Brexiters are waking up to the damage they've done | Hacker News Reader

Brexiters are waking up to the damage they've done

theguardian.com

34 pointsbelltaco15 comments

The Brexit vote also helped some politicians wake up to the damage they did in regards to better understanding ‘winners and losers in globalization’

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to offload environmental damage to China while gutting the middle class in your own country

Yes, in total the country is ‘richer’ after doing this, but most all of those gains went to the 1%; 99% suffered to prop up the ultra wealthy.

If policy makers don’t figure out how to fix the productivity/wage divergence (https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/) we will only see more populist rage.

All the idiots who voted for brexit voted for this and don’t get to complain. They should be compensating the people who actually paid attention to real facts rather the racism and nationalism.

Of course that won’t happen and England needs to accept that it is now going to become irrelevant - there’s no benefit to having business in Britain beyond access to just the market. Finance companies are already leaving, and vehicle manufacturing is probably not too far off either.

>Finance companies are already leaving

This sounds totally untrue, and the reverse is actually accurate. Banks are doubling down on London.

Goldman Sachs just built a new 1 billion pound office while Morgan Stanley is searching for a new office -- in London.

Even Deutsche Bank has committed to a new London office in 2023.

That's just the legacy finance companies, there's also Transferwise and other startups who aren't leaving.

Traditional tech companies are also doubling down on London. Google just built a giant new London office. LinkedIn is building a new London HQ. Netflix is also building a new London office.

It isn't surprising considering the talent available in London as compared to EU countries. Salaries continue to be substantially better in London for tech and finance workers.

It can true that some finance companies are leaving, and some are doubling down.

It's not clear from either statement whether Brexit was net positive for the finance industry, or the UK as a whole.

It'll take more time and analysis than plucking random statements to determine the net effect of Brexit.

The Goldman office is not fully staffed any more, and many bankers are leaving for Europe. The euro market has gone already, and others aren’t far behind.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-15/brexit-is...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-18/london-fi...

The other aspect you’ve failed to notice is that many companies are eschewing offices now. They’ve proven they can work without them; Docker, for example, is now going fully remote.

To be honest, the above comment is exactly why Brexit happened: a refusal to see the bleeding obvious while chest-thumping and saying “we are the greatest”.

It’s why trade is basically avoiding the UK and new sea routes have opened up between Ireland And Europe — because the UK has made trade inefficient. No amount of chest thumping is going to change that dynamic, and England will be poorer because of it.

Reality doesn’t care about Brexit ideology.

Multiple finance firms are on record as doubling down on London, including all of the largest names.

Your sources are all conjecture.

>“I would expect that 3,000 to 4,000 more investment bankers, especially industry-focused specialists and debt and equity issuance advisers, will have to leave London and come back to Europe,” said Andreas Halin, founder of Global Mind Executive Search Consultants GmbH

Oh, so it's analyst conjecture and not an actual source. Goldman Sachs themselves have committed to the city -- with a billion dollars in office space alone.

>London Finance Job Openings Fell 49% in 2020 on Brexit, Covid

Huge leap to blame this on Brexit given the virus conditions. In actual reality, looking at real headcount numbers from the Financial Times, almost nothing has happened (some firms have expanded). [1]

[1] https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...

And what are the Remainers to do? The damage is done, and rejoining the EU is politically impossible for the foreseeable future of both sides of the channel. For many, their lives are too interlinked and rooted in Britain to leave.

It feels very pessimistic currently as a remainer. Yes, there will be benefits to leaving for some, and life will mostly go on. But it’s heartbreaking to see the damage done as predicted.

How come Brits let their politicians convince them to not see the blaringly obvious coming?

Many reasons:

• Optimism and national pride. "We hold all the cards". EU was expected to give UK an even better deal, because "EU needs the UK more than UK needs the EU".

• Tabloids somehow managed to make the word "expert" mean "a clueless idiot", so all predictions were easily dismissed as "project fear".

• Leave proponents enthusiastically agreed that EU sucks and UK is great. Remainers had mixed messaging like "EU is not that bad", "EU is bad, but we can fix it", "UK is not as great as you think".

• Populism. For some the dogwhistle of "securing borders"/"stopping immigration" was more important than anything else.

Very few decisions don't have some undesirable consequences.

In this case the undesirable consequences were mostly foreseen by Brexit opponents, while Brexit supporters were fed a constant stream of xenophobia and economic utopia by large corporate interests and politicians riding (and stoking) the populist rage.

> the undesirable consequences were mostly foreseen by Brexit opponents

Indeed, and they could have been known to some Brexit supporters too. My point was that even if a decision has some undesirable consequences it might still be the right decision.

The balance of pros and cons is what makes a judgement, not that there are cons.

You're right. In this case though, I think the cons are notable because a proper balancing wasn't the basis of the decision because the cons weren't simply acknowledged as being worth the gains: They were outright dismissed as either overblown or fear mongering. Followed by a few years where there cons might have been minimized save for administrations that appear determined to get a hard Brexit, despite claims to the contrary.

I agree, though this is par for the course on political positions and commentary.

It's rare to see anyone who holds a position that can accept any weaknesses in their position, or strengths in opposing views, despite that the real world is complex and positions relating to it will inevitably have pros and cons.

Well, there's a few groups: There's the true believers, and some of them are the ones waking up.

On the other end are the disaster capitalists who anticipated the chaos and planned on profiting from it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com