I'm interested in hearing more about this. In my news sphere, there was a lot of doom over Brexit, it happened, and then the story stopped. What's it like and why aren't people connecting the dots?
It was really, really bad if you were in tech or finance.
Like, I worked for a few companies (I live in Ireland) who had moved their roles from the UK to Ireland because of it.
More generally, it's just made life much harder for UK exporters, as they now have way more customs declarations and tariffs on both sides.
The big thing for me (and lots of Irish people) was that we now avoid ordering from UK sites as it's likely to take longer and cost more.
Overall, it's been bad and kneecapping your productive industries on the promise (not fulfilled) of reducing immigration seems to be a bad idea.
That being said, the UK is still there, still a big market so it's more that they get less investment from multinationals than they otherwise would have, and their companies face much higher barriers to export.
And the worst part was that the EU introduced checks on agriculture immediately, while the UK didn't which basically meant that EU farmers were much more competitive in the UK than UK farmers could be outside it.
To be clear, Brexit could have been managed much better, but it was a bad idea executed poorly.
I honestly don't understand the comment that started this thread. Brexit eventually led to a historic defeat of the conservative party who was (rightly) blamed for it.
I guess the original commenter may have been surprised how long it took for that reversal to come (and that it didn't happen until after Covid exacerbated everything).
There were a lot of regulatory change projects, that kicked over into technology, but not a lot of other impact (speaking as someone who works in banking).
For me personally, nothing much really has changed. You can't bring as much wine back from France on holiday, and it is harder to take your pet to Europe.
The UK economy is shite, but it's not a significant outlier amongst other EU countries.
> There were a lot of regulatory change projects, that kicked over into technology, but not a lot of other impact (speaking as someone who works in banking).
There is a huge impact on people who export things like food to the extent that some of them have given up
Recent estimates put the losses at £100bn/year so far [0].
Long term, the estimate is a 15% hit to the economy.
And only 12% of people think that it went well. (For reference, that's about the same proportion as 'Americans who believe shape-shifting lizards control politics, or aren't sure' [1].)
In personal experience, my purchases of UK products have taken a massive drop.
And that's not even mentioning the losses to the environment or human rights.. So... Not what I would call a mixed bag. More like a deeply homogeneous bag.
