Was Brexit a mistake?

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THE BIG MISTAKE IS DUE TO PRO-EU POLITICIANS CARRYING OUT BREXIT, WE HAVE YET TO SEE BREXIT!

This has been engineered by the pro-EU politicians from more than one party for the purpose of making things awkward so we, theBritish public will start to say we want to go back to be a subsector of the EU. (We are never allowed to be full EU members due to the Magna Carter which is why we retained our own currency and had to have every EU law passed to be "Accepted" in one of the UK parliaments, unlike other EU countries who could simply accept whatever new law it is. UK is NOT ALLOWED to be ruled from outside these shores. So to be full EU members without conditions, the european parliament would have to be held inside mainland Britain. Something that they really don't want to do.

Yes, it appears to be an utter mistake.

The only positive is that it makes Irish reunification much more likely.

Actually (Though I realize that some do not believe but I will.mention it anyway), years ago God gave me a vision that he saw the UK as the whole of mainland Britain and the whole of Ireland together as one big special country.

I don't see the Irish people being on board with the English yoke returning to their lands.

They already fought a war to secure their freedom from British domination, after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_War_of_Independence

The biggest issue apart from out of control immigration numbers to UK shores (which have worsened, not gotten better as promised by a Brexit) - is more of a point of principle for a lot of people, in that they don't wish to have their country, the UK, with its thousands of years of history, effectively be unduly influenced by other western European powers including Germany & France.

The Brexit issue for many was fought on ideological grounds such as the UK being, in some people's view, subject to the "guilty until proven innocent" culture of the courts of the EU versus the "innocent until proven guilty" attitude of British courts. A Brexit would supposedly return sense to the British justice system.

Also, a lot of people who voted Brexit, wanted to see an end to immigrants using the ECHR and its rules as a means to forcing their way into the UK under the guise of human rights.

There were actually many reasons why people voted Brexit. People were also promised that after a brief period of economic hardship, the UK economy would become better than it ever had been in the EU, after a Brexit.

Not only has this not happened, but the UK economy has continued to stably stagnate since the 2008 financial crisis, with worser comparable economic performance versus several countries as part of the EU.

Must have been the Protestant God, and not the Catholic God, who gave him that "vision".

Give N Ireland back to the Irish is my view and the UK back in the EU asap. Coming out has screwed the economy and immigration is higher since we left.

Was it mostly about trade, or about "the EU taking away peoples' freedoms"?

It depends on the person I think. For some it was about removing foreigners as inhabitants and / or as government. Even that splits into different reasons - some don't like the extra population density, others just don't like foreign inhabitants, some don't like certain particular laws that came from the EU, others just don't like the idea of any law of foreign origin.

I thought Brexit was a mistake from the start.

Then you thought better than 52% of the voting British public.

In my opinion there were 2 main reasons people voted leave, whether they'll admit it or not.

The first is migration. Our 'free' press has been banging on about migration for decades, rolling the pitch for this vote. Here's the interesting (frustrating!) thing though - in the areas which actually experience high levels of immigrants settling (i.e. cities) the vote was majority remain. Migration wasn't a problem in the areas that actually experience it. Outside of the cities, in the country, where you rarely see anyone who isn't white and British, migration is a big problem, apparently. Brexiteers spread the lie that whilst inside the EU we had no control over migration. This is not true. We had a lot more control than we were exercising, countless governments had chosen not to control migration because it is economically beneficial to the UK to have low-skilled migration. But they can't say that aloud.

The second is sovereignity. Again our wonderful press has much to answer for. Decades of banging on about how the EU 'dictates' laws to the UK, using words like undemocratic to describe the EU, endless stupid articles about how the EU has banned bananas that are too bendy, just xenophobic nonsense. Most people don't understand how the EU works and pro-Brexit campaigners made the most of that ignorance, making it sound like we just have to accept any and all laws the EU wants to impose on us. Which is crap. The reality is that the European Commission researches and proposes laws which are then voted for by the EU parliament. Where the UK has lots of democratically elected officials. The UK had already negotiated a veto on the vast majority of laws passed by the EU, so we could basically opt out of anything we didn't like anyway. Finally the UK was massively instrumental in writing a lot of EU legislation. We were hardly taking orders from unelected bureaucrats which is what the papers would have you believe.

