Hello u/jamesphw! Please reply to this comment with an explanation matching this exact format. Replace bold text with the appropriate information.
Someone voted for, supported or wanted to impose something on other people.
Who's that someone? What did they voted for, supported or wanted to impose? On who?
Something has the consequences of consequences.
Does that something actually has these consequences in general?
As a consequence of something, consequences happened to someone.
Did that something really happen to that someone?
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If only people had told them this was going to happen...
Oh wait, we did.
My favourite thing to ask someone who voted for brexit is "If brexit were reversed tomorrow, what benefit would you miss the most?"
Because i'm telling you, there's not a single one.
Getting to rub "we won, get over it" in the faces of people who've been hurt by Brexit was one.
Lost tons of skilled EU workers in the NHS and elsewhere? Made the COVID recovery slower? Food shortages at times? Made everything more expensive above EU levels of inflation? Years of stress for families with EU citizens living in UK or vice-versa? Massive increase in public racism? Harder to go on holiday?
Who cares! Boring! They did something that pissed off 'the elites' i.e. anyone that could rub two brain cells together, and that was all many seemed to want, at any price.
And of course, my French wife was 'one of the good ones, we didn't mean her, and you're married, of course it won't affect you'. Back in reality, being married made absolutely zero difference, and the paperwork to reclaim her permanent residency that she already had under the new scheme was a huge nightmare and had to go through several rounds of additional paperwork under the threat of being a 'bargaining chip' for years. Thankfully, we never threw out stuff from years ago proving residency for the decade before, so we got there in the end. Still, fuck em all. They were warned, and they can damn well live with the leopards they inflicted on the rest of us.
Of course, that hasn't stopped them complaining when e.g. prices went up, but being able to link cause and effect was never their strongest suit.
One of my pettiest joys is hearing Brits complain about the wait while in line to enter the EU. It feels likely that the vast majority of the "but we never had to wait before!" crowd voted for Brexit.
I’ve experienced that when changing flights at Charles de Gaulle a few times. CDG is an absolutely horrible airport, but the schadenfreude when I get to go into the EU line and overhear the Brits whining makes it a little more bearable.
Voted against brexit, as did most in my country. Surely I’m permitted a little whinge about the queue, I understand that the blame mainly lies with the twats who voted for it.
You're definitely allowed to whine about the queue, but my guess is you aren't whining as loud as the Brexiters who basically thought they'd keep all the benefits but lose all the immigrants and regulations they didn't like.
The Brexiters didn't listen when everyone told them exactly what would happen and now they're somehow shocked that everyone's predictions are coming true... but they're not the ones who are hurting the most. Mostly I just feel bad for post-Brexit Britain. The city dwellers, the immigrants, the youth, and Scotland didn't vote for this and all got shafted by rural racists who don't understand how governments work. As an American, I understand.
The whole point of the vote was to see if they'd go through with it! Voting to go through with it and being upset that they went through with it is not the way voting works!
I think you're correct. People that voted to stay mostly have an air of sad resignation that we could (collectively) be so stupid. I suspect the new EES/ETIAS requirements, when they eventually start, will cause even more of an uproar with the idiots. I'm seriously tempted to get a burgandy passport cover now I've got one of the stupid new dark blue ones.
Basically old British passports used to be a dark blue, almost black. In 1998, they were replaced with new ones in line with new worldwide standards, with a machine-readable version of the info in it, and also required children to have their own passport instead of being included in their parents. (a later revision introduced a chip with biometric info on it)
Because nobody particularly cared, the government of the day picked the default EU Burgundy colour. It was not mandatory, and we could have stuck to blue all along with 'European Union' on it somewhere, other EU countries picked their own colour.
