None of this should be surprising unless you've been just gobbling up whatever you heard through mainstream media.
Britain is at a breaking point. There are existential questions to be asked:
Is Britain British without British Bourgeoisie that have lived there for thousands of years with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land?
Can Japan be called Japan without Japanese that have lived there for thousands of years and their homogeneous identity?
Why is it okay for one but not the other? Where does this double standard come from ?
The fact is the loudest voice in the room so far has never been representative of the answer to the above questions.
These questions aren't comparable. Japan had a crash modernization followed by a brief outburst of violent colonialism, which they thought was the style at the time but was actually in decline almost everywhere else.
Britain had an empire that lasted hundreds of years, and whose greatest legacy is linguistic and temporal system dominance. Having spent centuries proclaiming itself to be the literal center of civilization to most of the world, is it really surprising that ambitious individuals gravitate toward it? This is the common culture that Britain set out to impose on its possessions.
It's especially ironic (though not especially surprising) that immigration from former territories went way up after Britain forcibly detached itself from the EU. Perhaps the Brexiteers wil offer to secede from the world next - build a national space program and launch Britain into orbit as a second satellite that can service its markets while orbiting the planet from a distance.
The comparisons between the two nations are always superficial. When you peel the layers of nonsense off, it is just white supremacy with a mediocre attempt at masking it.
> Britain had an empire that lasted hundreds of years, and whose greatest legacy is linguistic and temporal system dominance... This is the common culture that Britain set out to impose on its possessions.
Yes, you're right. But colonial culture sucked! Britain didn't spend centuries socializing India in the principles behind the Magna Carta, individual rights, due process of law, etc. The colonies got the pointy end of the stick. Why wouldn't Britons be upset at that being turned on them?
It's death for Japan as we know it either way? There's no evidence that you can have a highly ordered, rules- and norms-based society like Japan while accommodating mass immigration. Name a single immigrant-heavy city that's as clean and orderly as Tokyo?
>with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land
actually Britain still see these arrivals.
Brexit restored immigration from people with more walks of life and with a more worldwide origins. There is no fast track for any nationality, like when EU citizens didn't need a visa, so companies are blind to origin.
You only got rid of the maudzits français / stronzo francese who liked the queen way too much and feel at home everywhere. The Québécois, the Swiss, the Dutch and a part of Europe look at Britain as an example for that : it's so funny to see them struggle with the UK ETA app while they no longer have Tyrrells crisps, as they keep complaining about british food and were mean about the tapestry anyway.
But was this show worth the losses that Britain had ?
It's never too late to apply again, Britain hasn't deviated from its course of rule of law and democracy
It's also fun to watch people's heads explode over the hypocracy pointed out by this episode. Short version: If Samoa has to follow non-racial discrimination rules than Samoa as a place of Samoans will cease to exist. Without taking a side, the same is true of Israel.
Oh yes, Israel. You know the funny thing about Israel is many of them are deeply nationalistic when it comes to Israel but seem to have the opposite attitude when it comes to other nations. Makes you wonder why right wing people like them.
Japan never colonised India, Japan never colonised an African nation, Japan never colonised a Caribbean nation.
Britain overnight cannot have a fresh start from its past, even the royals have ties to other nations. The England that was always English never existed and its history will always be rooted in the British empire (where the sun never set).
I'm not sure that creating mass addiction and collapsing the Chinese economy by forcibly industrializing and scaling up the opium trade was so much better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
And its "homogeneous identity" is mostly a construction, dating back from the Meiji era.
And Heian period Japan had a completely different set of values, not less nor more valid than Meiji era Japan, just different.
So the identity of a nation is not something eternal nor absolute.
Heck, there is even proof Japan has been a mosaic of at least three sets of human populations in prehistoric times, arrived at different times on the land.
So here you are: yes Japan was, long time ago, a land of immigration.
