Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120486821#Comment_120486821

Honestly I didn't even know the Orient Express was still a thing; those price-points are so eye watering you'd imagine this might only effect UK clientele most able to "simply" decamp to Mainland Europe in the first place. Certainly makes for an arresting, symbolic headline WRT to the continuing shambles of Brexit.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487585#Comment_120487585

Where that could have more of an effect on mood, given the much larger numbers of people heading there. Mind you, I'd never underestimate Britons' ability to blame the French when it comes to any self-inflicted wound. Goodness knows we've seen that enough already since 2016; no doubt the narrative will quickly pivot to how the French are "punishing" the UK'ers.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487585#Comment_120487585

Ffs the complaints are hilarious talk about privileged like. Their direct train to a foreign countries tourist attraction is gone.

You can barely get from Limerick to Dublin direct and people are moaning about Disneyland.

Leroy42

It's not about privilege. It's about something previously being there being taken away, for no identified benefit.

That it doesn't affect that many aren't really the point, but it is one of the reasons why Brexit was able to get through. They sold it as only impacting others (mainly foreigners).

ancapailldorcha

I'm reading Sebastian Payne's chronicle of his travels around the red wall at the moment. He mentions meeting a former fish merchant who met Johnson during the 2019 election campaign. She apparently implored him over 20 times to protect the UK's fishing industry and can barely contain her rage and what has befallen England's coastal towns. She aspires to set up a political party to represent them and, of course does not regret voting for Brexit.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487995#Comment_120487995

She could call them the Dory party 😝

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487947#Comment_120487947

The 'removing rights and freedoms' aspect is the most incredible part of Brexit. Removing freedom of movement for all UK citizens (after it being in place for nearly 50 years) and the Tories and the right wing press selling that as a 'win' is almost unbelievable.

wexfordman2

All part of the "they need us more than we need them" mentality, they never though ght it would happen, they were the UK, the feed the entire European tourist industry sure don't you know

Seth Brundle

The Spectator continues pedalling the nonsense about Brexit; this time that Rejoiners are spouting lies and misinformation...

Those opposed to leaving the European Union repeatedly accuse Brexit of being based on ignorance fed by lies. The ‘lie’ they invariably refer to is the £350 million on the side of the Boris bus. In reality, it was the Remain campaign, and its interminable Rejoiner sequel, that was and is based on systematic distortions and gross misunderstandings.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/be-honest-brexit-didnt-cost-us/

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120488430#Comment_120488430

The way my friends go on about as kids heading to northern France in the summer like it was Kilkee or something I'm not sure it really sank in that it was a different country they went to.

Most of them just seemed to hang around a camp site with other English people by the sounds of it anyway.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120488500#Comment_120488500

If you're not on the Brexit right, why would you care what the Spectator says? They've been at this since the seventies.

CelticRambler

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120488848#Comment_120488848

When we lived in Kent, it was just like going to Kilkee. Some weekends, we'd spend walking on the cliffs at Dover looking across the coast of France; others, we'd jump in the car and scoot over (or under) the Channel and do our shopping in the supermarkets of Calais or Boulogne. We'd have visited "northern France" ten or fifteen times for every one time we went to somewhere exotic, like London or Birmingham.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120489804#Comment_120489804

Ya but I bet you were not thick enough to think Brexit would not have an impact on your trips.

CelticRambler

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120490324#Comment_120490324

No, that's true. We'd left Britain's green sham... grey concrete shores long before Brexit raised its ugly head, not least because the precipitating signs were already evident, but it was mindnumbingly difficult to understand how so many of those who stayed behind argued that "Brexit won't change anything, we were perfectly able to travel to/move to France before we joined the EEC" when it was clear to us that most of them never really knew what pre-EEC British life was like. A good number of them were born into the EEC, and they'd been beneficiaries of the Four Freedoms for the whole of their adult lives.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120491034#Comment_120491034

Kent was a particularly baffling pro Brexit area in my experience. Met a crazy amount of people from the Eurostar stop town of Ashford who were pro Brexit.

