The Brexit betrayal is now complete – Without the promise to take back control of Britain’s borders, Leave would not have won
by ByGollie
The Brexit betrayal is now complete – Without the promise to take back control of Britain’s borders, Leave would not have won
by ByGollie
13 comments
> # The Brexit betrayal is now complete
>
> **Without the promise to take back control of Britain’s borders, Leave would not have won**
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> Jeremy Warner
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> 29 November 2023 • 6:00am
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> How’s Brexit working out? There have been some marginal positives, but in terms of the economy, it’s been mainly downside, and on the issues that really matter to voters – particularly immigration and a better functioning health service with more money behind it – Brexit has so far manifestly failed to deliver.
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> A recent European Movement commissioned Business Impact Report found that 94pc of businesses surveyed have experienced negative effects from Brexit, while the National Institute of Economic and Social Research reckons that leaving the EU has already cost the UK economy 2.5pc of GDP.
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> Dave Ramsden, deputy Governor of the Bank of England, seemed to concur, saying last week that Brexit had “chilled” levels of business investment in the UK.
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> As chief economist to the Treasury, Sir Dave co-authored much of the economic analysis that lay behind the Government’s “Project Fear” campaign in the run-up to the EU referendum, so you might expect him to gleefully claim vindication. Even so, it’s hard to argue with the numbers, which are abysmal.
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> Yet the much bigger disappointment for many Leave voters is on migration. Without the promise to take back control of Britain’s borders, Leave could not, and would not, have won.
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> With net migration surging to record levels over the past two years, there is a growing sense not just of frustration with the body politic, but of abject betrayal.
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> https://i.imgur.com/5Oi1D4k.png
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> Once more the politicians have promised something they have been unable to deliver, and this time we cannot hide behind the excuse of distant European elites.
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> Not that this is a specifically British problem. To a greater or lesser extent, nearly all “high income” economies are suffering from the same failure to control both legal and illegal migration.
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> In Europe, it’s already reshaping the political landscape, laying waste to the traditional centre ground as it goes. The same thing could yet happen here.
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> Britain’s Labour Party may be well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls at present. But even with the UK’s first past the post electoral system, which hugely favours the two biggest parties, Labour will surely, in time, wither just as comprehensively as the centre-Left has done on the continent if it fails to address these concerns.
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> The standard defence of relatively free movement across borders has long been that, despite the pressures imposed on infrastructure and social cohesion, the addition of new skills and younger blood that immigration provides is bound to be economically beneficial in the long run.
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> This may once have been true. France’s loss was England’s gain when highly skilled Huguenots fled across the channel from the late seventeenth century onwards to escape religious persecution. More recently, the same was true of Ugandan Asians fleeing Idi Amin.
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> Yet in an age of mass migration from almost everywhere, positive stories like these are much harder to come by. If truth be told, much migration has become more of an economic cost than a benefit.
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> Economies grow in two ways – either through population growth or productivity gain. It is only the latter form of growth that advances living standards.
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> If population growth through migration leads naturally to productivity gain, then there would still be an economic case to be made for it, but sadly this no longer seems to be true. To the contrary, very high levels of net immigration over the past twenty years have gone hand in hand with a marked fall off in productivity gain.
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> Britain’s poor productivity record has many different causes, admittedly, but if the old orthodoxy on the benefits of migration were correct, you would expect to see at least some positives in terms of innovation, work ethic and entrepreneurialism.
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> Worse still, changes in the mix of immigration, in part brought about by Brexit, has further magnified the economic negatives.
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> One of the great ironies of today’s record levels of migration is that they seem to have done little or nothing to ease Britain’s acute labour shortages. It is partly to address these shortages that so many work visas are being handed out, particularly in social care, the health service and hospitality. But to little avail.
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> The latest Office for National Statistics data show net migration of around 750,000 last year, compared to roughly 220,000 in 2019, yet vacancies are still close to record levels.
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> Today’s vast increase in the number of migrants is moreover entirely driven by non-EU nationals. The upsurge comes from humanitarian visas, international students, and dependents.
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> https://i.imgur.com/Tu08ojW.png
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> For 25 years prior to Brexit, Britain enjoyed some of the smartest immigration you could hope for – trained and educated in Europe but paying taxes in the UK.
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> The latest wave is overwhelmingly from the sub-continent, Africa and the Middle East. This is not to denigrate their qualities, but much of it is unlikely to have the same tax paying heft as what went before, never mind the greater challenges of integration.
