Tufts University asked an academic what the financial results were for the UK:
"The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."
Which is pretty much aligned with what more level-headed people predicted would happen, if my memory is correct. There was a strong push for UK to leave EU, but it was more based on emotion than rational. Of course the 'right' used the narrative of prosperity to get votes, but it never really made sense economically to leave the strong economic power of the EU and try to be independent again.
The UK is not the empire it was once, they need ties with mainland Europe, their closest trading partners, to be economically viable. So this doesn't entirely come as a surprise to me.
>Of course the 'right' used the narrative of prosperity to get votes
They used lies. Literal fabrications out of whole cloth.
They said that the UK was spending hundreds of millions of pounds on the EU, and if they pulled out they could use that money on like the NHS or something.
> "The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."
The average person doesn't care about any of that.
If ~99% of those gains go to ~0.1% of people, the average person does not care.
What they do care about is, did MY expenses go up higher than MY wages. Did MY opportunities get better or worse...
In the UK example, the result is potentially even worse - but I would guess the response to COVID & global wars are likely to have a bigger impact on that than Brexit.
> However, net-net, I'd rather have one shite layer of government, rather than two.
To make a parallel that might work for California or NY. In Europe however there is no single country that is so much better than the others at making money, in the same way as those two. Even countries that didn't enter the EU (Switzerland, Norway) accepted most of the EU regulations because they need some of them.
The UK in that respect already had the sweetest deal of all EU members; and, unlike Switzerland or Norway, actually had a say on the regulations that it had to follow. Plus, they had and have a messy situation due to (non-EU-related and therefore unaffected by Brexit) agreements that the border with Ireland cannot be a customs union, so the only thing a competent national government could do was to tell people they had been duped and promised something impossible. The result would have been a Switzerland- or Norway-like non-membership, with small benefits and less power in the EU.
At the time "polls" predicted a Remain win. Between the vote and the eventual Brexit along with protests, there was a government petition for a redo and a Remain optimism that a re-do would flip the result. For this poll to me meaningful, I would expect to see declining support for Reform. But the opposite is happening.
What percentage of the vote was required to join the EU? The EU effectively constitutes a relinquishment of sovereignty, but that's not how it was sold to citizens, they were told that they could leave at any time.
> The United Kingdom consulted its citizens directly only after joining the European Communities: following the British general election of October 1974, the Labour government of Harold Wilson held a referendum to fulfill one of its campaign promises. The non-binding referendum was held on 5 June 1975, some two and half years after the UK's accession. It was the first ever national referendum to be held in the UK, and the "yes" vote won by a landslide 67.23% on a 65% turnout with 66 out of the 68 local counting areas returning majority "yes" votes.
You remember the story the citizens were sold but not the vote requirement seems odd. From a minimum of research, it seems there was no vote to join the EU, which did not exist at the time (1973) of the European Communities project with common currency and the rest. But in 1975 they had a referendum to stay and decided they would with a 67% Yes.
> the EU effectively constitutes a relinquishment of sovereignty
Agreed, it is pooling sovereignty. The UK already does that with a union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Pooling sovereignty is often regarded as a benefit on the whole.
Your link largely agrees; the "Polls of polls" shows a general consensus on a tight Remain win, and the chart shows the convergence being very late in the game.
Also today: UK cutting infrastructure investments into healthcare and education by £5bn to fund defence [1].
I'm all up for defence spending in Europe, but if you had anything to do with British state education or healthcare, you know what a desperate move this is.
Most of the people that want to rejoin the EU never realised that Brexit happened at the same time as COVID and they believe that all the bad things that happened since were due to Brexit and Brexit only. All the while ignoring that most EU countries are not that much better off. Just look at the GDP growth.
We would have had a quorum requirement if it was a proper referendum but it wasn't, it was claimed to be purely advisory. Of course, it was never going to work like that if leave won. David Cameron is an arse.
It's been quite meh economically - we'd be wealthier if we'd remained. Also immigration went up which is not what a lot of Brexiters were hoping.
I think a lot of the Brexit vote was just people being fed up and voting for something different. In my experience few Brexit voters are happy with what arrived.
The taboo is the notion that the European Union needs to be reformed (no pun intended!). I was a Remainer, and do not regret that, but I hoped the EU would clean house. (Yes, the UK should do as well btw. Scotland should be independent. The House of Lords, Whitehall and Royal Family need a major overhaul.)
