The UK's Brexit dream is dead

I've always thought actually Brexit supported the left much more than the right.

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I think it's also important to add while a lot of legislation wasn't repealed, a lot of EU legislation is not being added to UK statue books.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.

I think in some ways Labour is going to deliver Brexit in a way that the Tories just couldn't. All the promises that Brexiteers made were the upside of deals, but without the willingness to pay the cost. Yes, our regulations could diverge and in some cases we might have good reason to. But Brexiteers want frictionless trade, and you can't diverge and have no friction. So we just didn't chose. We didn't diverge, because that would be too difficult, but we also didn't take diverging off the table because that was meant to be our big chance!

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.

It was always a lie. And it was so obvious. It pivoted on securing a deal with the EU to get back their buy-in, to maintain previously negotiated treaties in exchange for nothing but spite. And the EU held literally all the cards while idiot "brexiteers" just hamstrung their government by creating arbitrary deadlines _in law_.

I almost understand why people voted for it initially but I'm staggered by how many people still believe in it.

Did the opposition to Brexit before the referendum campaign all or mostly on why Brexit would be bad, or did they put any significant effort into arguing that even if you were very pro-Brexit you should vote "remain" on that particular referendum because that particular referendum was flawed?

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.

I expect that the UK will end up rejoining the EU on much worse terms than we had before. Sooner or later it'll happen.

Given that Northern Ireland is effectively in the EU trade-wise it would make sense for UK to put most of the southern UK into the same state for frictionless trade with the EU, but have areas of the UK that can free trade with the rest of the world. Would mean an internal "border" say from The Wash to the Bristol Channel. Effectively there would be two classes of goods - EU and non-EU - subject to different rules. Or maybe the border could be horizontal - a non-EU layer able to free trade with the rest of the world, and an EU-compliant layer on top. Goods would stay in their own layer unless they cross the non-physical border in some computer system someplace.

> Sorry Boris, your Euroskeptic vision has failed in so many ways.

> 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.

>Radical plans to tear EU regulations off Britain’s statute books en masse have already been abandoned. The benefits of buccaneering free trade agreements (FTAs) have proved elusive. Britain's public services, far from receiving a promised boost, have in many cases almost stopped working. The number of people moving to Britain from abroad is higher than ever. It’s not what advocates of Leave had in mind.

No, but it's what the establishment who wanted nothing to change and Brexit to fail had in mind.

"The alter orbis which Great Britain has aspired to be is not simply a world apart from continental Europe but a world embracing non- European continents and islands overseas." - Arnold Toynbee

Brexit was always an eventuality, but much like the empire was always going to fail.

What a bloody mess.

> “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…

There was never a "dream". Just lies and populism.

Anyone who thought the Brexit dream was going to be anything other than a nightmare was either a fraud, or convinced by one.