[thelock85]

I have a slightly different take that everything was really broken right before, but Covid and its response brought everything to bear.

I see this play out a lot in ed reform politics where leaders conveniently compact decades of prior failure into the “Covid gap”.

To be sure Covid and the response produced a slew of new problems, too, but I think they are massively inflated by prior failures.

[georgefrowny]

The UK is still blaming all sorts of stuff on the pandemic that are actually structural failures showing effects. It's a especially convenient time for cover considering Brexit happened in early 2020 and between then and now no major party has been willing to come out and say that Brexit has been damaging.

I don't even think it was necessary for Brexit to have been a net negative. There are plenty of ways the UK can thrive outside the EU, but the UK governments have basically done the square root of fuck all between 2016 and now to plan or execute on anything substantive.

That said, long-term problems included a lot more than Brexit, like the slow euthanasia of the industrial base and the parting out of anything but nailed down to the highest bidder.