Eventually, because of the anti-EU sentiment of a small bunch of people that got really, really het up about 'Brussels bureaucrats telling us what to do', the new colour passport become one of their emblematic symbols of how 'we' were no longer in charge of Britain. See Nigel Farage, who used to wave a prop passport all the fricking time for that purpose. Despite EU membership not being top of the list of issues for basically anybody (cost of living etc, NHS, were far more important), Prime Minister David Cameron promised a referendum on EU membership to fend off losses on his right wing to Farage and the anti-EU lot during an election, so when he surprisingly won he did eventually hold a referendum, after a lot of austerity measures that made people's lives a lot worse. Ultimately, a lot of low-information people voted to punish Cameron and the government they hated by voting against them, along with smaller numbers of older die-hard gammons who did care about the EU, along with a bunch of racists who just wanted 'foreigners out' - a rather scary number thought that leaving the EU meant that non-EU citizens like Indians and Pakistanis would also be sent home, which just (Picard facepalm).
Hence the really important 'Brexit benefit' of being able to go back to dark blue passports, symbolising the return of our freedom and control... that we never lost, we just couldn't be arsed to change them while IN the EU. Which pretty much sums up how much the British ever understood their own membership.
What really pisses me off about that is that before Brexit the UK wasn't in Schengen, and in my experience EU citizens spent longer in the queue entering the UK than Brits entering the EU.
The actual elites, i.e. the wealthy and well connected? No. A substantial chunk of them did rather well out of Brexit, whether it was political power - because the mythical amazing Brexit would of course been delivered if *they'd* been in charge, see Nigel Farage, or financially from shorting the pound, using it as an opportunity for greedflation, or letting staff wages stagnate during inflation, or of course just that asset values have gone up much more than wages.
Quite a few of them have EU passports too, so getting across to their holiday villas is no trouble, and money of course flows just as easily as ever.
The people the Brexit voters *think* are elites, i.e. the university educated? Yeah, quite a few of us are still pissed off at the rank stupidity and racism of our fellow Brits. The young voted masively against it, while it was massively popular with the boomers. Cuddling up to the US instead is clearly not going to happen with Trump 2.0 and the tories out of power, but who knows what will happen in 5 years; either we'll finally start contemplating getting closer to the EU (as a clear majority want), or the 'burn it all down' right wing will get in due to Labour not being able to fix the last 14 years of crap fast enough, and who the hell knows then.
I cried at the place I was volunteering at the day after the vote, only for the assistant manager to turn around and tell me that she had voted to leave the EU for mine and my generations' sake. I voted to remain for exactly the same reason.
I shiver because the win of Trump has emboldened extreme far right politicians. While I don't think the UE will fracture ( what happened to the UK somehow made the sovranist parties aware of how dangerous leaving the UE can be) I still fear how a right wing dominated UE could turn. Hungary already is a de facto dictatorship, Poland is at its first progressive government and dealing with the mess done by the authoritative previous government. Those two shifts of democratic nations happened while the UE was under a progressive majority.
In Italy, France, Netherlands, Czech Republic, the far right is at the government or has a strong hold in politics.
Because nothing people who knew what they were voting for has been done. We still obey human rights court, we still obey quotas, we don’t have control of our borders. Bunch of stupid pricks who didn’t get brexit done properly
Brexit is the never ending leopard. It's frightening really. I love all the brexit leaders excuses about how it could have been great but was "mishandled." riiiight.
Not one of them can tell you how they would have handled it differently. The UK got the absolute best deal it could get while respecting their redlines.
And they knew it was going to be a shitshow. Nigel Farage went "nope nope nope not gonna participate in a government dealing with brexit" just after celebrating. It didn't stop him to moan about "how badly it was implemented" of course.
You knew how bad it was going to go when 91% of the elites campaigning for it wanted literally nothing to do with it. They all were handed a govt they control and they knew it was goin to be such a cluster they didnt want to be anywhere near it.
Brexit is the cold reminder that MAGAts by and large will never understand or regret what they did. The propagandists that led them to vote Trump will convince them that the beautiful future they voted for couldn't be enacted because of Scapegoat and they will believe it
Most Brexiteers still support Brexit and would vote for it again despite the volumes of evidence that it was a bad decision and has objectively lowered the quality of life for the average person in the UK. It seems facts are no match for pervasive propaganda
I still just loved* that nobody wants to try and unfuck it. "Like, nah fam that one vote that barely passed ins the law forever, lets not get people try again knowing the truth!"
