The UK's Brexit dream is dead
politico.eu
politico.eu
I think we see that with two of Labour's key manifesto pledges would be either impossible or very difficult to do with EU/SM membership.
Firstly - VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Potentially you could argue for some exemption but I think it would be very slow.
Secondly - Labour's idea of "nationalising" the UK railways is really at odds with EU policy. Netherlands has an ECJ case pending because they do not allow private operators to bid for at least parts of it. I think this could potentially be mitigated but it is really not the spirit or direction of travel of EU law.
I think it's also important to add while a lot of legislation wasn't repealed, a lot of EU legislation is not being added to UK statue books. I think the UK would want to take a very different path on AI regulation vs the EU for example, and had we stayed in would have been a huge point of contention.
There is a lot more nuance in this Brexit argument. While I certainly didn't support it, this does not mean everything the EU does is good, especially in tech. There is too much black and white thinking going on with it. I'd also add that EU growth has been exceptionally poor compared to the US. Something is going wrong in Europe as a whole; and I suspect poor quality overregulation by the EU on growth industries is a (potentially small) part of that picture.
Given the long history of people the in the UK spouting absolute nonsense about what is or is not possible under EU law, do you have a reliable source for that claim?
Member States shall exempt the following transactions:
[...]
(i) the provision of children's or young people's education, school or university education, vocational training or retraining, including the supply of services and of goods closely related thereto, by bodies governed by public law having such as their aim or by other organisations recognised by the Member State concerned as having similar objects;
(j) tuition given privately by teachers and covering school or university education;
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
But yeah, very little stopping the UK following Ireland's lead, particularly on relatively trivial matters like the private school fees thing.
Has already been implemented by the Tories, as all the private rail operators essentially went insolvent, Covid being the coup de grâce. That would be allowed under EU rules.
It does not mean you have to privatise or can't nationalize railways, it just means that private operators can exist and have to be able to use same rules and rates for access to infrastructure.
Whether it's good idea or not I can't say, but there's a lot of pro-trade neolibby thought like that in last few decades of EU law.
So labour will decide, they'll decide to align on some rules in exchange for reducing some friction. That is what Brexit meant. It meant tearing up the deal we had with the EU. Now it's torn up, we have to get on with deciding what our new relationship should be.
I almost understand why people voted for it initially but I'm staggered by how many people still believe in it.
The question on the referendum was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" and your choices were "remain" or "leave".
The correct referendum would have been something like "Should the United Kingdom (1) prepare a detailed plan for leaving the European Union and negotiate the necessary trade and travel and military agreements between the UK and the EU that implementing the plan would require, and then (2) hold a referendum on whether to enact that plan and ratify the accompanying agreements?"
From what I've read a lot of pro-Brexit voters envisioned a quite different Brexit than the one they actually got.
It's not something you ever read here on HN and it's very surprising/unusual, but for people who made their decision based only on the campaigns, hindsight shows that voting Leave was entirely correct and voting Remain was incorrect. You'd never be able to have that level of clarity over something like an election because there's too much vagueness involved, but the specific structure of the Brexit vote and campaigns actually allows an objective evaluation.
The reason is that both campaigns made unusually objective and testable claims. On the Remain side they predicted a huge and immediate recession if Leave won due to uncertainty, they predicted enormous "emergency" tax rises to compensate for that, they predicted the UK would not be able to stay in the Horizon research framework, and more generally they predicted that the UK would underperform relative to the rest of Europe due to new trade barriers hurting trade with Europe. On the Leave side they stated the UK would be able to implement an Australian-style points based immigration system, that it would allow for new trade deals, that it would let the membership fees be reallocated to general healthcare spending, that it would allow divergence from EU law and that it would let voters "take back control". Both sides made no specific predictions about what would happen in the Remain case iirc, because that was assumed to be the status quo.
Well, Leave did win, and that lets us test these predictions. The 500-800,000 job losses due to an uncertainty-created recession never happened, the UK is still in the Horizon research framework (after leaving and rejoining), and the trade ratio of EU:ROW for the UK hasn't changed. In fact there's been no discernable change in EU/UK trade whatsoever, implying the single market had no benefits. The UK's performance has matched the rest of the EU as well. So basically all their main predictions were wrong.
On the Leave side, the UK does now have a points-based immigration system, it does have new trade deals, the membership fees are now being spent on public services instead, the UK is diverging from EU law (albeit slowly), and so on. The main disappointment for Leave voters is that mass immigration ideology proved so strong that the Conservatives chose political suicide and set the points threshold so low that immigration soared instead of reducing, this is technically not a failure by Leave who only campaigned on having a controllable system. The implicit assumption was that politicians would prefer to keep their jobs and set the points threshold high than destroy their own party; this assumption was wrong and now voters are "taking back control" by wiping out the Tories and moving votes to Reform... something that would have previously been impossible (as Reform's manifesto wouldn't have been legal).
