Eh, yes and no.
A lot of the financial backing given to pro-Brexit politicians was from rich City types hoping to be deregulated, it's true.
But London, the financial centre, had some of the lowest support for Brexit (outside of Scotland). Areas like the West Midlands and Yorkshire had the highest levels of support, and they've got no financial industry to speak of.
Areas with higher unemployment and lower economic development and opportunities often tend to vote on the extremes of the spectrum out of desperation. It's easy to think the EU or foreigners too your jobs away and that leaving the EU will somehow make it better.
In almost any normal society the 'left' would be 80 to 90% of the vote and if it isn't that's usually because of some demagogue or trick, immigration, religion, frustrations about various (often perceived) injustices and so on.
again, total rubbish
the working class mostly voted against mass low-skilled immigration from the EU
it was very much in their interests to cut off this stream of competition, and a few years later...
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-sees-fastest-wage-rises-...
to me it seems like they knew exactly what they were voting for (vs. EU regional development fund money for the town's middle class opera house/cultural centre/...)
Hmm, the article is from February 2022, aka right when we had "peak economy" just before the wordlwide shit hit the fan and everything tanked again, so I'm curious how much of that wage grows was just due to the Covid money printing boom that drove up demand in all sectors, coupled with reduced immigration due to Covid travel restrictions, is the true cause of this this wage boost instead it being the cause of just "EU workers diluted our wages".
>it was very much in their interests to cut off this stream of competition
Except now they have even more competition from outside the EU, with the UK reaching migration records as of recently. And non-EU cheap labor tends to be even cheaper compared to cheap EU labor.
Of course the pandemic economic boom coupled with temporary cutting off of migration due to covid travel restrictions would cause wages to spike in 2020-2022 but that could very well be temporary now with the increase migration from non-EU countries and with lower investments into the UK due to the lack of EU membership bringing the labor demand back down within the next 10+ years.
My point is only time will tell whether Brexit will or will not improve working class wages, the past ~3 years were a anomaly on many fronts. We'll just have to wait and see.
you answered your own question here
> Except now they have even more competition from outside the EU, with the UK reaching migration records as of recently. And non-EU cheap labor tends to be even cheaper compared to cheap EU labor.
there's a minimum salary requirement
previously this didn't apply to labour from the EU, now it does
so they've all but completely shut out low wage competition from the EU
sounds like they got exactly what they wanted
Excuse me but how is this the EU's fault and not the UK's own fault for not enforcing some sort of minimum wages before?
Where I live now in Austria, there are legally require minimal salary bands negotiated yearly by unions for every profession, so no matter where you come from for work, an employer here is mandated to pay you at least that legal mandated salary regardless if you are Austrian, EU or non-EU, just so it's much more difficult for an employer to wage-dump by using desperate migrants.
So, what stopped the UK from enforcing minimum salary bands on all workers instead of going through the extreme self flagelatory route of leaving the EU and loosing out on the EU membership benefits instead? You might say that would have been difficult and complex to implement, but so was Brexit and that came with pain on the side.
To me, most of the issues the UK complained it was suffering because of the EU, like this one and others, were all self inflicted through poor internal policies, as other wealthy nations in the EU did have proper measures in place to not have the issues the UK had, so blaming the EU was UK's lazy way of pointing fingers for it's own pollical incompetence.
>sounds like they got exactly what they wanted
For now maybe, but long term that could be being penny wise but pound foolish. Investors invested a lot in the UK post 2014 because being part of the EU was a big selling point. Who knows how it will play out now that the UK is isolated and with open borders.
It's really easy. Germany has a minimum wage. Everyone has to get it. End of story. That's just a problem UK made for itself before and politicians who got pressured by their donors to keep the cheap labor as long as possible looked around and "uh ... its ... uh ... the EU is at fault!"
Spot on. All the problems the UK was complaining about were entirely self inflicted but also entirely fixable internally without having to leave the EU.
The EU was not stopping the UK form fixing it's shit, like implementing minimum wages or expelling illegal migrants, the same way the EU wasn't stopping Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Finland, etc. from taking care of their internal matters much better than the UK has.
I'm sure the working class are devastated that foreign investors have potentially lost money
> Excuse me but how is this the EU's fault and not the UK's own fault for not enforcing some sort of minimum wages before?
it has one?
you have missed the point entirely, and have now dropped to arguing in bad faith
goodbye
Then it was a very poorly implemented one that obviously does not work.
>I'm sure the working class are devastated that foreign investors have potentially lost money
Who's the one responding in bad faith here? Investors aren't just the stereotypical Monopoly Man smoking cigars in his top hat while driving his convertible in central London.
Investors means all the companies opening up shop in the UK creating jobs for those working class people: semiconductor, auto manufacturers, aerospace, metal work, med tech, electronics, etc. Outside of the EU, the UK becomes less attractive to open up jobs there by international investors.
You clearly have no understanding what "investment" means and instead responding in bad faith to invisible straw men with a chip on your shoulder.
total rubbish, almost 100% of the City were pro remain, with maybe a handful of people/firms as leavers
I was on a trading floor that day, and the impotent rage at the "wrong" result was present from everyone, from the interns upto the MDs
what I imagine most of the Dutch went through last week
I totally believe you and the traders tend to be very keen about what the near future is going to bring (barring black swan events).
As for the Dutch, yes, it's embarrassing.
Who do you think will take responsibility for Brexit?
where did you get your information exactly? a section of the high quality British press?
there's your answer
remain had almost the entire British establishment behind it: the government, the civil service, all large political parties, most of the media, the City and all other industry. these groups mostly had their own self-interested reasons for wanting to remain ($$$ at risk dependent on the result)
leave had Aaron Banks, Farage and maybe a dozen other prats. they also had their own self-interested reasons for wanting to leave ($$$ at risk dependent on the result)
in terms of access to resources, remain absolutely dominated leave by several orders of magnitude
this was one of the reasons it was such a shocking result
> That the economy as a whole shrunk doesn't seem to have impacted them much
it didn't shrink as a whole, it's larger than it was in 2016
and since 2019 it's grown more than its France and Germany (peer nations), in both absolute and relative terms
Of course the marketeers working for the relatively wealthy fraction of the UK got paid handsomely. That wealthy fraction finds themselves without a hairs breadth of Brussels interference to enrich themselves further at the expense of the rest of the population in the UK, and they don't really care: they are now the largest fish in a much smaller pond and as long as the smaller fish can be kept in line they will make bank.
Not that any of the smaller fish would ever admit to being duped, after all this is a team sport and what matters is that your team wins, not that that which you have won is actually a step back.