I tapped out of this thread back in October last year, the debate seemed to be going nowhere, we were all going round in circles, and whilst to my mind the evidence was already very much into the realms of 'Brexit is a disaster even on its own terms' it was perhaps, a bit early in the piece to be asserting that - plus I was up against dunover claiming a 'Brexit victory' as being able to...... go shopping. (No, really!)
A further eight months down the line though. with Covid in the rear view mirror (and thus no longer being able to provide cover for Brexit), we can genuinely start to look at the concrete, real world impact of Brexit, and what it means for the UK. (And yes, I know 'BUT WAR IN UKRAINE' is the new Covid, but like Covid, all countries in the world are impacted by it, not just the UK, so we can look at comparative indicators from other economies.)
And in short, Brexit has fucked the pooch, to the extent that even the Brexiteers themselves have formed various circular firing squads to try and find someone else to blame for their grand project having crumbled into dust when measured against every conceivable metric.
There are no positives, nothing, when pushed to pick his favourite Brexit dividend a few days ago, Jacob Rees-Mogg blithered on about signs in the Dartford Tunnel having 'funny numbers' on them because of EU rules but now we can fix that because YAY FREEDOM. (I'm not making that up.)
No one's even pretending there are any economic benefits any more, it'd be the equivalent of standing in a lake and saying your feet weren't wet. The long term economic impact of Brexit on UK GDP is now agreed to be twice the damage that Covid did, except Brexit is permanent damage, it's a self-inflicted wound from which the UK will not recover - every single year the UK economy will bleed out tens of billions of pounds in lost economic potential, and we did it to ourselves.
And what did we take back control of? Well once again, we have Jacob Rees-Mogg telling us that we have escaped the tyranny of mobile phone manufacturers having to standardise their cables and chargers to use USB-C. (Again folks, I'm not making it up, I really wish I was.)
All the usual suspects are lining up to explain why it's gone wrong, I particularly enjoyed David Davis saying we got a 'Remainers' Brexit' (despite it being pretty much the hardest possible Brexit imaginable outside of a complete No-Deal Brexit):
Brexit has hurt our economy, it's hurt our standing on the world stage, it's devastated fishing and small and medium sized enterprises that traded with the EU, the bigger players have simply paid the extra costs and passed it onto consumers, Brexit is now widely recognised as being a significant contributing factor to current UK inflation, especially food price inflation. And of course, as Covid travel restrictions have lifted, Brits going abroad for their holidays have found out what it's like to have to wait in the non-EU lines at Customs.
Brexit has delivered nothing but pain, it's a busted flush so monumental it can be seen from space with the naked eye. Even its most ardent advocates are now engaged in nothing more than damage limitation, whilst trying to find someone, anyone but themselves, to blame. (So we have Daniel Hannan, for example, now saying we should have stayed in the Single Market.)
Tales like this abound, with people who voted for Brexit wishing they could recant, and take back the misery and extra costs they have inflicted upon their businesses, whilst draining jobs and money from the UK economy in the process.
So yeah, thanks Brexit - you absolute twat of a thing.