Japan is fairly homogenous with the obvious exception of the Ainu and certain castes. Much more so than Persia/Iran, Russia, Mexico or India. When Japan had a large empire, that was not so much the case, because they ruled over very different peoples.
That's not what most recent archaeological discoveries tell.
Quite distinct groups of humans mixed in ancient Japan, as different and distant at that time as the groups that are mixed in modern times in Peru or India.
Some groups were related to Autronesians, others to Yakuts, yet other groups to Hans, etc.
If I remember correctly, at least three distinct groups are proven to have cohabited and arrived at different times.
Having a storied history, culture, and customs go beyond simple birthright citizenship and xenophobic behavior to enforce said culture and sense of identity. The US, for all its faults, exemplifies how unnecessary it is to rely solely on where you were born— anyone can move to the US, get citizenship, and call themselves “American.” I honestly cannot understand what “connection with the land” even means in reality. Most people aren’t farmers, and land has no inherent culture. People do, and culture is acquired by living in it and participating in it. Culture also changes overtime and is, like the earth itself, for the living.
This idea that for some reason other human beings cannot embrace, be a part of, and contribute to existing culture simply because they were born in a different country is flagrantly absurd. It’s also how people who are born somewhere, but don’t “look the part” have to fight an uphill battle to prove they are.
So yeah, Japan could be called Japan if people who live there are culturally Japanese, participate in shared culture, and contribute to it. I am also absolutely aware that isn’t possible by any reasonable means currently, but it doesn’t change the fact it should be.
> This idea that for some reason other human beings cannot embrace, be a part of, and contribute to existing culture simply because they were born in a different country is flagrantly absurd.
It's not a normative point, it's a descriptive one. If Bangladeshi communities in London were culturally indistinguishable from British communities, nobody would be having this conversation. It is empirically true that immigrants carry their origin cultures with them for generations: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran....
> People do, and culture is acquired by living in it and participating in it. Culture also changes overtime and is, like the earth itself, for the living.
Yes, but are those changes good ones or bad ones? It's a simple application of Sturgeon's law. If you find yourself in one of the top 10% of places, why would you want to import culture from the bottom 90% of places? It makes no logical sense.
Pretty much all immigrants are good, or at least good for something. People generally want or need all the same things. Xenophobia by and large is an irrational urge.
I mean, it's not particularly difficult to imagine(and I'm an immigrant to the UK). You move here, then after a while you bring over your retired parents to care for them in their old age. They are not contributing financially to the system but they are costing British taxpayers a lot of money.
The point though - it's irrelevant. Even those cases, and even straight up cases where people come here and just go on the dole, don't change the fact that as a whole immigrants are a net positive to the country(financially), and that's based on the OFR findings not my imagination.
Brexit was about leaving Europe, whose immigrants where overwhelmingly young people or couples which would've been net contributors, spending up to a decade before returning to their home countries. I have literally seen this happen dozen of times in my time there.
Myself I have spent almost two decades in Britain, paid my taxes (at the highest rate at that), and decided to leave when I saw that the immigration talk had turned everybody into racist lunatics, and even people like me, from the same continent, were made to feel unwelcome by this rhetoric. For all I care, it's a failed state, yet it has not yet seen the bottom until it progresses its descent into decay, the same that has infected the US and elected Trump.
You will get your Reform government and it'll be Brexit times 10. Only then, maybe, the British people will stop falling for far-right propaganda paid for the Russians.
Mixing of cultures always lead to adding up their different solutions to all kinds of problems, improving the fitness of the result among other groups of humans.
It's gathering all the positive ideas or traditions of several groups, and the less useful or negative aspects tend to just fade naturally.
I don't understand Japanese culture well enough to comment on it, but if it contained the ugliness of xenophobia and white supremacy as they exist in America I'd surely oppose it.
At the time "polls" predicted a Remain win. Between the vote and the eventual Brexit along with protests, there was a government petition for a redo and a Remain optimism that a re-do would flip the result. For this poll to me meaningful, I would expect to see declining support for Reform. But the opposite is happening.
