#Brexiteers like me are realising it’s impossible for Brexit to ever be truly done
###Six years on, it’s worrying to think we went through so much pain to “take back control”.
####By William Atkinson
Next Thursday marks six years since Britain voted to exit the European Union. Although I was too young to vote, I was a committed supporter of leaving. And along with most of those ticking the Leave box, I hoped our exit would remove the spectre of Brussels from our politics forever.
Yet we are marking this anniversary amid headlines about the ongoing influence of the European Court of Human Rights, the government’s controversial proposals over the Northern Ireland Protocol of the Brexit agreement, and whether Labour wants to rejoin the EU’s single market or not. All of this comes, of course, after several years of bitter debate over whether we should actually leave, and what an exit would look like.
So contrary to my party’s 2019 promise, we are without a clear sense that Brexit has been done. Were my fellow Leavers and I naive that Brexit ever would be done, however? We certainly underestimated the hostility the vote would generate, and the determination of many to prevent Brexit going ahead. Then again, this is hardly surprising: a romantic faith in democracy is what fundamentally drove my Euroscepticism.
Yet many Brexiteers were also far too naive as to how easy getting a deal would be. Many didn’t understand the technicalities of Article 50, the customs union or the single market, and assumed mutual self-interest would prevent Brussels from making an example of us. Tory incredulity over the European Court of Human Rights’s decision to block deportations to Rwanda this week, with various figures asking how it can have control over our laws after Brexit, also suggests that many do not understand that the court is not part of the EU.
Moreover, splits within the Eurosceptic coalition clouded pictures of what our Brexit should and would look like. Some, like Daniel Hannan, would have been happy for us to have remained a member of the European Economic Area or European Free Trade Association, accepting freedom of movement for the sake of the ability to do free trade deals. Many Brexit voters instead saw the priority as reducing immigration – a promise that has hardly been fulfilled.
In that sense, we were also misguided to believe that Brexit would really constitute a new departure in British politics. Whatever the intentions of Cummings et al, and whatever the promises made by leading campaigners, the institutional inertia of British politics has meant we have hardly used Brexit to diverge from the European Union. Our economic model still requires ever-growing taxes, tariffs for key industries and high levels of immigration.
This is not to say I believe Brexit was pointless, or that it should not have been delivered. The Covid vaccination programme alone highlights the benefits of shrugging off the dead head of Brussels. If the campaign to overturn the vote had succeeded, it would have permanently damaged our democracy. The nation state remains the best way of keeping politicians accountable, and the recent crisis in Ukraine has ably demonstrated the EU’s dysfunctionality.
Yet six years on, it cannot be said that Brexit removed the European Union from our political life, or that leaving has been an unalloyed success. It is worrying to think we went through so much pain to take back control and get Brexit done, only to waste the opportunity it provides.
I will never understand how a brexiters mind can come up with so many untruths… the Covid vaccination Programme would have been no problem and could have been handled the same by any EU country, only that they all decided to go it together.
Also I fail to see where any UK politician is held accountable? All I see is constant lying being accepted by the nation…
Brexitards hey… Who would have thunk it.
None of this reconciles with the utter tosh that “WE KNEW WHAT VOTED FOR” we had to continually hear.
So many slimy Brexiteers are trying to absolve themselves of blame, whilst simultaneously pushing it on to everyone else.
Johnson said Brexit is done. It is done. It’s not going to get better from here on in however you dress it up.
Christ, even as a staunch remainer I understand that. You can’t roll the clock back. It is what it is.
Accept it and try and fix it if you want but fundamentally we are no longer part of the EU and we have to live with that.
Because “respected” publications and news outlets publish basic lies – such as the conflation of the ECHR with the EU – we allow public discussion to be hijacked and as a nation we continue to make bad decisions.
For fucks sake. This shit about the vaccinations. Shut the fuck up about it already. It made zero fucking difference whether we were in the EU or not in the EU. Big whoop, the UK started a bit quicker. The EU caught up very quickly on vaccination rates.
Hardly worth fucking the economy over forever though was it?
> Six years on, it’s worrying to think we went through so much pain to “take back control”.
