The UK is not being "punished". All the consequences of Brexit are imposed by the UK on the UK. (Also, it seems to be leading them somewhere more authoritarian, not less.)

Brexit for most people was about almost nothing at all. It was an empty shell of an idea that people poured their vision of a better country into. That's why the UK is being 'punished' - because nobody had a single actual decent idea of what they wanted.

"Brexit" the movement has lots of meanings to lots of people but is generally a set of issues/complaints. The people that movement enabled (brexiteers) have almost universally made those issues worse.

> introducing another layer of "barely elected" government

If the UK really cared about unelected government, why don't they get rid of their House of Lords? This would have been much less painful than Brexit. It looks a lot like this unelected government complaint is just an excuse and not something that they actually care about.

House of Lords?

Fair point, but we haven't had a democratically elected Prime Minister for quite a while now, let alone the House of Lords!

I’m not on-side with Brexit, but it’s not like the UK public have been given the chance to vote on dissolving the lords at this point.

That's the kind of opportunity which must be seized, not received. The French figured this out but the British probably never will.

Bloody revolution is not really appropriate here, the majority of the House of Lords is already not hereditary - of 780 seats, 90 are occupied by hereditary peers and AFAICT they will no longer pass their seats on.

The issue is whether the leaders of the commons should be able to appoint people to the upper chamber for life, whether the church should have a seat at the table etc. Or whether the upper chamber should be directly elected. It’s a matter of governance and constitution more than embedded privilege.

So as much as “Guillotine the nobs” would be a popular cry, most of them aren’t nobs in the first place.

This kind of cope is why you'll continue to be stuck with them.

I don’t live there, and explaining the situation, which you clearly don’t understand, is not ‘cope’.

I am confident that you have accurately conveyed the British mentality towards their circumstance, and therefore the reason their circumstance will continue.

I am confident you don’t understand what their circumstance is, such that your comments comparing it to the French situation a couple of centuries ago are born from nothing more than ignorance.

Hmm...

French Revolution - 1789.

English Revolution - 1649.

So the English cut off their Monarch's head before the French did. But we them invited the Monarch's back after not liking the republic of the "Lord Protector".

Admittedly the English state, not the later British state, but anyway...

I don't think they care about unelected government - a relative novelty in historical terms - so much as being ruled by foreigners.

I spent a long time rebutting each counterfactual in turn, but then I recognised that I was falling for a gish gallop. Furthermore, as dang is (rightly) adamant about avoiding personal remarks, I had to cut out the funny bits.

So instead, here's the simple truth.

The UK, in a surge of authoritarianism, cut its own balls off by leaving the EU (and the Civil rights it confers). It did this to appease fringe nutjobs and to make a pile of money for hedgies. Then it howled in pain and blamed the EU, even though the EU was against the chopping of the plums from the get-go.

The conditions for this bollockectomy were created by a barely-elected government, after the fall of which we have had, mainly, unelected government.

This entire manoeuvre was done under a screed of fractal dishonesty, in which scuttling little fibs decorate a structure of brassy falsehoods all stacked higgledy-piggledy on a giant whopper. Unwilling to accept the blame, the responsible parties continue to lie to this day.

In a parallel move completely unrelated to the above, the unelected UK government is ramping up surveillance. The EU has not done this, but the liars blame it anyway.

Today I learned the phrase “gish gallop”, which is both really useful and really fun to say.