Also today: UK cutting infrastructure investments into healthcare and education by £5bn to fund defence [1].
I'm all up for defence spending in Europe, but if you had anything to do with British state education or healthcare, you know what a desperate move this is.
We would have had a quorum requirement if it was a proper referendum but it wasn't, it was claimed to be purely advisory. Of course, it was never going to work like that if leave won. David Cameron is an arse.
Tufts University asked an academic what the financial results were for the UK:
"The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."
Which is pretty much aligned with what more level-headed people predicted would happen, if my memory is correct. There was a strong push for UK to leave EU, but it was more based on emotion than rational. Of course the 'right' used the narrative of prosperity to get votes, but it never really made sense economically to leave the strong economic power of the EU and try to be independent again.
The UK is not the empire it was once, they need ties with mainland Europe, their closest trading partners, to be economically viable. So this doesn't entirely come as a surprise to me.
>Of course the 'right' used the narrative of prosperity to get votes
They used lies. Literal fabrications out of whole cloth.
They said that the UK was spending hundreds of millions of pounds on the EU, and if they pulled out they could use that money on like the NHS or something.
> "The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."
The average person doesn't care about any of that.
If ~99% of those gains go to ~0.1% of people, the average person does not care.
What they do care about is, did MY expenses go up higher than MY wages. Did MY opportunities get better or worse...
In the UK example, the result is potentially even worse - but I would guess the response to COVID & global wars are likely to have a bigger impact on that than Brexit.
The EU today is about as far from being an empire as the US was in the "Articles of Confederation" era (roughly 1781-1789):
States are sovreign, the federal body doesn't have direct powers of taxation and the money it does get is what the states tell it it's getting, foreign policy only happens to extent individual states say it does, lacks a fully unified financial system, more about interstate commerce than anything else.
But yes, if you hate that and want to spend 6-8% GDP not having it, this is absolutely within the rights of the people to decide that.
Of course, if they didn't want that and just plain didn't believe the people who accurately explained the cost, that's an argument for undoing it. Lying politicians isn't at all unique here, and unfortunately politicians saying the decision is permanent and irreversable is also not at all unique, but it is anti-democratic.
> However, net-net, I'd rather have one shite layer of government, rather than two.
To make a parallel that might work for California or NY. In Europe however there is no single country that is so much better than the others at making money, in the same way as those two. Even countries that didn't enter the EU (Switzerland, Norway) accepted most of the EU regulations because they need some of them.
The UK in that respect already had the sweetest deal of all EU members; and, unlike Switzerland or Norway, actually had a say on the regulations that it had to follow. Plus, they had and have a messy situation due to (non-EU-related and therefore unaffected by Brexit) agreements that the border with Ireland cannot be a customs union, so the only thing a competent national government could do was to tell people they had been duped and promised something impossible. The result would have been a Switzerland- or Norway-like non-membership, with small benefits and less power in the EU.
IMO, the only thing that will contain Reform is Farage suffering consequences for misconduct. That or being overtaken by even worse people. The two things…
The taboo is the notion that the European Union needs to be reformed (no pun intended!). I was a Remainer, and do not regret that, but I hoped the EU would clean house. (Yes, the UK should do as well btw. Scotland should be independent. The House of Lords, Whitehall and Royal Family need a major overhaul.)
what does 'undermine' means here? It seems that there is a 'correct' way of thinking, and if you don't play along you're an enemy or a Russian asset or whatever. Not very democratic.
I wouldn't be sad if that little deformed Gerry Anderson puppet looking prick Farage went for a wee holiday with his Russian owners and got to stay on a high floor of their favourite hotel with a lovely balcony view.
Edit: Easy to see the Russian bots are out in force tonight!
