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Comment by patrickdavey | Hacker News Reader

Fascinatng that `brexit` isn't mentioned once in that article. Making trading harder with your closest neighbour can't be a great move for the economy.

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Yes that’s really funny. Im not sure how you can write an article like this and never even mention it once.

Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself, and the full effects are just starting to come to the surface now. I dont think the UK will ever fully recover from it.

> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself

America: Hold my beer...

> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself

From an economic standpoint, brexit was indeed a big L, but I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers.

from a non-economic standpoint it was just as stupid, the idea of "taking back control" is predicated on the concept that the UK was forced to accept rules imposed by others and would be free to stop doing that.

But the UK had substantial influence on those, and it no longer does, while still having to follow them to be able to do business with the EU.

And indeed, the UK has not really diverged from the EU in the last 8 years and voted a new government that wants to tighten the relationship.

It was a generic protest vote "I don't like how things are going and I was happier when I was young". I can empathize, but it was still self-inflicted harm.

It always amused me that people were voting for the clowns in Westminister to have more say. Even before Brexit they were showing how inept they all were so it was crazy to have confidence in them

As if EU parliament is not full of clowns too. At least local parliament has some windows to break close by.

- citizen of EU member, not happy with either national or eu parliaments :D

The EU parliament is elected with a much fairer system than the British one, half of which isn't even elected but nominated in return for bribes or being a bishop.

Hardly, it's full of people that each individual member state had no say on whether they were there or not.

Why should someone elected by the Polish electorate, or the Romanian one, have any say over what the British or Germans do? Especially when it's British & German money funding the project?

The EU is clearly going in a direction the British people do not like, and therefore they did the only thing they could after concessions were refused -leave.

If the EU were only interested in co-operation and trade, this would not be a problem. As it is, apparently it _is_ a problem. Why would that be, except to punish the British for daring to say "this isn't working - we don't want tighter integration"

Meanwhile, the EU continue to fiddle whilst Rome burns. British politics may be boned, but the people now have the ability to sack the lot of them as they did last summer. That is worth far more than a few % of GDP (which the British govt. have no interest in, or they'd be pushing policies that help growth - lower taxes, higher speed-limits, cheaper trains, reduction in gas prices etcetc) : as it is, all the stories we read are about slower roads, more expensive trains and higher taxes.

Common theme in EU parliament seems to be that people send politicians who shit the bed on national level for an expensive vacation to do next to nothing. Or being a celebrity in an unrelated field.

This is still better than the British system, where wealthy politicians who get voted out by their own constituents then get put in the House of Lords. It's then almost impossible to remove them.

See Zac Goldsmith for a recent example.

How much real power does House of Lords have?

But my biggest gripe with EU institutions is not EU parliament. Commission is much much worse. Especially with how special positions are assigned. It does not matter what is elected into EU parliament, each country sends someone. And that process is usually murky AF. And person being sent seems to not even know area-of-work in many cases. How EC speaker is „elected“ is yet another story. And then stories start to bubble up how this under-the-table formed EC is lobbying EP, all on our own tax money :D It'd be funny to watch if I wasn't a citizen of a member of this mess.

It no longer amazes me that people will blindly vote for 'anything different', particularly when whatever that difference might be is so vaguely defined. Indeed, it is even more effective for that 'difference' to remain vague or general winks without anything of substance to evaluate or hold someone to account on.

Brexit was absolutely about Economic conditions. Anti immigration sentiment was one big factor that everyone talks about, but in reality the sentiment itself was a symptom on display for the underlying condition of people having their living standards drop. The second big factor people kept bringing up was that EU was making decisions for UK, which people thought needed to be reversed. Austerity measures, which EU adopted, were the single biggest reason why people felt they needed more control. They also slowed down the post 2008 recovery, which meant people weren’t doing as well anymore. Anti immigration sentiment also rose once people were unhappy and needed someone to take the blame.

Absolutely agree.

When my boomer dad complains about the Pakistani family he went to sell something to having 2 BMWs it's definitely racist.

But the racism is inflamed by poor economic conditions, and the rationale is "how come these people that aren't even from here have a better life than me?"

