They didn't necessarily "fuck up". Many people voted for exactly this sort of BS. I am not saying that was a good idea. But that's what things like "Less Imports" and "no more regulations" mean in practice.

No. People didn't vote for that, because unfortunately the referendum was very non-specific "Do you want to leave the EU?" question with only a yes/no answer.

(Of course if there had been a "Yes, however you like", "Yes-gently", "yes-brutally", "no", kinda question the votes would have been split enough to make no consensus possible.)

Some people might have thought they were voting for a hard-exit, others a soft-one. But the actual specifics varied depending on who you spoke to.

It was Theresa May who drew a bunch of arbitrary lines in the sand, and essentially chose the kind of exit that would happen, but that was after a "Please Leave" result, not a vote on any specific form of exit.

After that things got vaguer.

But even if we pretend there was a specific kind of exit being voted for, the fact is things are still not "done" with the implementation. Checks on the UK-side are still absent, the whole Irish border situation is imprecise, and still not settled, and the mass-repealing of EU-related laws has been postponed.

All in all it's a mess, probably fair to say its a bigger mess if you voted remain, but still even if you voted leave I'd be surprised if you'd be happy with the current state of things.

I'm fairly sure that most brexit voters were expecting a soft brexit. There were plenty of politicians stating that it was absolutely not going to be a hard brexit, or at least that's what they said up until the vote.

Different politicians promised different things, with varying degrees of seriousness and commitment. (For example the Boris-Bus).

I realize I'm getting pedantic, but at the end of the day people just voted "Yes, leave" or "No, remain".

The actual specifics were wonderfully ambiguous.

(FWIW I'm a UK citizen, and I submitted a postal-vote for the referendum, having already left the country for unrelated reasons.)

UK Remoaner here.

I do remember brexit proponents going on TV and specifically stating that we would stay in the EU market and no way would it be a hard brexit.

But yes, the vote was flawed due to "brexit" not being defined at all.

If you are voting for vague promises and unrealistic, bonkers, literally impossible trade agreements, and end up with how brexit went, you have no one to blame but yourself. There was no "No longer be part of the EU" that would have resulted in a stronger Britain because the UK is not that important, so nobody would sacrifice themselves to make the lives of angry brits easier.

100% correct. Was not a negotiating failure, it was the desired outcome, though perhaps not the desired consequences of such an outcome

It's interesting to see interviews with people who voted for Brexit.

They understand that they have a worse life, but their emotions about the vote didn't change as significantly as their life circumstances because of their vote.

For many people it was a religious decision, a matter of faith. "You cannot reason people out of something they did not reason their way into"

It's because the reasons they have a worse life aren't caused by Brexit. The ruling party hasn't actually changed anything even though now they legally can.

It was essentially a 50/50 split. Why they decided before hand simple majority wins and not 66% or something is beyond me.

It is also told, that the EU has the toughest negotiators in the world. They got trained full-time on inner conflicts and just keep burying interlocutors, no matter the country.

they didn't negotiate. Cake-ism was not a Boris Johnson joke, it turned out to be the actual policy. Hence, bare bones agreement (which, according to Michel Barnier, we are not even compliant on) and massive surge of costs to UK consumers.

brexit is about setting the stage for things to come. brexit will make fewer people a lot of money. Is it far fetched to see NHS getting bled dry, paving the way for privatized health care?

Distribute the costs among the many, concentrate the benefits among the few.

EU was in a position where it couldn't allow a soft exit to Britain, because the whole EU would fall apart and even more behind other big economies.

soft Brexit would have been single market, Norway style. This was rejected by UK, not by EU

Norway style means that UK would still have had to allow freedom of movement. If the EU and especially Germany had adapted their (imo insane & ideology driven) immigration politics, I don't think the UK would have left. But in the given situation, what could UK have done?

(nothing)

immigration is the right thing to do, Germany will reap the benefit of the millions of people they have brought in. The issue is how to integrate, which is an entirely different problem. So far, no other mechanism to stymie population decline has worked

You cannot blame the EU for the UK's hard brexit. That was all down to the UK politician's brexit purity spiral. Theresa May tried to moderate it somewhat, and was swiftly thrown out because of that. This was all internal to the UK. The UK insisted on a hard brexit.

The stock "it's the EU's fault!" response is nonsense, again.

The UK wanted a hard Brexit.