I'm sure that's part of why, but the bigger reason is probably a more reflexive "well we switched more left and it didn't help, what if we go the other way." After a dramatic Labour win, they're just Conservative-lite. That kind of "well this didn't work, lets go the other way" response doesn't necessarily mean anything about any party's actual popularity.
Huh? Brexit materialized in 2020. Labour happened in 2024. Immigration going up between 2020-2024. Going down since 2024.
And that’s somehow Labour’s fault?
Those two outcomes are not mutually exclusive. A first-past-the-post system can give the power to a minority, if the opposing votes are divided. In the 2024 elections, Labour got a third of the votes but almost two thirds of the seats.
At the time it was the best thing for the UK. Then Starmer came along and ran the country into the ground, so it's really no wonder they want back in with the EU. No one is surprised...
Liz Truss tells an interesting anecdote of how when she became PM, she was given a list of things she was supposed to do. I think this is the reality of today's politics and is not democracy.
None of this should be surprising unless you've been just gobbling up whatever you heard through mainstream media.
Britain is at a breaking point. There are existential questions to be asked:
Is Britain British without British Bourgeoisie that have lived there for thousands of years with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land?
Can Japan be called Japan without Japanese that have lived there for thousands of years and their homogeneous identity?
Why is it okay for one but not the other? Where does this double standard come from ?
The fact is the loudest voice in the room so far has never been representative of the answer to the above questions.
These questions aren't comparable. Japan had a crash modernization followed by a brief outburst of violent colonialism, which they thought was the style at the time but was actually in decline almost everywhere else.
Britain had an empire that lasted hundreds of years, and whose greatest legacy is linguistic and temporal system dominance. Having spent centuries proclaiming itself to be the literal center of civilization to most of the world, is it really surprising that ambitious individuals gravitate toward it? This is the common culture that Britain set out to impose on its possessions.
It's especially ironic (though not especially surprising) that immigration from former territories went way up after Britain forcibly detached itself from the EU. Perhaps the Brexiteers wil offer to secede from the world next - build a national space program and launch Britain into orbit as a second satellite that can service its markets while orbiting the planet from a distance.
The comparisons between the two nations are always superficial. When you peel the layers of nonsense off, it is just white supremacy with a mediocre attempt at masking it.
> Britain had an empire that lasted hundreds of years, and whose greatest legacy is linguistic and temporal system dominance... This is the common culture that Britain set out to impose on its possessions.
Yes, you're right. But colonial culture sucked! Britain didn't spend centuries socializing India in the principles behind the Magna Carta, individual rights, due process of law, etc. The colonies got the pointy end of the stick. Why wouldn't Britons be upset at that being turned on them?
Before we got there women threw themselves on funeral pyres.
27 young non-EU migrants hired for every young Brit since 2020, analysis reveals
https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/newsroom/27-young-...
This is clearly not sustainable.
Objectively, Japan needs to do something about its culture. It’s literally killing the country.
Pretty sure a Japanese person could say the same thing about the U.K.
It's death for Japan as we know it either way? There's no evidence that you can have a highly ordered, rules- and norms-based society like Japan while accommodating mass immigration. Name a single immigrant-heavy city that's as clean and orderly as Tokyo?
There would need to be a mental and cultural framework where the old ways are loved, respected and allowed to be mourned.
I don’t really know what it would look like, it would have to be up to the Japanese, but I think you’re correct that this would be essential.
Japan is doing something. It is decades behind Europe but going down a similar path.
I would hope they have the highest possible bar for immigrants. Deep background checks. No criminals or thugs.
Don't repeat the mistakes made by Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc.
It should be a HIGH bar to get in and a LOW bar to get yeeted out again.
>with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land
actually Britain still see these arrivals. Brexit restored immigration from people with more walks of life and with a more worldwide origins. There is no fast track for any nationality, like when EU citizens didn't need a visa, so companies are blind to origin.
