No one can deny Brexit was the much bigger of two evils and has only exacerbated many problems that already existed in Britain prior.
possibly but i don't agree.
the anachronistic and self-defeating structure of uk society is a bigger problem than brexit. one by one the uk has sold the family silver and now the cupboard is almost bare. aviation sold to the spanish. trains sold to the germans. car industry sold to germany and india. steel insustry mainly sold to india. premier league being sold to "everyone" etc etc. in other industries standards are such that there are no leading tech titans in the uk. there are no world leading banks. this plus lack of investment, low education and training, low capital investment, low industrial standards have led to a protracted, extensive and
decade long decline in the relative productivity of the UK and a steady whittling away at living standards and the country's ability to compete.
a decade-long formed addiction to house price and credit driven consumption along with cheap, imported, skilled labour and the benefit of preferential access to one of the major global markets is going to lead to economic shudders when some of those legs are kicked away. but those addictions where not written in stone and didn't have to happen.
the UK finds itself in a world where its products are undersirable on the global scale and where it offers little to nothing that cannot be better procured from china and/or the usa. the UK finds that relying on (foreign) pre-trained doctors, nurses et-al leads to a shock when the foreign supply-taps are turned off and this has resulted in a misallocation of blame on the "turning-off" rather than the lack of local training and education in the first place.
the UK wanted to be a "switerzerland" relative to the EU but you cannot be "switzerland" when the swiss produce items of superior quality which are hard to get elsewhere and you produce sub-standard tat/services which markets are now dominated by china/usa and where services are low capital easy-to substitute-and-replace anyway.
the UK is finding it hard to find substitute trading partners for the EU, which is not suprising given the wares that the UK is offering. the fact that the UK increasingly has less to offer the world and cannot prosper without the crutch of European market access is a symptom of a broader malaise which lies at the heart of british societal structure
. brexit just hastened the unveiling of the issues but they have been there all along destroying living standards for decades now.
the uk has been living beyond its economic means, addicted to external resources without doing the hard lifting of restructuring its own internal capacity and now stands naked in the wind, without the crutch of trading advantages/cheap skilled labour, where the paucity of that local capacity is being steadily made increasingly bare.
the british political class seems to specialise in ballsing things up and have demonstrated an inability to complete internationally for decades in the face of rising competition. meanwhile the population would rather fuss about "scandals" aka "distractions" rather than focus on their inability to fix the country, their inability to lead (or even suggest) structural reforms to arrest the ongoing decade long decline. its insane.
however there may have been room for a better brexit, or a stealth-brexit-before-brexit by less engagement and integration with europe years ago but beyond such theory it is what it is now.
i personally think that the best "brexit" for brehdom would have limited east euro/euro immigration in particular while also doing more for brehdom training, education and in terms of levelling the playing field i.e. a more fulsome version of their "levelling up" push where society remodels itself to fully exploit the capacity of the population. so fewer accents and gilded childhoods ruling the roost and more of a meritocracy. that in combination with a drive to modernise the uk's industrial landscape (industries - see the anachronistic composition of the FTSE 100 (roughly flat since 2000), standards, small business fiinancing) would have gone someway to offsetting the structural inefficiencies of the uk economy and brexit in the longer term. even in the face of a shrinking pie brehdom getting more of that pie would be marginally beneficial.
TL;DR there is no world in which london's population increasing at an ongoing rate of around 30% over a few decades is sustainable, excusable or even livable for great swathes of the population. brexit + uk's structural issues is where we are now. there is significant room to address those issues but too many lack the stomach for it.
uk parliament discussing brexit.
pi$$ up in a brewery style
German parliament doing the same:
will the UK ever finally grow up
www.dailymail.co.uk
www.theguardian.com
www.france24.com