Sadly, people seeking power know this and use the racism to get power and don't fix the underlying cause, which was never immigration — it was wealth inequality.

If they were of the same race as your dad, the question "how come these people that aren't even from here have a better life than me?" would still be valid.

If he can tell they're not from there, then he'll be mad. If he thinks they are fellow Englishmen he'll be less mad. That's the point, how prejudice often has a ground in economic conditions

It was sold as a win on all fronts. Who wouldn't want a new hospital every year?

I'm not sure people would vote for it if they knew it comes with an economic meltdown.

Maybe still they would do, though.

"We won, you lost, get over it!"

As my taxi driver neighbour in Dagenham like saying.

I attribute much of our malaise to it being a long time since anything was done on 'economic grounds'. I'd love for us to have a fraction of the desire for capitalist principles that former communist countries have.

> "I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers."

You think remainers missed all the racism from the leave side and thought it was only about economics? Even when Boris Johnson's Vote Leave, Michael Gove and George Osbourne, Labour representatives, Green Party representatives, Nichola Sturgeon, and Unison reps were publicly condeming Nigel Farage and UKIP for their "blatant attempt to incite racial hatred" poster?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Point_(UKIP_poster)

Whilst brexit was a bad idea —- look forward not backward! Planning reform is a viable opportunity and making it as good as possible is a much better use of energy than moaning about mistakes past.

It’s an article looking back at the last 16 years - hard to do that when you’re looking forward, no?

> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself,

Trump tries very hard to make Brexit the second most stupid thing a country did to itself.

Already achieved, easily.

Electing Trump twice makes Brexit look relatively wise.

The US seems determined to beat that record.

Brexit is a symptom, not the cause. The people who were most screwed by Britain's prior mistakes voted for it in a vain attempt at fixing the problem by throwing misguided nostalgia at it.

What were those prior mistakes?

Allowing the concentration of wealth solely amongst the super wealthy.

The British economy was doing quite well before Brexit. Now it's absolutely crippled.

I wonder how Napoleon would react to finding out that British voted to impose the continental system on themselves.

Real GDP per capita growth for US vs UK was almost identical until 2008. The last 3 years have been terrible for the UK, but if you're looking for the start of UK's stagnation you have to go much farther back than Brexit.

The problem I see is that although the trend may have started before, Brexit caused the local financial services sector to effectively collapse and move to the Netherlands and Germany. London will never be able to recover that loss in ten generations. Had brexiters not ejected your finance industry, there was probably an opportunity to recover.

As far as I am aware, this is just straight up is not true. Do you have a source for this? Because if the financial sector in the UK halved and moved into the Netherlands and Germany the UK would be doing much, much worse, and Germany much better economically.

See:

https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/31/brexit-four-yea...

which is a source that is not going to be biased towards Brexit success, and instead against it (not that there was any success in it, but still).

I looked this up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_centre#Global_Financ... ) and I think you have got things wrong.

This - the economy rode on financialisation and north sea oil for the two decades before 2008. Since 2008 there has been no real action to resolve the core issue of unlocking the potential of the North of England - everyone knows that that is low hanging fruit (human capital, regional infrastructure etc) but no one will actually take the risk and go for it.

Not really, growth in the UK has effectively stalled since 2008, quite a few years before Brexit.

I’m sure Brexit hasn’t helped, but it seems that the economic stewardship of the coalition and post-coalition governments was also lacking.

I don’t know what the UK can do about it, but it’s been stuck in a spiral of economic stagnation for over 15 years now.

That’s the time the Conservative Party were voted in and imposed “austerity”. This involved scaling back government spending and scratching their heads wondering why growth is stalled.

"Austerity is the idea that the global financial crash of 2008 was caused by there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton." - Alexei Sayle

It is insane that not only has it lasted multiple Conservative governments and appears to be alive and well under Starmer's Labour, but also that the USA has now decided to embrace it too.