You only got rid of the maudzits français / stronzo francese who liked the queen way too much and feel at home everywhere. The Québécois, the Swiss, the Dutch and a part of Europe look at Britain as an example for that : it's so funny to see them struggle with the UK ETA app while they no longer have Tyrrells crisps, as they keep complaining about british food and were mean about the tapestry anyway.
But was this show worth the losses that Britain had ?
It's never too late to apply again, Britain hasn't deviated from its course of rule of law and democracy
Great Radiolab on this topic
https://radiolab.org/podcast/americanish-2306
It's also fun to watch people's heads explode over the hypocracy pointed out by this episode. Short version: If Samoa has to follow non-racial discrimination rules than Samoa as a place of Samoans will cease to exist. Without taking a side, the same is true of Israel.
Oh yes, Israel. You know the funny thing about Israel is many of them are deeply nationalistic when it comes to Israel but seem to have the opposite attitude when it comes to other nations. Makes you wonder why right wing people like them.
Japan never colonised India, Japan never colonised an African nation, Japan never colonised a Caribbean nation.
Britain overnight cannot have a fresh start from its past, even the royals have ties to other nations. The England that was always English never existed and its history will always be rooted in the British empire (where the sun never set).
India was already colonised by the Mughal empire by the time the Brits got there.
England is 1,100 years old next year. You are historically ignorant.
I obviously hurt your feelings but thank you for the facts that clearly changes everything.
You didn't hurt my feelings. You came on here and boasted about how weak your country was.
This is a very bizarre response. Don't mind if I screenshot this and write an email. Very strange behaviour.
Well Britain didn't genocide the Chinese. And all the countries colonized by Britain are now better of then those that weren't. Look at ex-Rhodesia.
I'm not sure that creating mass addiction and collapsing the Chinese economy by forcibly industrializing and scaling up the opium trade was so much better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
Are you British or do you live in Britain?
Why? One can parrot Reform talking points from anywhere.
The result of the poll in the article seems to be a soft rebuke of the kind of viewpoint you espouse.
> Can Japan be called Japan without Japanese that have lived there for thousands of years and their homogeneous identity?
> Why is it okay for one but not the other? Where does this double standard come from ?
Disingenuous question; even people who like Japan and Japanese culture tend to dislike how xenophobic and racist it is.
It's not ok in Japan either.
And its "homogeneous identity" is mostly a construction, dating back from the Meiji era.
And Heian period Japan had a completely different set of values, not less nor more valid than Meiji era Japan, just different.
So the identity of a nation is not something eternal nor absolute.
Heck, there is even proof Japan has been a mosaic of at least three sets of human populations in prehistoric times, arrived at different times on the land.
So here you are: yes Japan was, long time ago, a land of immigration.
Japan is fairly homogenous with the obvious exception of the Ainu and certain castes. Much more so than Persia/Iran, Russia, Mexico or India. When Japan had a large empire, that was not so much the case, because they ruled over very different peoples.
That's not what most recent archaeological discoveries tell.
Quite distinct groups of humans mixed in ancient Japan, as different and distant at that time as the groups that are mixed in modern times in Peru or India.
Some groups were related to Autronesians, others to Yakuts, yet other groups to Hans, etc.
If I remember correctly, at least three distinct groups are proven to have cohabited and arrived at different times.
Having a storied history, culture, and customs go beyond simple birthright citizenship and xenophobic behavior to enforce said culture and sense of identity. The US, for all its faults, exemplifies how unnecessary it is to rely solely on where you were born— anyone can move to the US, get citizenship, and call themselves “American.” I honestly cannot understand what “connection with the land” even means in reality. Most people aren’t farmers, and land has no inherent culture. People do, and culture is acquired by living in it and participating in it. Culture also changes overtime and is, like the earth itself, for the living.
This idea that for some reason other human beings cannot embrace, be a part of, and contribute to existing culture simply because they were born in a different country is flagrantly absurd. It’s also how people who are born somewhere, but don’t “look the part” have to fight an uphill battle to prove they are.