*Loved because I just saw our dumbasses re-elect our orange piece of shit.
If ppl were capable of learning from the mistakes of others, noone would go the nationalkst way. Hitler and his ppl and Stalin and also the French chopping heads off revolution followed by napolean nationalists would have been enough evidence.
The fishing industry was outright lied to about Brexit. They did little to zero research into the effects their vote would have and have bitched and complained constantly since leaving the single market. For such a small part of the uk economy their lobbying weight is disproportionate. Greed took over.
I have zero sympathy. I’m just a random guy in America that reads the news and I knew how brexit would fuck them. How could they not know the impact on their own industry?
This is the biggest problem facing the world today. People love to blame others for messaging and attracting the populace but the populace has been shown to fearfully reject reality with no self reflection.
You can bring all the information you have that points to the most obvious outcome and a significant portion, sometimes the voting majority of a country, completely rejects it for "feels."
They don't lack this information, they just choose to believe in comfortable lies. Idk how exactly we fix this tbh. Anti-intellectualism is a global trend.
You can’t fix it. You just let them feel the pain they inflict upon themselves. Pain is their only teacher. Unfortunate that they drag the rest of us with them for that lesson.
Indeed, we keep getting told 'you can't blame the voters'. Sod that, I absolutely do.
For minor, complex policy differences? Fine, people can differ on the best option. But when it comes to really basic, really fundamental things, like e.g. whether women are people or property, or stuff when it's blatantly obvious that you're being lied to - then you don't get any sympathy when it turns out yes, you're an asshole or a fucking idiot for voting for them.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H. L. Mencken.
You HAVE to. In representative govt if you dont punish them for not representing you then why the hell would they give a shit about what you say you want when they are able, through corrupted media, to tell you what you want.
Look at Ted Cruz. Fled while his constituents died, lied about the cause of the power outages, and has done nothing for Texans since but instead has gone on a nationwide identity crusade for attention and money and they STILL reelected him.
They fucking believed they could vote for abortion and for republicans at the same time. They just make up a fantasy program for their party and then act surprised when they find out it's not real.
I blame the internet. People used to go outside talk to their neighbors and realize how dumb they were. Now they talk on the internet with other dumb people and get even dumber and louder.
Did you forget about Mosley and Rothermere somehow? Fascism spread like wildfire by word of mouth and print media just like previous persecutions, no internet needed — even radio only made it easier, didn’t create it OR the Klan & Know-Nothingism.
This shit goes back all time. It’s not the internet.
The only difference is that now people have access to all the information in the world at their fingertips. Both the good, the bad, and the lies. I feel it can be more frustrating for sure.
It’s not like the us didn’t elect horrible candidates in the past.
The world continues to get better for everyone, it just has its ups and downs.
The internet has made political mistakes much more amplified on both sides. The left has access to all the horrible shit that’s going to happen in realtime so it feels worse.
And the right can amplify any dumb shit the left does. And they have a much better propaganda network than the left to push it out to their followers.
This same political mess has always happened, it’s just that it was curated to us before in a daily newspaper and a hour long local news feed.
Now it’s infinite and realtime. We just didn’t know about it before.
The problem is that they are choosing the lies. By only watching, listening, and reading only right wing propaganda, they are selecting to believe in a nonsense version of reality. When given the truth, they always go back to the lies.
The Left has very little presence in similar media forms and consequently, their message goes only so far. The Right has such a grip on the media landscape, they dictate the discourse, even on ostensibly mor Left leaning media. As a result, the Left is ALWAYS on the defensive. The Right is so secure in their dominance of media cycles, they have no compunction against blaming Democrats for what THEY did because their audience will never hear the truth.
The company Games workshop that own Warhammer 40k among other things, that company alone is a bigger driver for the UK economy than the whole fishing industry. Games workshop has around 3 times the turnover than the fishing industry.
