[jll29]

The UK's big opportunity was: to be the "best" EU country by having the most reasonable (informal, common-sense based) interpretation of EU rules permissible, and to benefit from intra-EU trade and freedom of movement.

This opportunity was sadly squandered due to populism (and Steve Bannon's Cambridge Analytica financed by Rob Mercer), with the result that now tons of migration from India and other Asian places is arranged to fill the gaps that the European workers that left created.

So let's see how life will be at the front doorstop of the EU of which it isn't a member anymore, say, in 10 year's time, compared to how it was 2016. From what my journalist friends are telling me, for once food theft has skyrocketed, because many cannot pay their grocery bills.

[mike_hearn]

Trading with the EU is no harder outside than inside for the UK apparently. If that were the case then there'd now be less of it but after a brief adjustment period the proportion of UK/EU trade has remained constant. The EU rules are oriented towards the needs of Germany and France, so goods trading was "harmonized" around their processes and services trading (where the UK is strong) was never really addressed at all, by the EU's own admission.

Informal/reasonable interpretations of EU law don't work. To even bring that up as an idea shows the culture gap that drove the UK out. The culture in Britain is incompatible with that. What happens is activists go to the ECJ and get a ruling that's unreasonable but formal, which the UK civil service (which likes clear rules) then goes ahead and implements strictly whilst other countries with different cultures would just ignore the rules. This process was called "gold plating". The result was the UK would end up with the worst possible outcome: a reputation for fighting against bad rules and being generally disagreeable/uncooperative, but then actually enforcing those rules when they pass anyway. The approach used by many other EU countries was to all agree on how wonderful the new rules were and then widely flout them, hence why obscure topics like fishing took on surprising prominence in the Brexit debates, the flouting of those rules was a long term and neuralgic issue that typified the problem.

Ten years from 2016 is only two years from now. There won't be any big changes in two years. The UK economy has closely tracked the rest of Europe and isn't doing any worse post-Brexit than other countries, or even sometimes slightly better (nothing to write home about compared to the USA of course, though how much that's due to US deficit spending is open to question).

> From what my journalist friends are telling me

Journalists?! They are widely distrusted for good reasons! You certainly shouldn't be learning anything about Brexit from them, they will happily say all kinds of nonsense that isn't true to try and defend the EU.