So yeah, Japan could be called Japan if people who live there are culturally Japanese, participate in shared culture, and contribute to it. I am also absolutely aware that isn’t possible by any reasonable means currently, but it doesn’t change the fact it should be.
> This idea that for some reason other human beings cannot embrace, be a part of, and contribute to existing culture simply because they were born in a different country is flagrantly absurd.
It's not a normative point, it's a descriptive one. If Bangladeshi communities in London were culturally indistinguishable from British communities, nobody would be having this conversation. It is empirically true that immigrants carry their origin cultures with them for generations: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran....
> People do, and culture is acquired by living in it and participating in it. Culture also changes overtime and is, like the earth itself, for the living.
Yes, but are those changes good ones or bad ones? It's a simple application of Sturgeon's law. If you find yourself in one of the top 10% of places, why would you want to import culture from the bottom 90% of places? It makes no logical sense.
Xenophobia is bad for humanity.
That’s a very simplistic take on a complex problem.
Unrestricted immigration destroys democratic high trust societies.
There is a balance to be found, as in all things. It isn’t simply diversity always good or always bad.
Inequality destroy high trust societies, and low trust cultures implement a surveillance state to replace trust.
[dead]
Easy question with an easy answer that threatens a lot of bad people: immigrants are good.
That’s way too simplistic.
Not all immigrants are good. Many cost society more than they contribute. The right kind of immigrants are good.
Pretty much all immigrants are good, or at least good for something. People generally want or need all the same things. Xenophobia by and large is an irrational urge.
Paint me this picture of an immigrant who costs more than they contribute.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GRkMGTgX0AEFhVp.png
This is for Denmark.
https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/the-effects-of-immigr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_Trump
I mean, it's not particularly difficult to imagine(and I'm an immigrant to the UK). You move here, then after a while you bring over your retired parents to care for them in their old age. They are not contributing financially to the system but they are costing British taxpayers a lot of money.
The point though - it's irrelevant. Even those cases, and even straight up cases where people come here and just go on the dole, don't change the fact that as a whole immigrants are a net positive to the country(financially), and that's based on the OFR findings not my imagination.
Brexit was about leaving Europe, whose immigrants where overwhelmingly young people or couples which would've been net contributors, spending up to a decade before returning to their home countries. I have literally seen this happen dozen of times in my time there.
Myself I have spent almost two decades in Britain, paid my taxes (at the highest rate at that), and decided to leave when I saw that the immigration talk had turned everybody into racist lunatics, and even people like me, from the same continent, were made to feel unwelcome by this rhetoric. For all I care, it's a failed state, yet it has not yet seen the bottom until it progresses its descent into decay, the same that has infected the US and elected Trump.
You will get your Reform government and it'll be Brexit times 10. Only then, maybe, the British people will stop falling for far-right propaganda paid for the Russians.
Yep, it's incredibly unfortunate, given how obvious it is.
Immigrants are people. People are not automatically good. Or bad.
Migration is not just a choice between an open door and a closed door, but a spectrum. There are a variety of levels between those two extremes.
Yes.
Mixing of cultures always lead to adding up their different solutions to all kinds of problems, improving the fitness of the result among other groups of humans.
It's gathering all the positive ideas or traditions of several groups, and the less useful or negative aspects tend to just fade naturally.
I don't understand Japanese culture well enough to comment on it, but if it contained the ugliness of xenophobia and white supremacy as they exist in America I'd surely oppose it.
At the time "polls" predicted a Remain win. Between the vote and the eventual Brexit along with protests, there was a government petition for a redo and a Remain optimism that a re-do would flip the result. For this poll to me meaningful, I would expect to see declining support for Reform. But the opposite is happening.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/revoke-artic...
A change of this magnitude probably should've been like an American constitutional amendment; a stricter requirement than 50%+1 vote.