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> But don’t take it from me; it’s what, in effect, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said last week in its “Economic and Fiscal Outlook”.
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> It’s also what the credit rating agency, S & P Global, says in its latest assessment of the UK economy. “Net immigration has remained high even though fewer EU workers are now part of the U.K. labour market”, S & P wrote.
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> “Yet the skill set of the non-EU immigrants is different and their participation in the labour market is lower. Many are students or refugees. Consequently, immigration does not necessarily help fill the gaps in industries where the workforce is lacking”.
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> The OBR similarly finds that “those that arrive as students, dependents, or for other reasons tend to have below average labour participation rates”.
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> As a result of this change in mix, the OBR expects that the surge in migrant numbers will add less than a half to the nation’s labour force as would normally be expected from such an influx.
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> In attempting to address manifest shortcomings in the post-Brexit migration regime, the politicians face some awkward trade-offs. Do they abandon hopes of a comprehensive free trade agreement with India, where more work visas are part of the price demanded?
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> What becomes of many of our universities, an increasingly important export earner, if denied the lifeblood of overseas student fees? And who’s going to look after the elderly, or staff our hospitals, if we cut the inflow of foreign workers?
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> Are we willing to pay significantly more for these services as a way of persuading more Brits to fill the gap? This would only imply higher taxes still, with progressively squeezed labour supply, and permanently higher interest rates.
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> In its programme of measures to make work pay, the Government has some of the right ideas, but if the package works at all, it’ll take a long time to have a meaningful impact.
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> Immigration is perhaps the biggest political issue of our time. Brexit was supposed to provide answers. So far it’s made matters worse, not better.
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The remain campaigned should have highlighted how freedom of movement wasn’t the problem but rather immigration from non-eu countries.
This article seems to assume that other issues that might be harder for most to visualize are also to blame for various woes. Housing crisis is exacerbated by real estate businesses acquiring large numbers of houses pushing up prices both for purchase and rent. The unequal distribution of any economic gain to the upper classes while the middle and lower classes stagnate or become poorer are also not necessarily tied to migration either.
That said the powers that be will find it much easier to scapegoat immigrants (which aside from EU countries the UK very much controlled its borders) than to explain and implement the larger structural changes needed to improve society in general.
The Telegraph still offers Nigel Farage spots for opinion pieces by the way. Saw one on their front page like 2 weeks ago. Hypocrites
Doesn’t make it any better. Open borders is like the best thing with the EU.
Well, was there any point to Brexit, apart of “tacking back control of Britain’s borders” and consequently limit immigration (which, by the way, they completely failed to do)?
Well done Britain. Laughing all the way to the food bank.
Imagine voting for the Tories when they promise to do something and acting shocked when they don’t do it.
Maybe the types of immigrants allowed in has changed since Brexit(?).
Won’t be long now before they accuse the EU of tricking the UK into leaving.
[deleted]
There was no betrayal.
If you were dumb enough to think that the politicians could actually do ANYTHING about the borders, certainly anything to even keep them the same, let alone improve them, then you were an absolute idiot.
The problem with Brexit was not someone failing you, or someone deciding not to do what they promised, or someone just unable to “battle” internal bureaucracy or opposition or even “the EU” to get what they wanted.
The problem with Brexit was that it was never actually viable, was never going to make anything better, and everyone with half a brain was telling you that (but “I think we’ve all had enough of experts”, remember?) and that some people BELIEVED A POLITICIAN. They honestly thought that the bunch of crooks (on all sides) who were talking about Brexit were going to do what they said, without even questioning it once.
Brexit was a perfect demonstration of how the stupidity of the average makes progress almost impossible. The second that – as a country – we started being governed by rhetoric, sound-bites, prejudice, hating our neighbours, and blaming everyone but ourselves for our problems, Brexit was already going to happen, and already going to be an unmitigated (quite literally unmitigated) disaster – it was the only possible consequence.
I have a British analogy for Brexit:
– We were all playing football together.
– The one boy got pissed off because he didn’t want to play the same way as everyone else, he wanted to be the only one allowed to score goals, and their goal had to be bigger, and they weren’t allowed to try to save his shots, and that was CLEARLY a foul because it was against him, …
– So he threatens to take his ball elsewhere unless everyone plays the game HIS way, whether that’s fun for them or not. And everyone basically says: “Okay then. We think that’s dumb and you’ll regret it, but if that’s what you want”.