It was explained to you at length before the vote that Brexit meant pain. You ignored the warnings. Now you’re stuck with this pretence that this isn’t really Brexit, despite being pretty much exactly what all the grown-ups told you would happen. Dick.
> a romantic faith in democracy is what fundamentally drove my Euroscepticism.
For most Leave voters, it was a dislike of foreigners.
> Yet many Brexiteers were also far too naive as to how easy getting a deal would be. Many didn’t understand the technicalities of Article 50, the customs union or the single market
Well, yeah, along with bigotry the leave vote was heavily driven by a deep ignorance of almost everything to do with the EU.
> If the campaign to overturn the vote had succeeded, it would have permanently damaged our democracy.
No, democracy isn’t something that just happens once. If our democracy had changed its mind and expressed that in a safe, reliable way (like a referendum) then our democracy would have been working exactly as it should, not damaged in the least.
>Whatever the intentions of Cummings et al, and whatever the promises made by leading campaigners, the institutional inertia of British politics has meant we have hardly used Brexit to diverge from the European Union. Our economic model still requires ever-growing taxes, tariffs for key industries and high levels of immigration.
This is what I don’t get though. When was this ever even part of the discussion?
The problem I have with so many of these “Brexiteer views on Brexit” articles, is all they do is highlight just how disconnected and wishful each of them is.
This person was under the impression that Brexit meant, at least with some certainty, that the UK would drive forward with radical changes to government, taxation, business and trade. That we’d be a leader in innovation for all those areas and more because we’d be “free” to do it as we please.
But the major tag line for Brexit was the fucking NHS bus bullshit. The vox pops all seemed to talk about immigration. The articles obsessed over “red tape” and “taking orders” from Brussels.
So where is William Atkinson getting the idea from, that Brexit was a progressive push for being able to take up radical changes for the betterment of the country? Was he on another planet in the years and months leading up to and after the referendum?
This entire article is just another attempt at Brexiteers to disown their mistake. Rather than simply come out and say [“I took a risk, and it didn’t pan out. My bad.”](https://i.imgur.com/ae4xtKY.jpg), they’ll insist that Brexit actually was meant for something else entirely, that it could have been great if we’d just done things differently; The way they think they should have been done.
Which is worth fuck all.
>Next Thursday marks six years since Britain voted to exit the European Union.
Although I was too young to vote, I was a committed supporter of
leaving. And along with most of those ticking the Leave box, I hoped our
exit would remove the spectre of Brussels from our politics forever.
​
Yet then the author goes on to whine about the ECHR. The ECHR is, of course, not an EU organisation, and is not based in Brussels but Strasbourg.
More of these type of pieces popping up now so I reckon we backstepping towards a post Johnson landing ground. I reckon it will be some kind of customs alignment, probably mirroring the NIP.
That way brexiters can say they get back the trade bloc that the UK joined in the 70s, but without the bogeyman EU attachment, and then with probably a new monarch in time the brexit era will slide from the public mind.
The article seems to claim the following.
1. Brexiteers were divided on the form that Brexit should take.
2. Many brexiteers fail to understand the complexities of the UK’s involvement with the European Union.
3. Brexiteers underestimated the opposition they would face both from within the UK and from the EU.
4. (4a) Brexit allows the UK to depart from its ‘model’ of ‘ever-growing taxes, tariffs for key industries and high levels of immigration’ and yet (4b) the UK has not done that.
Here is some appraisal.
A) 1 and 2 seem true.
B) I am unsure about the truth of 3. For, some Brexiteers want division and some Brexiteers exaggerate the opposition that they face. Indeed a common tactic is to present problems that do not owe to political opposition as if they did owe to political opposition. Think of Northern Ireland and the requirement to honour treaties that the Brexiteers themselves negotiated.
c) 4a seems exaggerated, in that the UK had considerable control over those matters whilst it was within the EU. As to 4b: the article should mention the costs – economic and otherwise – of such departure.
d) Nothing within 1-4 seems to yield a case that it is ‘impossible for Brexit to ever be duly done.’
But I thought Boris had delivered Brexit?
Yep. Because you can’t gas people anymore. Live with it.
