How do we resolve the Brexit mess?

[SkyBlueFlux]

In the real world what would you like because I can assure you that is never going to happen, and everyone and his Dog knew that we were leaving the customs union which meant leaving the single market it wasn't a secret.

If you tried to sell that as a way to get back into the EU it'd be hammered at the ballot stations.

Yes, it's not going to happen for this country, nor is any rejoining of the EU - at least not in the next 20-30 years of my useful life. But I can definitely see the rest of the EU continuing down that path of closer union. For now, I don't really have any suggestions on what the UK can do other than try to maintain alignment and improve access to the customs union. But I think the next 10 years for the UK look immensely bleak. I would say I'm likely (though not certain) to emigrate in that time because my family is 50% EU nationals and the EU looks a more sensible bet.

And I really don't think it was clear to a layman at all whether we would leave the customs union, as in this fact check article:

What was promised about the customs union before the referendum? - Full Fact

Campaigners weren’t explicit about what Brexit would mean for the customs union before the referendum.

fullfact.org

Michael Gove said this in April 2016: “There is a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey that all European nations have access to, regardless of whether they are in or out of the euro or EU. After we vote to leave we will remain in this zone."

I remember listening to that speech and it influenced my thinking. I don't see how statements like that make it clear we'd leave the customs union? It sounds like the opposite.

So to claim every man and his dog knew is just revisionism. Maybe you thought that was going to happen, but I certainly didn't. Ultimately, the reason I voted to stay was because the lack of clarity and detail was a big red flag to me, but I wasn't at all sure I'd made the right decision as a 25-year-old with no clue of how the EU actually worked.

 

[Vic]

In the real world what would you like because I can assure you that is never going to happen, and everyone and his Dog knew that we were leaving the customs union which meant leaving the single market it wasn't a secret.

If you tried to sell that as a way to get back into the EU it'd be hammered at the ballot stations.

Yet it was part of the Leave campaign's Project Fear.

Why you should vote for Brexit – according to Nigel Farage

I believe we're big enough and good enough to govern our own country. If we Remain, we’ll get swept up into a United States of Europe

www.independent.co.uk

 

[mexico1970]

Yes, it's not going to happen for this country, nor is any rejoining of the EU - at least not in the next 20-30 years of my useful life. But I can definitely see the rest of the EU continuing down that path of closer union. For now, I don't really have any suggestions on what the UK can do other than try to maintain alignment and improve access to the customs union. But I think the next 10 years for the UK look immensely bleak. I would say I'm likely (though not certain) to emigrate in that time because my family is 50% EU nationals and the EU looks a more sensible bet.

And I really don't think it was clear to a layman at all whether we would leave the customs union, as in this fact check article:

What was promised about the customs union before the referendum? - Full Fact

Campaigners weren’t explicit about what Brexit would mean for the customs union before the referendum.

fullfact.org

Michael Gove said this in April 2016: “There is a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey that all European nations have access to, regardless of whether they are in or out of the euro or EU. After we vote to leave we will remain in this zone."

I remember listening to that speech and it influenced my thinking. I don't see how statements like that make it clear we'd leave the customs union? It sounds like the opposite.

So to claim every man and his dog knew is just revisionism. Maybe you thought that was going to happen, but I certainly didn't. Ultimately, the reason I voted to stay was because the lack of clarity and detail was a big red flag to me, but I wasn't at all sure I'd made the right decision as a 25-year-old with no clue of how the EU actually worked.

It wasn't/isn't revisionism mate it was pretty clear.

 

[carlosthejackal]

In the real world what would you like because I can assure you that is never going to happen, and everyone and his Dog knew that we were leaving the customs union which meant leaving the single market it wasn't a secret.

If you tried to sell that as a way to get back into the EU it'd be hammered at the ballot stations.

I’d estimate the vast majority had no idea what the customs union was or had even heard of it .

 

[mexico1970]

Yet it was part of the Leave campaign's Project Fear.

Why you should vote for Brexit – according to Nigel Farage

I believe we're big enough and good enough to govern our own country. If we Remain, we’ll get swept up into a United States of Europe

www.independent.co.uk

Nope Cameron said it as well, was he part of project fear?

 

[mexico1970]

I’d estimate the vast majority had no idea what the customs union was or had even heard of it .

But that isn't the fault of the leave campaign because they said it time and time again, as stated on this thread the huge majority of people don't have politics as a hobby but the ones that do definitely knew it.

The remain camp were shit at their job.

 

[Didsbury Dave]

When is the Armageddon going to happen they predicted? It was a fuck up everyone gets it but this day by day drip by drip account is monotonously predictable.

Fuckin' smile a little :)

We should grateful that it’s just really fucking shitty rather than total Armageddon then, yeah? We didn’t get the sunny uplands but we should be happy that we are living in a lonely rat infested dirty alley rather than a nuclear waste dump?

 

[Phil1]

Don’t worry, we (Spain) are looking at loosening the restrictions on Brits moving over without having to fuck off after 90 days so you can all come and join me in the sunshine and leave the wind and rain behind. :-)

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

I think a lot of the more catastrophic forecasts were based on the implicit assumption there would be no transitional period or deal with the EU in place. While Johnson's "oven-ready" deal was a much worse deal than just staying in the EU, it probably did avert the worst case scenario of a no-deal exit. And that really could have been a total shit show.

But this is the biggest problem I have with the whole thing - Brexit could have taken so many different forms and nobody knew what form they were voting for. In fact, I'm not embarrassed at all to say in the weeks leading up to the election, I was at one point going to vote leave - why? Because I was operating under the assumption that Brexit would mean leaving the EU while trying to keep as strong a foothold in the customs union as possible. I thought that people were worried about possible political overreach of the EU, but everybody broadly agreed that strong economic alignment was a good thing and there was no way we'd dispose of that. How wrong was I? Good job I changed my mind.

My experience of what Brexit has done, including direct impacts to my own family, have now radicalised me in the other direction. We should be as close as we possibly can be to Europe. I would strongly consider supporting Europe federalising as a republic and having a shared constitution like the US. I don't really care any more for the UK's ability to be a self-governing country because our electoral system is so unrepresentative, our politics is so broken and our hand in international affairs is so weak. Any patriotic feeling I had towards this nation has been gradually eroded over time. I have more in common with my friends in Lisbon than I do with the people that live in the same town as me, so what do I care if I'm governed by bureaucrats in London or bureaucrats in Brussels?

This post essentially sums up my position now, which certainly wasn’t the case in 2016. The manner in which we left, and the discourtesy we’ve shown to our neighbours, means I don’t even care if we keep the pound anymore. My previously conciliatory approach to that topic has dissipated and the way our politics has been exposed as dysfunctional in recent years has radicalised me somewhat.

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

It wasn't/isn't revisionism mate it was pretty clear.

I think you're just demonstrating my point by showing a video where people are talking about the EU single market when I'm explicitly talking about the customs union. These are two different things.

The important distinction being a customs union doesn't have free movement of labour - which was the main problem people seemed to have with the single market.

We were 100% leaving the single market, I agree that everybody knew that. But nobody knew whether we were leaving the customs union. Turkey for example, is not in the EU but is part of the customs union for the vast majority of its good and services. It seemed crazy to me that we would leave that as well.