Leroy42

It isn't really baffling when you look at the lines they were sold. Everything was going o stay the same for the UK, the EU would give them everything they wanted and the UK would be getting full EU membership without any of the rules.

Not only that but there would be massive benefits. No more foreigners. Council taxes would drop, and the cost of food and clothing would drop. All that money that was being given for free to all the rest of the EU could now be spent in the UK. Schools, hospitals, roads.

When you are unhappy with how your life is going, unhappy with how the country is going, and people tell you that they not only have a fix but a fix that would leave everyone, well everyone in the UK, better off, there really isn't anything baffling about it.

And the electorate need to take a long hard look at themselves. Not only did they vote it through, they then doubled down with giving May another term, and doubled down again to give Johnson a massive majority. Even now there is a huge amount that reckon that Starmer isn't great. With the disaster that Brexit has been the Tories should be wiped out.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120491678#Comment_120491678

Lots of people who voted remain heard that and know it was bullsht too.

There is a bit too much mollycoddling of Brexiters and blaming of political or media gaslighting when a fair amount was was willful ignorance and a pride in ones own stupidity. The mentality of the kinds of places who bemoan experts and ostracize anyone who tries to educate themselves or climb out of the crab bucket.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120491678#Comment_120491678

Nobody really believed in the apocryphal benefits of Brexit though. There'd have been riots if they did.

Brexit was never about economics. That was the mistake that Cameron, Osborne & Stronger In made. People had had enough with stagnation in wages and cost of living and the red tops successfully attributed the blame for this onto Labour, the EU and foreigners. The stuff about food prices going down was a man behind the curtain to hide the sheer stupidity of what was being proposed.

It's the same reason why Johnson won in 2019. It wasn't about levelling up. It was about his optimistic persona and the can do attitude that he projected before spending the pandemic years handing out peerages and taxpayers' cash to his friends before heading to the US speaking circuit.

As for the electorate, only 17.4 million out of a country of almost 70 million voted for the thing. It still triggered Brexit but plenty of people saw through it.

I'd heartily recommend this to anyone who is curious about people voting for Brexit:

serfboard

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120491775#Comment_120491775

I'd be someone who would understand, if not mollycoddle, some people who voted for Brexit. Take the constituency of Boston and Skegness, the only constituency which still thinks that Brexiting was the right thing to do according to a recent poll (everywhere else is either tied or thinks that it was wrong). According to Wikipedia:

The constituency has a lower level of qualifications than the East Midlands average and the average for Great Britain ... In 2019, the average gross weekly pay for people working full-time was ... lower the average for Great Britain. The most common jobs are process plant and machine operatives and sales and customer service occupations. Around 40% of workers work in one of these areas, more than twice the national average. The constituency also has a lower employment rate and a higher level of people on unemployment benefits than the averages for the region and the country.

According to the 2011 UK Census, Boston was "home to a higher proportion of Eastern European immigrants than anywhere else in England and Wales". People born in other EU countries, most of whom came from Eastern Europe after the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, made up 13% of the town's population. The BBC described the town as "one of the most extreme examples in Britain of a town affected by recent EU immigration".

So you're a poorly educated manual worker or unemployed person living in Boston, and you can barely afford your rent. You see Eastern European immigrants come in and take all the better jobs (because they're better qualified, but you won't be factoring that into your analysis). These better-paid immigrants can thus afford better housing and are pushing the locals out of the better areas.

You then put what you're seeing, along with what's on the front pages of the Express/Mail who tell you that your current situation is all the EU's fault and Brexit is the answer. In this scenario, Brexit doesn't even have to promise you that much - just that once we're out of the EU things will be better. In your desperation, you conclude that that is the case, and that things could not be any worse.

The education level point is relevant because: Recent studies show that education level was one of the most important determinants for voting Leave or Remain.

In fact, had just 3 per cent more of the population gone to university, the UK would probably not be leaving the EU.