There was no "soft Brexit" on the table. What you are asking for is the equivalent of changing the constitution of a country for the benefit of a single city. The slippery slope isn't that the country would fall apart, the slippery slope is that the country would abandon its core values for the benefit of a small group of elites that doesn't care about the country.

Wasn't import taxes an inevitability as a result of brexit? The free movement of goods and people is a fundamental part of EU and EEA and once you are no longer part of it you no longer have those freedoms and instead have the normal external EU/EEA costs?

no, they were not, Turkey and Switzerland are not in the EU nor in EEA, but they can sell (some) of their goods to EU countries with no taxes due to specific agreements.

UK explicitly chose to avoid such arrangements.

Turkey, Switzerland, and/or even russia (pre-Ukraine war) are part of the EU Customs Union that the UK chose to stay out of.

not switzerland, and I have no idea why you think Russia was ever part of the EU customs union.

But the point is that staying out of the customs union was not an "inevitabile result of leaving the EU", it was a choice separated from it.

The UK didn't choose to avoid such arrangements and requested many times for a comprehensive free trade deal.

The problem is that the EU considers arrangements such as those with the Swiss to be legacy, deprecated and no longer on offer. They have also spent a lot of time pressuring Switzerland in various ways to try and force it to become a de-facto member-without-membership. They don't want any country in Europe to have any option other than membership, whereby membership means full control from Brussels without local elections having any meaningful outcomes. That is their goal and doing a trade deal with the UK would have undermined that.

No, the EU could choose to simply not levy such tariffs. They have signed free trade deals with other countries before that don't require membership, they simply refuse to do that for any country geographically in Europe.

They do this even though tariffs hurt people in EU countries (they are taxes on Europeans remember), because refusing to compromise or negotiate - insisting that everything comes as a single package with no flexibility whatsoever - and then using trade as a weapon to enforce this, is how the EU establishes its power over member states.

As a strategy it works well - look at the people in this thread. They are brainwashed into believing the EU position is immutable and inevitable, like a law of physics or something. Wrong. They can set tariffs to whatever they like. There is no specific reason trade barriers must be linked to who the supreme court is, or immigration policy, or any of the other thousand things that the EU makes contingent on them. When the EU does this it is purely about power.

Some people are upset and blame Leave campaigners for not making this clear enough. They say, how could tell us the EU would ever compromise on anything? The reason is that many Leave campaigners wanted to be diplomatic and not upset people in Europe any more than necessary, especially as some might end up in the government afterwards, as indeed happened. Spelling out the truth to people is deeply unpleasant. It means telling people that the EU is a fanatical organization that never negotiates with Europeans, these days it is only willing to dictate.

Of course the above was obvious all along. I voted for Brexit knowing full well it would mean the UK was out of the single market along with everything else, and predicting quite possibly a sort of unofficial cold war between the two sides. The people who performatively exclaim that the population were misled are talking nonsense. It was clear to anyone whose eyes were clear of ideology or diplomatic constraints how the EU would react, because it is a union held together by aggression and fear. If they tried to establish cooperation on everything possible without the take-it-or-leave-it approach, that fear would evaporate and many other countries would head for the exits.

How can the EU be so unfriendly?

How can the UK be so deluded as to think they would get a better deal and be better off than they already were?

They were in the union, kept their own currency and had exemptions from a lot of EU rules.

Now they fucked up royally out of pure arrogance and some ill-advised nationalism.

Good luck.

This was the real shocker to me. The UK had an absurdly good deal in the EU. This was a fight between guys who make billions from domestic commerce and guys who make billions from international commerce and the local guys won. A cost of living crisis is a boon for them.

> How can the EU be so unfriendly?

I suspect that the grandparent is joking, doing the "why did the EU do this to the UK?"

The joke is that brexit issues are never the UK's fault. Along the lines of https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/who-killed-hannibal

I think the EU were perfectly happy to have talks and negotiations, but the UK wanted to be able to influence the EU without being bound by its rules - hardly a reasonable stance for the UK to take

It always amazes me how people always believe the EU is honest and truthful in all negotiations. This is even after they wrecked Greece and tried to prevent the UK getting their COVID vaccinations.

The EU didn't try to prevent Covid vaccinations in the UK. AstraZeneca decided to interpret contracts. The EU held them to their contract.

As an EU/UK citizen living in the UK - I'm okay with that. The EU signed a contract with a 3rd party company and they are requesting delivery on their goods.