> At the time "polls" predicted a Remain win.
This is a common trope but is simply not true. The polls were really tight[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United...
Reform don’t need 50%, though. I don’t think even Margaret Thatcher’s landslide got more than 40% of the vote.
I'm curious what valid reasons there are against Brexit? AFAICT, most people arguing it is/was bad are ignoring any kind of evidence.
The UK is doing fine, especially relative to other EU countries. None of the things the anti-Brexit side claimed would happen have happened.
Also today: UK cutting infrastructure investments into healthcare and education by £5bn to fund defence [1].
I'm all up for defence spending in Europe, but if you had anything to do with British state education or healthcare, you know what a desperate move this is.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-07/uk-plans-...
You don't know how bad it can get. See Ukraine.
This is why these kinds of decisions shouldn’t be flipped on a marginal vote. Most countries require a supermajority before doing something like this.
Sadly this now cuts the other way and the EU is highly unlikely to enter into anything with us without serious guarantees.
We would have had a quorum requirement if it was a proper referendum but it wasn't, it was claimed to be purely advisory. Of course, it was never going to work like that if leave won. David Cameron is an arse.
This post is 2 years old and pretty bleak:
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/07/02/broken-bri...
Didn't the polls say the same before brexit? I don't get it. They left to stay away from regulations, just to put even harsher ones.
Tufts University asked an academic what the financial results were for the UK:
"The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."
https://now.tufts.edu/2026/06/08/10-years-after-brexit-vote-...
Which is pretty much aligned with what more level-headed people predicted would happen, if my memory is correct. There was a strong push for UK to leave EU, but it was more based on emotion than rational. Of course the 'right' used the narrative of prosperity to get votes, but it never really made sense economically to leave the strong economic power of the EU and try to be independent again.
The UK is not the empire it was once, they need ties with mainland Europe, their closest trading partners, to be economically viable. So this doesn't entirely come as a surprise to me.
> Which is pretty much aligned with what more level-headed people predicted would happen, if my memory is correct.
Of course this was painted as "project fear", and Michael Gove famously said that people had had enough of experts.
>Of course the 'right' used the narrative of prosperity to get votes
They used lies. Literal fabrications out of whole cloth.
They said that the UK was spending hundreds of millions of pounds on the EU, and if they pulled out they could use that money on like the NHS or something.
Lies.
Your username is weirdly on point for discussion of the topic at hand i guess xD
> "The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."
The average person doesn't care about any of that.
If ~99% of those gains go to ~0.1% of people, the average person does not care.
What they do care about is, did MY expenses go up higher than MY wages. Did MY opportunities get better or worse...
In the UK example, the result is potentially even worse - but I would guess the response to COVID & global wars are likely to have a bigger impact on that than Brexit.
Ah yes, economists are famously capable of accurately projecting a decade in the future.
so essentially submitting to a european continental empire is worth it for 6-8% GDP?
The EU today is about as far from being an empire as the US was in the "Articles of Confederation" era (roughly 1781-1789):
States are sovreign, the federal body doesn't have direct powers of taxation and the money it does get is what the states tell it it's getting, foreign policy only happens to extent individual states say it does, lacks a fully unified financial system, more about interstate commerce than anything else.
But yes, if you hate that and want to spend 6-8% GDP not having it, this is absolutely within the rights of the people to decide that.
Of course, if they didn't want that and just plain didn't believe the people who accurately explained the cost, that's an argument for undoing it. Lying politicians isn't at all unique here, and unfortunately politicians saying the decision is permanent and irreversable is also not at all unique, but it is anti-democratic.
> submitting to a european continental empire
Moron.
Yeah, nothing to do with draconian net zero measures, the stupid sanctions on Russia.
The only stupid thing about sanctions on Russia is that they aren't harsh enough.
The first time in history people have been able to accurately predict a counter-factual.
Of course, any economic gains weren't guaranteed and were predicated on competent national government and we saw what happened there.
