I was ordering bike parts in the UK from Belgium, after the import taxes hit the company, they lost 80% of their sales.
How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly?
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.
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.
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.
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.
UK explicitly chose to avoid such arrangements.
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 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.
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.
(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 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.)
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
(nothing)
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.
The stock "it's the EU's fault!" response is nonsense, again.