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Comment by hkt | Hacker News Reader

As a British person, I'd suggest you reconsider. Things over here are not so rosy. Drugs shortages, crazy inflation, no discernible benefits at all except to a government that hates judicial oversight of any kind.

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The UK has been doing a bad job at a lot of things and they ended up blamed the EU. Now all the problems are blamed by the opposition on leaving the EU.

The reality is that most of the UKs problems were not because of the EU before and are not because they left the UK now.

Can you share more about this 'drug shortage'? Is it like the empty shop shelves and empty fuel pumps that is claimed to still exist for years now despite being resolved within days/weeks at the time?

IDK about the UK, but in Czechia, we had a shortage of, among others, antibiotics, only very recently alleviated.

At the worst times, you could phone to thirty pharmacies with a relatively standard recipe (Augmentin etc.) and be turned away everywhere.

Been there, done that.

The fact is not everything was the EU's fault. There was a lot Westminster could have done to make things better. They choose not to and indeed actually gold plated many EU directives due to virtue signaling which made them much more difficult to follow.

That said not all the good stuff actually was caused by the EU either. I'd recommend watching Yes Minister but apparently that will get you put on a watchlist these days... https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1153smh/yes_min...

The fact is politicians at all levels including EU take credit for things they didn't do and try to ignore the fallout from things they did. All the while blaming the voters. Mainly because changing public perception of policy choices takes time and effort and they have limited of both and tend to want to focus on things they actually care about.

"Drugs shortages, crazy inflation"

Sounds precisely like Czechia right now.

I think inflation in the EU is roughly at the same level as the UK right now.

edit: apparently this is a controversial statement

Its actually higher than in the UK.

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate?con...

I see Sweden the "utopia" that some claim has even higher inflation than UK, I guess that must be because of Brexit too right? And Italy, the land of the great food?

The UK would do much better had they not chosen Brexit. Basically everyone here admits that (bank of England etc) apart from some zealot politicians. And the health system has collapsed. The problems are not solely caused by Brexit but it exacerbates nearly all of them.

Exactly. Brexit long term net effect could be a few points off their GDP. That's not the end of the world, but it's certainly significant and it will make British people a poorer, which of course has an impact on public services. Whether this is worth it's up to British people to assess.

My personal suspiction is that UK citizens were mislead about the consequences of leaving but, hey, democracy is about taking decisions with incomplete information. People have spoken and their decision is sacred. I wish the UK the best luck and it's with sadness that I believe they will need a lot of it.

Democracy is about informed voters. The voters were tricked by silly things like lying bus ads. Doesn’t look like a Democracy to me.

If your definition of Democracy requires no deception or falsehood in politics then there likely has never been a Democracy in human history. The voters never work with perfect knowledge, and the politicians always lie.

There's a bar to what we should call Democracy. It clearly isn't America with how liberal manufacturing consent works. We're in a neoliberal era.

Besides their xenophobia and racism, at least the Nordic countries are closer to informed voters.

Euro Area inflation is significantly lower than UK, same as Germany, France, Spain, ...

In the EU as a whole it's slightly higher because of the East countries (Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, ...) where inflation is crazy high because of their dependency on Russia for energy.

UK is in the very West of Europe, not East, and not reliant on Russia as East countries are. The economic impact of Brexit has just been significant, as it was supposed to be. Everybody knew it would be. Brexit was never about economy, but mainly sovereignty. That's a legitimate trade-off, of course, and many in the UK prefer to be a bit poorer in exchange for less dependency on their neighbours. I respect that. But it's important not to fool oneself thinking that leaving the highest economy in the world (EU economy was bigger than US' before UK left) was going to be good for the UK economy. That's just nonsense.

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