I don't understand it, I thought these guys were all supposed to have studied economics (is that not the "E" in that Oxbridge "PPE" degree they all have) how are they fumbling the basics so badly

post '08 and until 2016 the UK economy was the fastest growing in the G7, notably countries that imposed much more severe austerity fared even better - Ireland who are still wedded to the policy continues to thrive, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian economies all grew at a much faster rate than the UK (and by extension the rest of the G7)

> post '08 and until 2016 the UK economy was the fastest growing in the G7,

Found George Osborne's account! Seriously though, you're wrong:

- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1370599/g7-country-gdp-g... there is one year (2014) where the UK has a higher GDP growth rate

- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1370625/g7-country-gdp-l... when looking at GDP per-capita it tells a similar story

Even reading those you can surely see it was the correct approach.

Reading the graphs I can see that you were making stuff up and can be safely ignored

Head in the sand eh? even using your data the picture is very different to what you were claiming and much closer to my assertion, so we use different sources...your conclusion is still incorrect.

Bet you're not interested in looking at the three Baltic states I mentioned or Ireland...because it would be another fistful of nails in the coffin of your purely ideological belief that "aUsTeRiTy BaD" (truthfully, some austerity is bad, but the fiscal kind).

We’d had a decade of zero growth and 30 years of industrial decline in the North. The country was not doing well, that’s the primary reason it was inevitable putting a big button marked “do not press, posh boy David Cameron says he doesn’t want you to but has no other solutions. Ignore the people saying it will fix the country” would result in the button being pressed.

The economy was doing well for some parts of the country, but you can only ignore the rest for so long.

Well now its not doing that well anywhere, bravo. Thats the problem with populists - they easily find some real issue and point to it, blaming all even completely unrelated woes on it. So far so good.

But the solution part is where all populists fail, since actually addressing it and its root causes always has to involve admitting that no, problem is actually much more complex, different etc. than I was voted for. Like trump stop blaming immigrants or its (former) allies for all US woes.

The cure? Nothing easy, intelligent moral population for democratic elections. Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good (ie refusing 6 weeks mandatory minimal paid vacation per year for workers). That's the population bar for true democracy.

Sure, I'm not saying Brexit was the solution to any of it, quite the opposite. But it wasn't a binary choice between X populist saying "Brexit will fix it immediately" and Y mainstream politician saying "here are the complex factors causing this issue, here's how we as a country can address them over so many years". It was a choice between "Brexit will bring sunlit uplands!" and "the country's doing well, don't ruin it!".

It's not hard to understand why, given that choice, someone stuck in a Northern ex-mining town facing zero prospects, poor housing, no local amenities, massive regional unemployment or unstable employment would listen to the one pretending to be listening to their issues. Again, we'd had 30 years before that where FPTP allowed the main parties to more or less ignore huge parts of the electorate.

> Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good

eh, somewhat.

There are still plenty of emotionally charged decisions being made by Swiss voters, like banning all minarets (in a country that had ... 3 minarets before), blanket granting all pensioneers one additional month of payment per year or routinely wrecking your relationship with the EU.

I agree that on average, the Swiss voters don't do too badly. But it's also easier to vote rationally and for the common good when you're as well off as the Swiss are.

It has preformed broadly in line with other western European economics. If you look at GDP numbers over time the big problem was COVID. The UK is richer relative to France or Italy than it was 25 years ago, but no European country has done as well as the US:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

The old, which have been ‘criminally’ favoured by Britain’s mistakes, have overwhelmingly voted for Brexit. While the young, who have been royally screwed, voted Remain.

It's not great, sure, but it's only something like a long-run 2% drag. 2% is a lot, don't get me wrong! But the loss from planning is pretty high double digits, well over 10% in the US, to say nothing about the gains from liberalizing migration

A recent estimation puts the cost of Brexit as 6% of GDP, since 2020 - because that's when the UK actually left. So over 5 full years. That's a lot. And it's not a one-off either.

Oh yeah. Higher than I thought! I still doubt it's as high as housing or migration, but yeah probably the first thing after that.

COVID had a bigger impact than Brexit.

Oh, based on the title I assumed the article was entirely about Brexit.

Brexit.

Making trading slightly harder with 27 non-English speaking countries in a stagnating political experiment (roughly 30-50th percentile of worldwide GDP growth rates)

Making trading easier with 168 other countries, many of them English-speaking nations, and who comprise the largest and most dynamic economies on Earth.

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