However, net-net, I'd rather have one shite layer of government, rather than two.
> However, net-net, I'd rather have one shite layer of government, rather than two.
To make a parallel that might work for California or NY. In Europe however there is no single country that is so much better than the others at making money, in the same way as those two. Even countries that didn't enter the EU (Switzerland, Norway) accepted most of the EU regulations because they need some of them.
The UK in that respect already had the sweetest deal of all EU members; and, unlike Switzerland or Norway, actually had a say on the regulations that it had to follow. Plus, they had and have a messy situation due to (non-EU-related and therefore unaffected by Brexit) agreements that the border with Ireland cannot be a customs union, so the only thing a competent national government could do was to tell people they had been duped and promised something impossible. The result would have been a Switzerland- or Norway-like non-membership, with small benefits and less power in the EU.
https://archive.ph/giLPA
That's a dangerous situation for EU:
- UK would rejoin EU,
- and then, later on, Reform would reach power and undermine EU just like Orban did.
So maybe it would be better to refuse UK its reentry into EU...
A successful rejoin referendum would probably help contain Reform.
However such a referendum is basically taboo in the British public discourse.
IMO, the only thing that will contain Reform is Farage suffering consequences for misconduct. That or being overtaken by even worse people. The two things…
If so, there is some kind of hope.
The taboo is the notion that the European Union needs to be reformed (no pun intended!). I was a Remainer, and do not regret that, but I hoped the EU would clean house. (Yes, the UK should do as well btw. Scotland should be independent. The House of Lords, Whitehall and Royal Family need a major overhaul.)
what does 'undermine' means here? It seems that there is a 'correct' way of thinking, and if you don't play along you're an enemy or a Russian asset or whatever. Not very democratic.
I'm afraid that it looks as if there are plenty of other contenders for those who might wish to undermine the EU, now and in the future.
I wouldn't be sad if that little deformed Gerry Anderson puppet looking prick Farage went for a wee holiday with his Russian owners and got to stay on a high floor of their favourite hotel with a lovely balcony view.
Edit: Easy to see the Russian bots are out in force tonight!
Trump would be happy if the UK joins the US. With Canada. And Greenland. ;-)
I don’t buy it. They are getting ready make Farage a prime minister, based on the exact same premise: xenophobia.
I'm sure that's part of why, but the bigger reason is probably a more reflexive "well we switched more left and it didn't help, what if we go the other way." After a dramatic Labour win, they're just Conservative-lite. That kind of "well this didn't work, lets go the other way" response doesn't necessarily mean anything about any party's actual popularity.
Huh? Brexit materialized in 2020. Labour happened in 2024. Immigration going up between 2020-2024. Going down since 2024. And that’s somehow Labour’s fault?
Those two outcomes are not mutually exclusive. A first-past-the-post system can give the power to a minority, if the opposing votes are divided. In the 2024 elections, Labour got a third of the votes but almost two thirds of the seats.
If they do, Reform would almost certainly form government on a minority of the vote. Brexit was a yes/no question.
[flagged]
As someone who is white british -- this isn't happening. Please stop regurgitating right wing US talk show talking points. It's boring.
I don't really understand what the point was since they haven't gotten rid of harmful EU policies like the climate change hysteria.
At the time it was the best thing for the UK. Then Starmer came along and ran the country into the ground, so it's really no wonder they want back in with the EU. No one is surprised...
If you want to gauge how well it went take a look at investment in the automotive industry and its production figures.
We went from making two million cars a year to just 750 thousand. Investment plummeted.
Note that even the sole prominent Brexit economist predicted this.
Speaking of incompetent politicians, let me remind you of the Liz Truss lettuce...
Liz Truss murdered Queen Elizabeth.
Liz Truss tells an interesting anecdote of how when she became PM, she was given a list of things she was supposed to do. I think this is the reality of today's politics and is not democracy.