farage on the radio saying that leaving the single market would be stupid and that the EU would just fold and let the UK in with its own rules. Remember the “pro cake and pro eating it”?