– He picks his ball, walks off crying.
– Now he’s stuck sulking on the sidelines, kicking his ball against a wall on his own, muttering about how stupid EVERYONE ELSE is, and of course he doesn’t miss them, why would he, he’s got his own ball, and this ball is better than theirs, stupid teams, who wants to be in a team anyway, they’re all dumb…
– Meanwhile, the other 27 players got another ball, carried on playing, don’t give him a second thought except to laugh at him whenever they look over.
Guess who’s having more fun.
Guess who got EXACTLY what they asked for.
Guess who regrets it.
Guess whose decision it was.
Guess who suffered from that decision.
Guess who needs to man the fuck up and admit they were wrong, even if it means apologising, asking nicely to get back in the game, even if that means they aren’t passed the ball anywhere near as much now in case they walk off with it again.
I’m British and Brexit was not a “betrayal”. You got *exactly what you voted for* (remember those words?) which was a non-descript, empty, detail-less plan to somehow “leave the EU” without any concept of what else you were going to do, no actual brief about how to do it, which experts warned against, the EU warned against, and which was ALWAYS going to end badly. And that’s what you got – we left the EU without a damn clue what we were actually going to do next, or even how to go about actually leaving in the first place. Not for one second did I believe a single promise of leaving the EU… not even ONE. Not even the tiniest. And I still can’t actually find one that actually “came true”. It was always quite clear.
It wasn’t a betrayal. It was idiocy that everyone lumped in and cheered along and joined in while a load of sensible people tried to reason with the crowd and were jeered and attacked for even trying to do so.
Since day one of the slightest hint of such a dumb suggestion becoming mainstream, Brexit was – to many – like watching the population voting to kick themselves in the balls. And while it gained momentum, and everyone cheered about how great kicking ourselves in the balls would be, and discussed ways we could kick ourselves in the balls even harder, the rest of us just looked out at the dumbest fucking idea in political history in disbelief that we were being challenged whenever we suggested that maybe kicking yourself in the balls wasn’t actually such a great idea – no matter how much we explained it, tried to “come down to your level”, took great pains to be polite and understanding why you wanted to kick yourself in the balls.
And the thing is: They kicked us all in the balls too. They voted to kick everyone in the balls, without even working out the simple logistics of how to do that, let alone WHY we would want to do that, and we all ended up being kicked in the balls “to show them!”. Those damn foreigners who said we’d be dumb to kick ourselves in the balls! Well, just because of that, we’re going to kick ourselves in the balls even harder! That’ll show ’em!
Brexit wasn’t a betrayal. It was a ball-kicking that people voluntarily voted for, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, when previously kicking ourselves in the balls hadn’t even been SUGGESTED, until suddenly one day everyone around us seemed to want to kick themselves in the balls and we couldn’t understand why.
Brexit wasn’t a betrayal. They did exactly what they promised to actually do, to the letter – because they promised NOTHING OF ANY DETAIL AT ALL WHATSOEVER. Everything else was hypothesising how great doing that dumbest fucking thing would be and how we’d all be magically showered in gold once we kicked ourselves in the balls – with no explanation of why that would ever be. It showed you just exactly how fucking dumb having politicians “listening” to the people in the streets who can barely work out how to write in joined-up writing works out, or how dumb it is to let politicians be in charge of anything of import (which COVID also handily demonstrated – when politicians are in charge of a pandemic response rather than, say, doctors, we get a shitshow).
You want to fix Brexit? Undo the entire fucking thing, every detail, and go back to where we were (which you can’t, because we threw away a ton of once-in-a-lifetime benefits that we knew we could NEVER restore if we went Brexit, and idiots just thought “Well, we’ll never need these bridges anyway, might as well just burn them all.”)
Brexit wasn’t a betrayal. It just demonstrated perfectly how dumb people are, and how dumb politicians are to think that “what the people say” is even vaguely close to “what the people want” and nowhere near “what the people need”.
Sorry, but you weren’t betrayed. You were a bunch of idiots. The mugger didn’t “trick” you out of your wallet… you gave it to them on a silver platter and tried to convince yourself that doing so would mean that you’d somehow get richer.
Brexit wasn’t a betrayal. It was a load of balls.
Tough times push people to the right. Populists tell people what the people want to hear: that they deserve more because they are better than “them others” (substitute with the category of choice, e.g. jews, muslims, immigrants, blacks, …).