For Greece - I think the level of corruption in the Greek market was pretty obvious so I'm not so too bothered by the "wrecking". If they followed the laws and didn't steal money - they would have been okay.

The corruption in the Greek economy was a drop in the ocean though. It had 5% growth per year, enough to outgrow its corruption like every other developed country.

But also had 13% budget deficit (of its GDP). Other countries had to bail them out of default on loans.

They also said they will get the deficit under control in 2 years and a few months later said they would most likely default.

They had massive tax evasion problems (e.g. corruption) and one of the lowest retirement ages in the EU.

I'm really nor sure how you see corruption given that the government took out loans which it had no way of repaying even with 5% YoY growth. The simple fact is they were fiscally irresponsible. It's a common pattern in the Balkans to just do what is needed to win the elections without thinking of how the country is developing and what is the right course. It stems from the corruption of the political system.

The EU is a huge economic block, and Britain's single most important trading partner. They can be whatever the fuck they like to be. And the EU was exceptionally friendly and patient towards the UK which demanded all the benefits with none of the responsibilities.

UK's entire chain of options were known to everyone with half a brain even before Brexit started. Described succintly in this chart: edit see first chart on House of Lords page here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldeu... end edit and explained very briefly in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agZ0xISi40E

How can England be so unfriendly and not allow a Scottish Independence referendum?

> How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly?

I don't think you can blame the negotiators. The politicians sold a Brexit that was somehow going to be soft enough to allow access to EU markets, but strong enough that the UK didn't have to follow any rules or give any concessions.

The only two options on the table at any point in this were "stay in the single market but without any influence, and get rules simply handed down by Brussels" or "hard brexit", and the first was political suicide. Few (30%?) would have voted for Brexit had they had an honest vision presented as to what it would actually mean.

Leave were perfectly aware of this, which is why Brexit was presented as everything for everyone instead of a specific deal.

Quite literally. Aside from the broad lies - the infamous £350m a week for the NHS, and the "Absolutely no one is suggesting the UK will leave the Single Market", among many others - Cambridge Analytica aimed micro-targeted ads with knowingly misleading promises at micro-demographics.

The whole point of Brexit was to remove local and EU democratic oversight and turn the UK into a neoliberal dictatorship. Those responsible are perfectly happy to trash most of the UK's economy as long as they personally get much, much richer.

The entire project is a shocking exercise in leveraging exceptionalist collective narcissism into a pretext for oligarchy and corruption on a Russian scale.

> The whole point of Brexit was to remove local and EU democratic oversight and turn the UK into a neoliberal dictatorship.

Of course, the expectation that the EU should be saving the UK from its local elites who the UK press and voters continue to protect and elect is a strange one. It's certainly antidemocratic.

It's even stranger if you think about another common anti-Brexit argument: that many of the "EU laws" which caused people to vote for Brexit were actually created by the UK and Brexit supporters were tricked into blaming the EU for them, where the "UK" in question was actually the same tiny group of UK leaders that we're meant to fear Brexit will hand over control to, behind closed doors, with no real functioning democratic oversight.

It did moderate some of the more vicious impulses of local elites. Look at the enthusiasm with which they went at the human rights act.

My favourite analogy for the Brexit vote is as follows:

Imagine if you will, voting on what to have for dinner.

30% are vegetarian 30% eat only pork 30% eat only beef 10% eat any meat

Now, if the only two options are meat or no-meat, then you're going to get 30% voting for no-meat and 70% voting for meat - a clear majority. However when you got to the shops, what do you buy? Pork will only satisfy 40% and beef will only satisfy 40%, so you're going to end up with 60% unhappy with the choice.

I think you describe the fundamental crisis of democracy. No single proposal ever has a majority of support. So you get what is essentially a confidence motion... that the 'winner' themselves would not survive.

That's a weakness of FPTP voting systems, not of democracy

Import taxes are a 100% voluntary policy of the United Kingdom that has nothing to do with any negotiations (except insofar as the UK uses them for leverage). The government could abolish these taxes with the stroke of a pen, effective tomorrow.

>How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly?

It's my understanding that a failure to reach an acceptable solution to the Irish border produced a worse deal with a Europe less willing to compromise and also drained away the time to negotiate new trade agreements before Brexit went into effect. In a sense, Britain's colonial past came back to bite it.

No other outcome was possible. Why would europe have given the UK anything?