14 comments
#Brexiteers like me are realising it’s impossible for Brexit to ever be truly done
###Six years on, it’s worrying to think we went through so much pain to “take back control”.
####By William Atkinson
Next Thursday marks six years since Britain voted to exit the European Union. Although I was too young to vote, I was a committed supporter of leaving. And along with most of those ticking the Leave box, I hoped our exit would remove the spectre of Brussels from our politics forever.
Yet we are marking this anniversary amid headlines about the ongoing influence of the European Court of Human Rights, the government’s controversial proposals over the Northern Ireland Protocol of the Brexit agreement, and whether Labour wants to rejoin the EU’s single market or not. All of this comes, of course, after several years of bitter debate over whether we should actually leave, and what an exit would look like.
So contrary to my party’s 2019 promise, we are without a clear sense that Brexit has been done. Were my fellow Leavers and I naive that Brexit ever would be done, however? We certainly underestimated the hostility the vote would generate, and the determination of many to prevent Brexit going ahead. Then again, this is hardly surprising: a romantic faith in democracy is what fundamentally drove my Euroscepticism.
Yet many Brexiteers were also far too naive as to how easy getting a deal would be. Many didn’t understand the technicalities of Article 50, the customs union or the single market, and assumed mutual self-interest would prevent Brussels from making an example of us. Tory incredulity over the European Court of Human Rights’s decision to block deportations to Rwanda this week, with various figures asking how it can have control over our laws after Brexit, also suggests that many do not understand that the court is not part of the EU.
Moreover, splits within the Eurosceptic coalition clouded pictures of what our Brexit should and would look like. Some, like Daniel Hannan, would have been happy for us to have remained a member of the European Economic Area or European Free Trade Association, accepting freedom of movement for the sake of the ability to do free trade deals. Many Brexit voters instead saw the priority as reducing immigration – a promise that has hardly been fulfilled.
In that sense, we were also misguided to believe that Brexit would really constitute a new departure in British politics. Whatever the intentions of Cummings et al, and whatever the promises made by leading campaigners, the institutional inertia of British politics has meant we have hardly used Brexit to diverge from the European Union. Our economic model still requires ever-growing taxes, tariffs for key industries and high levels of immigration.
This is not to say I believe Brexit was pointless, or that it should not have been delivered. The Covid vaccination programme alone highlights the benefits of shrugging off the dead head of Brussels. If the campaign to overturn the vote had succeeded, it would have permanently damaged our democracy. The nation state remains the best way of keeping politicians accountable, and the recent crisis in Ukraine has ably demonstrated the EU’s dysfunctionality.
Yet six years on, it cannot be said that Brexit removed the European Union from our political life, or that leaving has been an unalloyed success. It is worrying to think we went through so much pain to take back control and get Brexit done, only to waste the opportunity it provides.
I will never understand how a brexiters mind can come up with so many untruths… the Covid vaccination Programme would have been no problem and could have been handled the same by any EU country, only that they all decided to go it together.
Also I fail to see where any UK politician is held accountable? All I see is constant lying being accepted by the nation…
Brexitards hey… Who would have thunk it.
None of this reconciles with the utter tosh that “WE KNEW WHAT VOTED FOR” we had to continually hear.
So many slimy Brexiteers are trying to absolve themselves of blame, whilst simultaneously pushing it on to everyone else.
Johnson said Brexit is done. It is done. It’s not going to get better from here on in however you dress it up.
Christ, even as a staunch remainer I understand that. You can’t roll the clock back. It is what it is.
Accept it and try and fix it if you want but fundamentally we are no longer part of the EU and we have to live with that.
Because “respected” publications and news outlets publish basic lies – such as the conflation of the ECHR with the EU – we allow public discussion to be hijacked and as a nation we continue to make bad decisions.
For fucks sake. This shit about the vaccinations. Shut the fuck up about it already. It made zero fucking difference whether we were in the EU or not in the EU. Big whoop, the UK started a bit quicker. The EU caught up very quickly on vaccination rates.
Hardly worth fucking the economy over forever though was it?
> Six years on, it’s worrying to think we went through so much pain to “take back control”.