The Tories have done in the UK what the Americans have also done - starved the public education system of funding, so that the best teachers go into private education, leaving publicly funded pupils less likely to go into further education. These people can then be targeted with all sorts of propaganda. As Donald Trump declared: I love the poorly educated.

And I would argue that, taking growing inequality in Britain into account, the decision of the UK to impose no restrictions on the 2004 accession countries, and George Osborne's disastrous (and unnecessary) austerity budgets were two of the biggest-contributing recent decisions which gave rise to Brexit in later years.

Water John

George Osbourne, responsible for a lost decade.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120493109#Comment_120493109

Keep in mind that there would have been very specific reasons why there so many EU migrant workers in Boston - almost certainly because the locals were too uneducated, unskilled and unmotivated to even fill the local vacancies. So they ended up blaming EU citizens for their own total uselessness as a workforce. It also explains why racism against ethnic minorities is often rampant in these communities.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120493109#Comment_120493109

A lot of people in those areas are their own downfall when it comes to education. There is an awful lot of holding their own down and I have little sympathy having seen it most of my life.

If you have ever seen a child actively discouraged from reading a book by an adult you'll get where I'm coming from.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120493109#Comment_120493109

I'd to google this. Apparently, it's true. Source here:

https://thelincolnite.co.uk/2023/01/boston-and-skegness-only-places-in-uk-which-dont-regret-brexit-poll-claims/

The Boston and Skegness constituency has kept its crown as the Brexit capital in a poll which claims it’s the only constituency to not regret leaving the EU.

The overwhelming majority of the UK now thinks that Britain voted for the wrong choice in the referendum, it claims.

Respondents were asked by pollster UnHerd Britain whether they agreed with the statement “Britain was wrong to leave the EU”.

Boston and Skegness, which had the highest Leave vote in the country, saw 41% disagree with the statement and 37% agree.

I get what you're saying here but there's a flaw in your argument. Thatcherism economically decimated the north and earned Labour a series of safe seats that endured for decades. Being poorly educated is of course important but that demographic has only felt the tip of the spear thus far. Wait until we start adopting AI and robots en masse. One of the most common tropes I've heard from older people is that the young don't work hard enough, a lens that's never used on themselves and others within their own demographic. We knew what Johnson was long before he started travelling around in a red bus. It was plain for all to see. The thing with democracy is that people always get the result they deserve. Always.

I complained about the price of property to my aunt's husband once. The response was him and his friends ganging up on me to shout about how lazy I was as I only had the one job (in fairness, the man himself did vote remain, ironically). Whenever it's someone like him, poor old Johnny foreigner get it. Said aunt's husband runs a business which exclusively hires Romanians.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120493152#Comment_120493152

I'd say were into the second one here. There'll arguably be at least a third as well.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120493612#Comment_120493612

This in a massive way. The amount of snide comments I got when I was in my teenage years was unreal. I spent my evenings after school staying in classrooms studying. I knew it was my only way out. Of course, I'm living like a student nearly 15 years after the fact while my unemployed sister lives in a free house having more children. Maybe the degree didn't do that much...

ancapailldorcha

Michael O'Leary speaking out:

The chief executive of Ryanair has claimed Britain will be forced to rejoin the European Union’s single market by a generation of pro-Europeans as Brexiteers die out.

Michael O’Leary, the boss of Europe’s largest airline, claimed the British people had been sold a “tissue of lies” over the benefits of quitting the EU and said exiting the bloc had been “unbelievably messy”.

Mr O'Leary accused Boris Johnson of being “completely delusional” about Brexit and said leaving the EU would be a “net negative” in the next five years.

Ireland’s best-known businessman claimed Britain would be forced to rejoin the single market within the next 15 years, arguing that demographics would support the shift.

The 62-year-old said: “In the next five to 10 years, quite a number of the Brexiteers will die, as the average age of them is about over 70. Younger people coming through are much more pro-European.”