> [Labour Chancellor] Reeves said she does not think “anyone voted Leave because they were not happy that chemicals regulations were the same across Europe”,
The EC actually had a website for this at one point: https://web.archive.org/web/20200131192225/https://blogs.ec....
The WHAT?
I can't _really_ see people in the UK opting for a Norway type arrangement vs EU membership, though I suppose to some extent I suppose it does depend on how it's sold; per the Brexit referendum the public is not _that_ interested in the actual facts of the matter vs the marketing.
Like, grudges and personal issues aside, the numbers say the EU would be greatly bolstered with the UK in it.
> Boris Johnson is out of parliament, making millions from speeches and newspaper columns.
I'm pretty sure Boris thinks he succeeded just fine. The rest of the country, not so much.
> All the key Vote Leave characters have left the stage.
I get why you'd want to try to forget about Nigel Farage but the article even has a graph showing how spectacularly Reform is surging in the polls. They'll probably not quite get to the level they need to take a chunk of seats, as their voters are probably quite spread out, but if they get anything close to these numbers in the vote today, that would be pretty impressive. Politically at least.
No, but it's what the establishment who wanted nothing to change and Brexit to fail had in mind.
If Conservative Prime Ministers aren’t part of the establishment, who is?
They used it as a marketing trick and got stuck with it when the vote came in. Didn't plan to implement the changes people wanted it for, and didn't.
Recent tweet from them:
> YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU: Only one party can save Britain from the corrupt establishment.
> Today, vote with your HEART and vote for what you TRULY believe in.
All they got in exchange was a failed referendum on alternative voting. They proceeded to get crushed and almost vanished.
But here they are, potentially taking over from the Tories. There's some nine dimensional chess for you.
Which was sabotaged by the Tories reneging on promises they made to the Lib-dems, and the campaign against it led by Dominic Cummings, using the same "lets spend the money on the NHS instead" lie that he re-used for brexit.
The irony that passing this would have potentially saved them from destruction at the hands of Reform UK (and indeed avoided Brexit altogether) is an added delicous irony.
The mostly likely things that has made Brexit not work, if it could ever have worked, and other than the people in charge being terrible at their jobs, are the enormous headwinds of Covid and the war in Ukraine.
Covid was largely in the rear-view mirror by the time the UK _really_ left; the really disruptive changes didn't start til mid 2021.
You can never reason with cults, as their logical system are closed, self-referential and unfalsifiable.
Brexit was always an eventuality, but much like the empire was always going to fail.
> “The EU doesn't want us back," he said.
While I doubt the veracity of this statement, there's a saying on the continent that God knew why (s)he put the Brits on an island. I'm starting to believe that…
What is the point accepting someone who would not want to play together.
It's certainly a disaster compared to "we hold all the cards", said by a fraud and many were convinced by that fraud. I hope they are coming to understand that relative nightmare and turn out the fraudsters for a very long time.
At the end of that time I suspect they'll find themselves mostly not-as-well-off-as-they-could-be, rather than actually poverty stricken and isolated. It'll be the kind of thing economists point to on charts, but not really easy to see in the various economic noise.
I hope it's no worse than that. And maybe, just maybe, that somebody somewhere learned something.
The real question is, can they get out of it? It's one thing to do it for a few years, but, if nothing else, they can't afford to run current budget deficits forever, and they don't have _that_ much scope for increasing revenue other than growing the economy. And really that deficit is with spending lower than it should be; public services are really struggling at this point.
Like, in some sense it is an ordinary weak economy, but self-inflicted; the government's own office of budget responsibility reckons they've sacrificed 4% of GDP in the long term. For a developed economy, that's not a small hole to climb out of.
well they lost the right to live, work and freely travel through the EU.
and what did they gain in return for that. a weak economy.
If you're a small business that traded with the EU, it was a disaster. If you're a consumer who buys things from the EU, it was a disaster. If you were an assistance dog owner that travelling regularly to the EU, it was a disaster. If you were a young person hoping to study in the EU, it's a disaster.
If you're fairly rich/wealthy now, then sure, it's basically fine.
At the time of the vote I remember a conversation with a friend's wife, who is British. I simply asked her opinion. The response I got was so caustic and vitriolic. She was very much supportive of the separation, but had no real reason other than "the foreigners are taking jobs from those born in the UK".
She was fully convinced and pissed that I even asked because it clearly meant that I was challenging their rights and freedoms.
It was then that I knew it was not only a bad decision economically, but that it was being made out of irrational thinking and not logical decision making.