It was explained to you at length before the vote that Brexit meant pain. You ignored the warnings. Now you’re stuck with this pretence that this isn’t really Brexit, despite being pretty much exactly what all the grown-ups told you would happen. Dick.
> a romantic faith in democracy is what fundamentally drove my Euroscepticism.
For most Leave voters, it was a dislike of foreigners.
> Yet many Brexiteers were also far too naive as to how easy getting a deal would be. Many didn’t understand the technicalities of Article 50, the customs union or the single market
Well, yeah, along with bigotry the leave vote was heavily driven by a deep ignorance of almost everything to do with the EU.
> If the campaign to overturn the vote had succeeded, it would have permanently damaged our democracy.
No, democracy isn’t something that just happens once. If our democracy had changed its mind and expressed that in a safe, reliable way (like a referendum) then our democracy would have been working exactly as it should, not damaged in the least.
>Whatever the intentions of Cummings et al, and whatever the promises made by leading campaigners, the institutional inertia of British politics has meant we have hardly used Brexit to diverge from the European Union. Our economic model still requires ever-growing taxes, tariffs for key industries and high levels of immigration.
This is what I don’t get though. When was this ever even part of the discussion?
The problem I have with so many of these “Brexiteer views on Brexit” articles, is all they do is highlight just how disconnected and wishful each of them is.
This person was under the impression that Brexit meant, at least with some certainty, that the UK would drive forward with radical changes to government, taxation, business and trade. That we’d be a leader in innovation for all those areas and more because we’d be “free” to do it as we please.
But the major tag line for Brexit was the fucking NHS bus bullshit. The vox pops all seemed to talk about immigration. The articles obsessed over “red tape” and “taking orders” from Brussels.
So where is William Atkinson getting the idea from, that Brexit was a progressive push for being able to take up radical changes for the betterment of the country? Was he on another planet in the years and months leading up to and after the referendum?
This entire article is just another attempt at Brexiteers to disown their mistake. Rather than simply come out and say [“I took a risk, and it didn’t pan out. My bad.”](https://i.imgur.com/ae4xtKY.jpg), they’ll insist that Brexit actually was meant for something else entirely, that it could have been great if we’d just done things differently; The way they think they should have been done.
Which is worth fuck all.
>Next Thursday marks six years since Britain voted to exit the European Union.
Although I was too young to vote, I was a committed supporter of
leaving. And along with most of those ticking the Leave box, I hoped our
exit would remove the spectre of Brussels from our politics forever.
​
Yet then the author goes on to whine about the ECHR. The ECHR is, of course, not an EU organisation, and is not based in Brussels but Strasbourg.
More of these type of pieces popping up now so I reckon we backstepping towards a post Johnson landing ground. I reckon it will be some kind of customs alignment, probably mirroring the NIP.
That way brexiters can say they get back the trade bloc that the UK joined in the 70s, but without the bogeyman EU attachment, and then with probably a new monarch in time the brexit era will slide from the public mind.
The article seems to claim the following.
1. Brexiteers were divided on the form that Brexit should take.
2. Many brexiteers fail to understand the complexities of the UK’s involvement with the European Union.
3. Brexiteers underestimated the opposition they would face both from within the UK and from the EU.
4. (4a) Brexit allows the UK to depart from its ‘model’ of ‘ever-growing taxes, tariffs for key industries and high levels of immigration’ and yet (4b) the UK has not done that.
Here is some appraisal.
A) 1 and 2 seem true.
B) I am unsure about the truth of 3. For, some Brexiteers want division and some Brexiteers exaggerate the opposition that they face. Indeed a common tactic is to present problems that do not owe to political opposition as if they did owe to political opposition. Think of Northern Ireland and the requirement to honour treaties that the Brexiteers themselves negotiated.
c) 4a seems exaggerated, in that the UK had considerable control over those matters whilst it was within the EU. As to 4b: the article should mention the costs – economic and otherwise – of such departure.
d) Nothing within 1-4 seems to yield a case that it is ‘impossible for Brexit to ever be duly done.’
But I thought Boris had delivered Brexit?
Yep. Because you can’t gas people anymore. Live with it.