Brexit - was it worth it? (Vol. 4)

What are you suggesting M, we move back to cottage type industries to make small items to sell to china?

This would be the services trade we were all told ad infinitum would be utterly destroyed as there would be no passporting, etc.?

Where London would disappear, euro clearing would cease to exist for us, Frankfurt and Paris would grind us into dust?

Even now, with efforts galore to force clearing to shift, the actual internal agreement requires barely anything to move.

Not a contribution but more a question.

I live in Frankfurt.

My Mum comes over next week and is helping out at an English-as-a-foreign-language class in Bad Homburg. She’s done it before as a native speaker. The teacher (German) is a mutual friend.

Last time she was asked by the students how those in the UK who had voted pro-Brexit in 2016 felt about it now.

To those of you that did, can you quickly say how do you feel? Just so she has something to share with the students.

Thanks in advance!

Brexit sucess hinged on the ability and willingness of our leaders to engage in trade and busiess with the rest of the world. A Singapore on Thames was one of the phrases. I voted to leave because I felt the EU was another body that did not care for people in Europe rather the EU project itself (that made many rich). That's still my position but what it's highlighted is MPs care about themselves more than people. Brexit has been a failure not because of Brexit but because of MPs

When you voted did you know much about Singapore? Had you spent much time there?

Sorry, but have to pick up on this.

Just for context, a large part of my work is for the EU and EU funded institutions on various social reform projects so I see first hand what's going on in reality at street levels - and it is most certainly focused on people over the institution.

There are many European nations wishing to join the EU (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, etc). To move them to a point where an application is valid, they are required to achieve EU acquis; a set of social minimum standards that are common across all member states. To do this, they receive financial and practical support in things like education, healthcare, governance, sanitation, gender equality and everything else that imposes the lives of people.

In Cyprus, a member state, you have the north of Cyprus which is not recognised as being independent sovereign by any nation other than Turkey. It is officially an illegally occupied region. So technically is not part of the EU. Yet the people of live there are considered Europeans by the EU and thus entitled to receive EU support on societal reforms and improvements (one of the projects on which I am currently working).

And all of this works. The lives of all Europeans have improved immeasurably as a result of EU interventions and support. Nations that had the propensity for instability - which would have effected other EU nations including the UK - are now stable. Opportunities for people have expanded exponentially, lives have been enriched.

The EU 'project' is 100% about European people. It can be nothing else. People have indeed grown rich from the implementation of these measures but that wealth is an indicator of success. And in any case, enrichment from government policy is not exactly a new or solely an EU thing (See Covid/PPE for more information).

Politically and operationally, it is not without its faults but to suggest that the EU does not care about people from Europe is utterly wrong. You'd need less than a week with me on any number of field missions to see this for yourself.

I think the comparison to the Miners' Strike is apt in the sense that the event - the strike in the 1980s, the referendum/exit in 2016/2020, were on both sides viewed through lenses far more complicated than the actual issue at hand. The Strike was about far more than the economic viability of the British coal industry, and Brexit is about far more than the UK's membership of a supranational economic organisation.

Both - on each side of the flashpoint - are about differing sections of society's differing views on how things should be, how they view themselves and want the UK to view itself/be viewed as a country, what the assumption underpinning the status quo should be and so on.

For the Miners' Strike it was about asserting the dominance of central democratic government and liberal economics and calling time on the post-war consensus and the labour politics that went with it, and more broadly bringing down the curtain on/actively demolishing (depending on your POV) the British working class culture that had developed with the industrial revolution 200 years before. For Brexit it was - is - a clash between views on the primacy of the nation-state vs. international sublimation, the UK remaining a global power or not, whether the UK is a culturally and politically European nation (or not, and if not whether it is distinctly/exceptionally 'British', Anglo-Saxon, internationalist etc.), nationalism/globalism, whether you've 'won' or 'lost' from the way things have been run in the past 20 years (or the last 40, right back to the Miners' Strike if you want to tie it all together etc.) and so on and on.

Like the Miners' Strike (but, I think I'm safe in saying, not as viscerally or as immediately) there are Remain voters for whom it wasn't just a vote about a political policy. They feel they lost something in the core of their identity/worldview and that the UK did so too. Just as a lot of the Leave voters walked with a renewed lightness of step because they felt they had achieves something new, or regained something lost.

Politics is fundamentally a passionate and emotional process and isn't - shouldn't - be a realm only of bland Vulcan logic and credit/debit decisions. People aren't like that. Expecting people to 'get over' things of this scale, when there is so much to get emotionally invested in, is unreasonable.

Re: The lost opportunities and the lack of 'gumption', I am put in mind of Dominic Cummings in the New Yorker feature surveying the Conservative legacy:

Politically and philosophically I have little to nothing in common with Dominic Cummings, but I do agree with his basic view that 1) The UK needs a major top-to-bottom shakeup of how things a done and the assumptions on which it operates 2) Brexit was only ever going to be better than the Remain course if it served as an opportunity to do that. Cummings and I would certainly differ massively on what sort of changes to make, and it what direction, but I think we'd agree on the need for radicalism. I think we'd also agree that from 1997 to now the Conservative Party has completely ossified its own internal ideology to focus on one very specific, narrow sort of rentier liberal capitalism which means the party and those within it have blinkers that obscure any other way of doing things, even other broadly 'conservative' ways. You saw that on one direction with Truss, and you see the blinker on the other eye in that Cummings comment above about how even suggesting doing things like America - the global crucible of capitalism - is apparently off the table.

As for the bolded bit specifically, this may be getting into pop-sociology (gotta put that anthropology degree module to use somehow...) but I have seen it theorised that the British cultural tendency to moan about lost opportunities and mistakes of the past rather than seizing the present or looking to the future is an echo of our socially and economically stratified society that we have never properly ended or thrown of, we've merely softened the boundaries a little. So the 'average British person' wasn't - isn't - in full control of their own or their national destiny. That was a job for the ruling class - they ruled the country. The owning class owned and managed the land and the factories and the infrastructure. The middle class dictated the cultural norms - what was 'good taste' and 'fashionable'. Throughout national history most British people had little to no agency at any level, and that system is still in place in a way that it isn't in countries that have created more egalitarian, mobile and democratic systems. It's like a nation-wide 'cultural cringe' that actually holding sway over our own destiny - as people, as a society or as a country - isn't really 'for the likes of us' so all we do is 'Monday Morning Referee' the decisions of our betters and moan about them, while studiously avoiding any political strains that might actually deliver the agency we apparently crave.

Which is also why we lose our collective minds when we get offered a referendum - a way to have a direct say that is none the less offered at the behest of our betters in a controlled, official, sanctioned, approved and acceptable way. So it becomes a 'safety valve' to vent all the grievances and moans and aspirations and desires, regardless of how relevant they are to the actual issue.

Or.. I know this is hard to believe.. but maybe the EU wasn't constraning the UK from trading with the rest of the world.

In my personal opinion, many of those who say "brexit was a success" are actually well aware of how economically damaging brexit has been, but it's a price they are willing to pay to not have anything to do with the EU any more.
Ironically, if folks just accept its been st so far, then moves could be made to make it a success. However, claiming the emperors new suit is very fine indeed just stymies that. Instead we get tinfoil hatted excuses about "civil servants not believing in it" and other such nonsense.

M.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68826577
Brussels police have told the BBC they will enforce an order to close down the National Conservatism Conference

Farage
"Thank God For Brexit"


If you say so Nige