As someone who's pro-EU, I'd also really like to see major reforms within the organization.
While it contributes enormously to the welfare of the continent, the EU is by design dysfunctional and toothless.
I'm a pessimist, there is so much money behind the forces that want to see the EU fall apart because small individual countries are easier to buy off, I don't see how we can defend against that.
We'll only know what we lost when it's gone, but then it'll be too late.
IMO, the only thing that will contain Reform is Farage suffering consequences for misconduct. That or being overtaken by even worse people. The two things…
what does 'undermine' means here? It seems that there is a 'correct' way of thinking, and if you don't play along you're an enemy or a Russian asset or whatever. Not very democratic.
None of this should be surprising unless you've been just gobbling up whatever you heard through mainstream media.
Britain is at a breaking point. There are existential questions to be asked:
Is Britain British without British Bourgeoisie that have lived there for thousands of years with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land?
Can Japan be called Japan without Japanese that have lived there for thousands of years and their homogeneous identity?
Why is it okay for one but not the other? Where does this double standard come from ?
The fact is the loudest voice in the room so far has never been representative of the answer to the above questions.
These questions aren't comparable. Japan had a crash modernization followed by a brief outburst of violent colonialism, which they thought was the style at the time but was actually in decline almost everywhere else.
Britain had an empire that lasted hundreds of years, and whose greatest legacy is linguistic and temporal system dominance. Having spent centuries proclaiming itself to be the literal center of civilization to most of the world, is it really surprising that ambitious individuals gravitate toward it? This is the common culture that Britain set out to impose on its possessions.
It's especially ironic (though not especially surprising) that immigration from former territories went way up after Britain forcibly detached itself from the EU. Perhaps the Brexiteers wil offer to secede from the world next - build a national space program and launch Britain into orbit as a second satellite that can service its markets while orbiting the planet from a distance.
The comparisons between the two nations are always superficial. When you peel the layers of nonsense off, it is just white supremacy with a mediocre attempt at masking it.
> which they thought was the style at the time but was actually in decline almost everywhere else.
I truly hate the historical revisionism of Westerners. Japan engaged in colonialism because it was an active victim of colonialism, and the only way to fight back was to stand on equal footing. Through the 1800s~1940s, Europe controlled nearly the entirety of Asia. China had been subject to countless treaties forced upon it. The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, India were all colonies. 90% of Africa was under European control. 100% of both Americas was under European control. 100% of Australia and New Zealand was under European control. Europeans were literally aiming for world domination. The list of countries free from European colonialism could be counted on one hand: Japan (only because it successfully fought back), Korea (before it got annexed by Japan), Siam, Nepal, Iran pretty much covers it. Yet amazingly Europeans found and continue to find no shortage of pearl clutching over Japan daring to do the same thing they did, in a dog-eat-dog world where not doing so meant becoming another pawn.
To the extent colonialism declined, it was solely due to to the world wars wrecking Europe so utterly they could not maintain their overseas holdings, + the untouched US intervening in eg. Suez Crisis in order to assert itself as the global Western hegemon with no peers.
It's not historical revisionism, it's my desire to not write multiple paragraphs explaining the much briefer period of Japanese colonialism when the main point I wanted to make was about the British empire. By the time Japan launched its invasion of Manchuria the end of European colonialism was already in sight; Ireland had freed (mos of) itself from British domination a decade earlier, Gandhi had led the salt march in India the previous year and so on.
Yet amazingly Europeans found and continue to find no shortage of pearl clutching over Japan daring to do the same thing they did, in a dog-eat-dog world where not doing so meant becoming another pawn.
This is the exact opposite of how I feel about it. It was natural for Japan to emulate its geopolitical competitors, they just timed it poorly, overlooked the gradually rising tide of decolonization, and allowed the army in Manchuria too much leeway, culminating in atrocities that continue to haunt their foreign relations today.
Having a storied history, culture, and customs go beyond simple birthright citizenship and xenophobic behavior to enforce said culture and sense of identity. The US, for all its faults, exemplifies how unnecessary it is to rely solely on where you were born— anyone can move to the US, get citizenship, and call themselves “American.” I honestly cannot understand what “connection with the land” even means in reality. Most people aren’t farmers, and land has no inherent culture. People do, and culture is acquired by living in it and participating in it. Culture also changes overtime and is, like the earth itself, for the living.