I think he's missed some points such as the state of the Conservative party, the willingness of the EU to readmit the UK, the work that will need to be done to mount a strong campaign and the time all of this will take.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fbusiness%2F2023%2F04%2F19%2Fdelusional-brexiteers-will-die-soon-says-ryanair-chief%2F

ambro25

“I think he's missed some points such as the state of the Conservative party, the willingness of the EU to readmit the UK, the work that will need to be done to mount a strong campaign and the time all of this will take”

I think all that is baked into his 15 years timescale estimate.

FWIW I’ve long had it at 10-ish years from actual Brexit day (1st March 2021) myself, considering the scale and pace of socio-economic vandalism.

In personal Brexit-ish -related news, I am quitting my current post after our integration into the British ‘mothership’ last summer. It’s been one ungodly mess since the start, to rival the Conservatives’ handling of Brexit.

I fixed it once, and built them a Ferrari of a professional services setup here; they turned it into a borked Trabant overnight for <reasons>, remaining completely deaf to feedback, suggestions and info about local market (jury’s still out on whether it’s been deliberate, for winding down the local operation without hefty redundancies:35+% local staff turnover since last summer 🙄). I’m not staying to fix it again, moreover they cannot afford me anymore.

After yesterday’s unexpected news from a colleague that he is also quitting (after 16 years), they’re now in a very serious situation, with only 3 people left (1,5 with actual experience) who are capable (qualified/authorised) of doing EU work. Now this is a tier 1 outfit in our professional world, with a global reputation spanning decades, doing EU work for Fortune 50 companies. Going down the tubes in 3,2,1…

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120497963#Comment_120497963

I can't see the uk rejoining, too much losing face involved, but I can see a single market fudge happening.

It seems inevitable that Britain will end up aligning with northern Irelands access, call it the Irish regulatory alignment, or IRA for short.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120498167#Comment_120498167

That's a really sad story, ambro. I hope you come out of it in a happier position than you started but, even so, it's depressing to see an enterprise that you have put so much into trashed by the poor decisions of others.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120498167#Comment_120498167

I'm genuinely sorry to hear this. You've always been incredibly helpful with regards to my attempts at career change. I hope things improve for you soon. 

You're in Luxembourg as I recall. I was under the impression that you'd aligned with the continental side of things. It's sad to see Brexit continuing to undermine professional services and people's lives in this way. 

My landlord just gave me my marching orders so I've to move shortly and the market here has gone mental. I think I'm going to just give up and see if I can get a nice pharma manufacturing job in the west of Ireland in a few years. 

This entire mess has benefitted almost nobody and we still have far too few people here who'll actually say it as it is. 

PokeHerKing

Is there a breakdown of the brexit vote by age?

I've heard claims of both, that it was the grey vote amd also that it was split relatively evenly across age groups?

ambro25

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120498270#Comment_120498270

Thank you for your kind thoughts, Peregrinus.

It is very much that indeed, but then a sorry-not-sorry outcome.

None of us leavers (ha!) is losing anything out, only the British firm…and therein lies the flagrant Brexit parallel: the senselessness of their insular method and execution, when the operation could have been synergistic instead, but for some bilateral dialogue and planning. But then, with a partnership full of OxBridge types who know best…

Anyway, like so many other Brits, politician and business types alike, they’ll have to learn the hard way.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120498448#Comment_120498448

I’m sticking with the sector and will still be around for some career advice if requested, ancapailldorcha 😉

Sorry to hear about your own circumstances, I too hope that you turn things around for the best.

Re. “I was under the impression that you'd aligned with the continental side of things”

I hadn’t so much ‘aligned with continental side of things’, as adopted a position of “mercenarial ambivalence”, with the occasional coating of Schadenfreude in debates out of frustration at the lack of constructive opposition in the U.K.

Still pretty much that way inclined now.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120498760#Comment_120498760

No. The young rejected it but were less likely to vote. A slim majority of reliable older voters were behind its passing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/520954/brexit-votes-by-age/