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by RandomThoughts3 538 days ago
How exactly did the EU punish Britain?

Britain was by far the most annoying of the two during the whole negotiation and didn’t even play fair. The Home Office is currently being sued by the EU for not respecting its engagements related to foreign nationals.

The current situation is not punishment. The UK wanted to leave the single market and is now out of the single market. Turns out that leaving a common market including your main import and export partners is somehow disastrous for your economy. Who could have guessed? Certainly not the experts who spent months explaining at length to the UK population before the referendum.
1 comments
kukkeliskuu 537 days ago
We cannot know what really happened, but we can look at the end result. Britain wanted to leave EU, not quit trade. Britain has worse trade agreements than before joining the EU.
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RandomThoughts3 537 days ago
> Britain wanted to leave EU, not quit trade.

This sentence doesn’t make sense. The trade agreements are part of being in the EU. Wanting to leave the EU is literally wanting to stop being part of the single market. Obviously they have worse trade. They decided to leave the trading union.

This is not punishment. This is literally what Britain asked for.

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kukkeliskuu 537 days ago
EU is much more than a trading union, to these people EU represents giving up on the sovereignity of your nation. I have not read that anybody would be opposed to trading. They were and are opposed to giving up on sovereignity, and against the laws passed as a consequence of that, but not against trading with other EU countries.

There are other trading unions and agreements that are possible besides EU, and it seems like EU has prevented UK from re-establishing the trading unions and agreements it had prior to joining the EU.

We can only speculate why, but it seems plausible and rational that EU is doing this as kind of a punishment and warning to other nations considering leaving the EU. UK benefits more from these agreements, while EU benefits less from these agreements.

On the other hand, EU is under an existential threat, and will disintegrate if other nations follow Brexit. So it is kind of rational (albeit only for the short term) for the EU leaders to think that EU benefits from preventing these agreements from happening if it prevents or hinders the disintegration.

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