This idea that for some reason other human beings cannot embrace, be a part of, and contribute to existing culture simply because they were born in a different country is flagrantly absurd. It’s also how people who are born somewhere, but don’t “look the part” have to fight an uphill battle to prove they are.
So yeah, Japan could be called Japan if people who live there are culturally Japanese, participate in shared culture, and contribute to it. I am also absolutely aware that isn’t possible by any reasonable means currently, but it doesn’t change the fact it should be.
>with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land
actually Britain still see these arrivals.
Brexit restored immigration from people with more walks of life and with a more worldwide origins. There is no fast track for any nationality, like when EU citizens didn't need a visa, so companies are blind to origin.
You only got rid of the maudzits français / stronzo francese who liked the queen way too much and feel at home everywhere. The Québécois, the Swiss, the Dutch and a part of Europe look at Britain as an example for that : it's so funny to see them struggle with the UK ETA app while they no longer have Tyrrells crisps, as they keep complaining about british food and were mean about the tapestry anyway.
But was this show worth the losses that Britain had ?
It's never too late to apply again, Britain hasn't deviated from its course of rule of law and democracy
It's also fun to watch people's heads explode over the hypocracy pointed out by this episode. Short version: If Samoa has to follow non-racial discrimination rules than Samoa as a place of Samoans will cease to exist. Without taking a side, the same is true of Israel.
Pretty much all immigrants are good, or at least good for something. People generally want or need all the same things. Xenophobia by and large is an irrational urge.
I am sure that Denmark, a country that amongst other things imposed forced sterilisation against the Inuit population up until the 1970s, and abused people with disabilities [0], is offering black-skinned people equal opportunities and not pigeon-holing them into unemployment and social exclusion...
I mean, it's not particularly difficult to imagine(and I'm an immigrant to the UK). You move here, then after a while you bring over your retired parents to care for them in their old age. They are not contributing financially to the system but they are costing British taxpayers a lot of money.
The point though - it's irrelevant. Even those cases, and even straight up cases where people come here and just go on the dole, don't change the fact that as a whole immigrants are a net positive to the country(financially), and that's based on the OFR findings not my imagination.
Brexit was about leaving Europe, whose immigrants where overwhelmingly young people or couples which would've been net contributors, spending up to a decade before returning to their home countries. I have literally seen this happen dozen of times in my time there.
Myself I have spent almost two decades in Britain, paid my taxes (at the highest rate at that), and decided to leave when I saw that the immigration talk had turned everybody into racist lunatics, and even people like me, from the same continent, were made to feel unwelcome by this rhetoric. For all I care, it's a failed state, yet it has not yet seen the bottom until it progresses its descent into decay, the same that has infected the US and elected Trump.
You will get your Reform government and it'll be Brexit times 10. Only then, maybe, the British people will stop falling for far-right propaganda paid for the Russians.
Mixing of cultures always lead to adding up their different solutions to all kinds of problems, improving the fitness of the result among other groups of humans.
It's gathering all the positive ideas or traditions of several groups, and the less useful or negative aspects tend to just fade naturally.
> Is Britain British without British Bourgeoisie that have lived there for thousands of years with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land?
Thousands of years? Are you talking about celts?
Because Romans later arrived in Britannia and founded Londinium. Is it British when it was founded by those pesky Romans?
Or are you complaining about later populations, such as Vikings or Normans? I mean, they haven't been to the British isles for thousands of years. How can Britain be British with those smelly frenchmen?
Unless what you really are trying to do is complain that Britain now has too many brown people.
Excuse me, are you holding up the British as some kind of pure, undisturbed ethnicity?
You mean the celts who were conquered by Romans who were conquered be Angles who were conquered by Normans? Who speak this bastard language we're using now, where most vocabulary is Latinate upon bones of Germanic?
> Why is it okay for one but not the other? Where does this double standard come from ?
Because in Japan AIUI they haven't been infiltrated by people pushing narratives that being eg White British is inherently racist, that to not open your borders to one and all is racism and xenophobia (you can see lots of examples of such people in the post about the Swiss referendum on the 10M population limit), which they do in order to gain for them and their communities.