So both of the main reasons were utter BS. But there were some powerful people that wanted us out of the EU and some of them owned newspapers so any hope of getting sensible discourse on the issue was lost.

The campaign was so divisive that it tore families and communities apart. It created space for the kind of populist politics that have been springing up everywhere to get a foothold and we're still dealing with that now.

We lost access to the single market and customs union which has caused many businesses which previously traded without tarifs to incur them and suffer delays at customs - many have found it simply unworkable and shut up shop. Meanwhile, goods from the EU flow in to the UK unchecked at customs because no one thought to consider it might be necessary.

Economic growth is projected to be lower to the tune of 4% over the next decade, I believe. In a country with almost zero growth, that's a real shot in the foot.

We lost the right to freely live, work and study across the European Union.

Even visiting is now subject to visas and other complications that weren't there previously (EHIC cards anyone?).

We lost access to countless educational, health and scientific collaborations.

We embarrassed ourselves globally, both with the decision and the behaviour of our elected representatives in the negotiations as they behaved like petulant children while our media (mostly foreign owned, by the way) cheered them on. Our standing in the world is greatly diminished and may never recover.

Upsides: Um...yeah. No one has actually thought of any yet. Not one.

So yes, it was unequivocally a mistake. A big one. A stupid one. We allowed self-interested idiots to lie to us and made a decision that really wasn't in the interests of our nation.

It looks like immigration is a major concern in the UK

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-67 ... c_team=crm

For centuries, people were leaving Europe to go and live elsewhere. Now, the opposite is happening.

The article didn't say, but maybe people in the UK are as concerned about immigrants from continental Europe? I guess people in the EU can go and live in any EU country they want. So, a lot of British retirees opted for sunny Spain, back in the day. I don't know what happened to them now.

It is a major concern, rightly so, but rarely for the right reasons. It's mostly been whipped up by a malevolent media which likes to present migrants as a negative thing, coming over here stealing our jobs at the same time as claiming benefits, somehow.

The truth is that the UK has an aging population, all those oldies need care and there aren't enough young people entering social and health care jobs because they don't pay very well and conditions are shocking - there's better and easier money to be made elsewhere. Can't blame them for that. Ditto for seasonal crop picking.

If we're not going to have loads more children, then we need immigrants to come and do these jobs for us, we should be making them feel as welcome as possible. We also need their taxes to pay for the pensions of the elderly.

Migrants are a net benefit to our economy and our public services but no one ever makes the case for them.

When we were in the EU, most of these migrants were from the EU, naturally. Now the shortfall is being made up by migrants from places further afield and more culturally removed like India and Pakistan, which I can't imagine will please the people who voted for Brexit out of xenophobia.

Last time I heard from British xenophones, that was about right. They hated Pakistanis, Indians, and Africans. It's all about skin colour. They didn't much mind Europeans, perhaps because they were harder to spot. Though the wave of immigration from Eastern Europe may have changed that a bit. Quite a few moved into my area, and from the more noticeable ones I observed the following behaviours:

1. Playing extremely loud muzac 24/7, with speakers in their back yard.
2. Setting up a service to install boom boxes in cars, and constantly testing them.
3. Chain-smoking cigarettes and chain-drinking lager, wandering about blind drunk.
4. One chap blew his nose right in front of me as I passed him on the street. No handkerchief, he just occluded one nostril and blew a string of snot out of the other, straight onto the pavement at my feet. What a culture shock!

If I wasn't prone to careful thinking I may have become a racist, so I can well imagine how people who don't think carefully must have felt. There were probably hundreds of other Eastern European immigrants behaving quite innocuously, but as such they weren't noticeable. And I've seen worse behaviour from British people. Nonetheless I was angry. Government decisions had adversely affected the quality of my life. The noise polluters were the worst of it, and I got them sorted out through the city council and the police, just as I would have done if they'd been English. It took some perseverance on my part.

Brexit was a massive, idiotic act of self-harm.
Hey - we belong to the biggest trading bloc on the planet, benefitting massively from harmonized trading regulations, general legislation and a free bilateral exchange of labor!!
Yeah - let's stop all that immediately!!

DuckHairback said everything I wanted to say.

Seen online elsewhere - "Schrödinger's Immigrant... Simultaneously stealing our jobs but also first in line at the benefits office."