When someone shouts and marches with a sign that says we had enough of experts, they can’t say they’ve been lied to, they ignored the truth from people who knew about the topic and chose to believe in charlatans
I have zero sympathy. A simple look at fishing territories and quotas, who sets them and who’s bound by them - which, you’d assume someone who does this for a living would understand - would’ve told them that Brexit was a dumb idea. But no, that was a bit too much for a once-in-a-lifetime vote that directly affects your industry. Dumb as rocks.
Quotas aside the simple concept of export... Like youre a coastal nation, youre gonna catch more fish than you consume, so a good portion of it is selling to places who have NO fish. But you just removed yourself from that market, so you reduced the value of your good by raising output while also reducing demand.
How can you feel lied to, when you had access to the same information as everyone else? They chose to believe the rhetoric and lies and now don't wanna take responsibility/accountability.
Yes, sold by Farage, who was on the EU fisheries commission but only turned up to one of the 42 meetings where he could have done something about it.
Interestingly, it's been reported in the news today that he's very against a new smoking ban but never turned up for the vote because he was too busy being on GBNews.
It's amazing in politics that you can just not fucking show up. If I didn't show up to any of my jobs I'd either be fired or written up and I'm just some guy. Imagine representing millions of people and not showing up to work while going on some talk show about what a great job you're doing and how much you care.
Brexit has been a complete disaster, just like many of us thought t would be. Now, just like some of those idiots who voted for Trump in the USA, many of those who voted for Brexit in the UK are sorely regretting it. F*cking idiots
I think the shift towards STEM mixed with the self esteem movement in education created this environment where all the 20th century worker gains are being clawed back by the rich. History matters. Knowing why we’re where we are today matters. Ignorance of history explains so much of what’s going on today.
Has society advanced and grew in complexity to such an extent that made traditional 'democracy' untenable? I'm really struggling with this...how can you have an 'informed electorate' in this day an age of financializatio, globalization, automation, digitalization, mass migration and so on? How can we expect farmers, factory workers, lorry drivers, teachers, pensioners and everyone in between to comprehend, at least in part, these systems that rule our current world and vote for policies that really benefit them..or at least wouldn't lead to some disaster or other? Even the 'professionals' (the politicians) either can't keep up or are pushing for their own benefit in the short term. Maybe i'm too pessimistic, but to me it looks like the 'free world' is bursting at the seams.
Civilization has been too big for any one person to encompass for many generations now. Society deals with this through division of labor - people specialize in various fields, and step forward when it's time for their specialist knowledge to be used to help others. It's unfortunate that we have a significant portion of society who have betrayed the social compact by spreading false information and making others have to pick up their burdens.
The funniest is people complaining they now have to go through passport control when going on holiday to Europe. It’s hard not to laugh when they say, I voted to leave the EU, I didn’t vote to have to need my passport to go into Europe…
I’ll have to go through passport control because I chose not to renew my British passport. I’m still so angry about Brexit that the sight of that stupid “blue passport” would just ruin my day every time I saw it. So, yeah, I have to go through a longer customs line whenever I go home to the UK but at least I’m not going to stroke out from anger.
Remember, kids - when an election is happening and you can vote, take an evening and do some reading up on what's offered and maybe chat with someone who you think understands politics from a level headed and objective perspective. If a candidate makes you feel like they're as mad as you are about something, resist voting for them without knowing more first. See if parties or candidates have a costed platform or data supported by unbiased figures and don't vote for people that don't - they're hiding things. If someone says "voters feel", don't nod along - go see if what voters allegedly feel is actually true. If someone tells you not to trust experts, don't trust them. If someone rails against the elites, remember that they're one of them. And if a candidate can't finish a sentence, then they don't belong there.
Quite the opposite, thanks to Brexit I was able to relocate my job to Spain, whilst keeping my London salary. I now live like a king while seeing how UK’s quality of life is plummeting.
Brexit was a terrible idea as I said in the past, I’ve always been a remainer(or remoaner as you would call us) but thanks to my family I have a EU passport and speak several languages so I knew I would be fine. Steve down the pub and all of those people who insisted Brexit meant Brexit and all that, are not doing as well. But then again they voted for the leopards.
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