The existing minority populations know they can abuse our good nature, our placidity, our leftist politicians, and even the English language in order to gain, and to position themselves as continuous victims. Some feminists do the same. The idea that the whole of the UK is full of angry white supremacist racists is the kind of propaganda I allude to (it's funny how many US folk here fall for it).
(I am British, lived here all my life, live in a county with many areas of significant minority populations, and just old enough to have observed plenty of change in England)
And its "homogeneous identity" is mostly a construction, dating back from the Meiji era.
And Heian period Japan had a completely different set of values, not less nor more valid than Meiji era Japan, just different.
So the identity of a nation is not something eternal nor absolute.
Heck, there is even proof Japan has been a mosaic of at least three sets of human populations in prehistoric times, arrived at different times on the land.
So here you are: yes Japan was, long time ago, a land of immigration.
Japan is fairly homogenous with the obvious exception of the Ainu and certain castes. Much more so than Persia/Iran, Russia, Mexico or India. When Japan had a large empire, that was not so much the case, because they ruled over very different peoples.
That's not what most recent archaeological discoveries tell.
Quite distinct groups of humans mixed in ancient Japan, as different and distant at that time as the groups that are mixed in modern times in Peru or India.
Some groups were related to Autronesians, others to Yakuts, yet other groups to Hans, etc.
If I remember correctly, at least three distinct groups are proven to have cohabited and arrived at different times.
I am not talking about prehistory here. The culture of the Japanese "Home Islands" in the Middle Ages consisted of two main groups: Ainu/Edo and the Japonic peoples who spoke related dialects. The first group was treated abysmally and dwindled. There were differences based on environment, e.g. the people in Tohuku had to deal with the cold and those in the south had subtropical climates and more outside interaction. The first major cultural difference (other than Ainu) came in with Christianity in the south and caused a civil war.
Japan is a heck of a lot more homogenous than Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and most of continental south east Asia. In fact, for that matter, Japan was more homogenous in 1707 than the British Isles, Spain, France, Italy or Germany.
The Ainu/mainland distinction is a feature arrived much later than the mixing I am referring to.
My point is that Japan ethnicity is the product of a mixing just as the one occurring nowadays in France, Britain or Norway, between several very different people.
So that, if such mixing produces great results (do we agree that modern day Japan is that?), why not welcome today's mixings for the sake of the great nations of the future?
But I don't think we'll reach a common understanding on this topic, so we can just agree to disagree.
Japan never colonised India, Japan never colonised an African nation, Japan never colonised a Caribbean nation.
Britain overnight cannot have a fresh start from its past, even the royals have ties to other nations. The England that was always English never existed and its history will always be rooted in the British empire (where the sun never set).
I'm not sure that creating mass addiction and collapsing the Chinese economy by forcibly industrializing and scaling up the opium trade was so much better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
1. You claim (without basis or evidence) that people in the West have a double-standard about xenophobia and cultural chauvinism as between Japan and Western countries.
2. I say people in the West also dislike it in Japan and Japanese culture (more precisely, the same people who dislike racism and bigotry in the West dislike that it exists in Japan too)
I don't understand Japanese culture well enough to comment on it, but if it contained the ugliness of xenophobia and white supremacy as they exist in America I'd surely oppose it.
I'm sure that's part of why, but the bigger reason is probably a more reflexive "well we switched more left and it didn't help, what if we go the other way." After a dramatic Labour win, they're just Conservative-lite. That kind of "well this didn't work, lets go the other way" response doesn't necessarily mean anything about any party's actual popularity.
Huh? Brexit materialized in 2020. Labour happened in 2024. Immigration going up between 2020-2024. Going down since 2024.
And that’s somehow Labour’s fault?
I'm saying that I believe public opinion on Brexit is unrelated to public opinion on Conservative/Labour/Reform. I also believe that public opinion on Conservative/Labour/Reform is unrelated to any particular policy positions of any of those three beyond "things were bad under C, lets try L" and then "things are bad under L, lets try R". That's my explanation for Brexit being unpopular, but Reform nonetheless performing well in polls and the recent local elections.
("unrelated" is too strong, but I think they're weak correlations)
Those two outcomes are not mutually exclusive. A first-past-the-post system can give the power to a minority, if the opposing votes are divided. In the 2024 elections, Labour got a third of the votes but almost two thirds of the seats.
"The British GDP has been reduced by 6–8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU."
https://now.tufts.edu/2026/06/08/10-years-after-brexit-vote-...