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Comment by StanAngeloff | Hacker News Reader

As a EU resident who is a partner in several UK based businesses, the uncertainty over what's coming next is frightening. When I approached different colleagues, friends & family in the UK, they all had different views on what should happen. To an outsider, it looks like opinions have been polarised.

If you are managing a business that has ties to the UK there are very many unknowns right now. It's a lot easier to plan for the worst than it is to take risks IMHO. Brexit must ultimately hurt the UK economy in some way – jobs lost, money flowing out of the country, talented people leaving?

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You're right about the polarisation. The same forces in play in America are in play in Britain right now. It's no accident that Trump described himself as "Mr Brexit". Authoritarian voters support Brexit, liberal ones don't. The major parties split right/left not authoritarian/liberal and are terrified of losing their voting base. I know a die hard leaver, she's one of the few people I'd trust my children with. She's also an authoritarian leftist who can't understand why we're not out already and wants to get rid of immigrants.

The London Tech scene (which skews left/liberal) seems to be hemorrhaging talented people to Berlin and other places. All of these people are what I think of as natural Londoners, but they're deciding for their own reasons that Britain isn't the place they thought it was. (Me, I've got a wife and kids, it's harder to up sticks. That and I love this country.)

Meanwhile, inflation is so bad the supermarkets are quietly reducing the quantity in boxes to avoid giving shoppers a heart attack at the prices, and Brexit _hasn't even happened yet_.

> It's no accident that Trump described himself as "Mr Brexit".

No he didn’t. That’s how he introduced Nigel Farage at a rally.

> They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/76624621307949875...

From my little time in the UK right before the Brexit vote, similar patterns emerged in public discourse about the vote.

Disclaimed: anecdata below.

From the few people I talked to, both the leave and remain group seemed to leave voters mostly thinking, “the other choice sounds bad,” rather than having real strong reasons and desired outcomes in favor of voting one way or the other. It was a fear-driven vote, one to avoid a bad outcome rather than gain a good outcome.

Similar to the US Presidential election, people tended to have stronger opinions against the other candidate than for their own candidate.

both the leave and remain group seemed to leave voters mostly thinking, “the other choice sounds bad,”

Absolutely, this. The remain campaign was actually labelled "Project Fear" [0], I mean if that doesn't say it all I don't know what does ..

There was never, any actual discussion of what brexit means. How it would look. What consitutional adjustments would be made. Simply a binary "Stay" or "Leave" on the Ballot, which strikes me as particularly absurd and should in some way undermine the constitutionality of it.

Brexit to me, is the outcome of an absolute failure in governance by all concerned, whatever the outcome, and whatever outcome was envisaged by those that voted for it. ..

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Fear_(British_politics...

As a Remainer who voted Yes in the Scottish Indyref, I strongly agree. What it seems to me happened is that Cameron drew exactly the wrong lesson from the Indyref. He thought Project Fear worked there, despite the vote moving from strong No to close No over the course of the campaign. So he replicated the strategy. What he hadn't realised was how corrosive a demoralisation-based strategy that relied on the collusion of the three main supposedly opposed parties was.

Ongoing, Brexit is being run entirely in essay-crisis mode. Nothing will happen until the last minute. The process will run on the EU timetable with the EU's preferred outcomes unless and until the UK government collapses and is unable to send anyone. Nobody from the UK side is proposing serious, workable options.

I did not know this was called Project Fear. That is fascinating.

Fear has always been in the toolbox for politicians, but it seems to be being used more and more. Xenophobic fear is probably the most loudly-proclaimed one, but there are other types of fear, like the fear for one's safety... which, in the USA, is typically related to xenophobia these days, even if statistically it should not be [0].

I don't know the most effective way to fight fear-based messages besides very inspiring, positive-oriented messaging.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/2...

There is a rather important point though: Project Fear was a label applied by professional politicians to dismiss the genuine opinions of people who actually knew what they were talking about.

As it is, the UK has gone in two years from the best economic performer in the EU to the worst, and every prediction of how badly the divorce proceedings would go seem to come true. There’s quite a few people who use the phrase Project Fact now.

Ironically, the Vote Leave campaign was characterised by stoking fact-free fear about immigration.

Yes, the polarization is deliberate, following the US culture war template or the older UK colonial practice. Keep the population fighting each other to prevent them uniting to focus on the real inequalities. Lots of people in the most marginalised parts of the country voted for Brexit in an attack on "elites", but of course the "elite"(+) running Brexit aren't going to start caring about Lowestoft.

(+) used with heavy sarcasm to describe the current lot http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/reshuffle-cabinet-priv...

>Authoritarian voters support Brexit, liberal ones don't.

I don't think that's an accurate analysis. As far as I can tell the vote was driven mainly by economic distress, media (which papers you read) and community (a lot of people just voted the same way their friends or family did).

>The London Tech scene (which skews left/liberal) seems to be hemorrhaging talented people to Berlin and other places.

I know a lot of people in the London tech scene and I only know two off the top of my head who have gone to Europe, and I don't think Brexit was a major reason for either of them.

I also haven't seen much of a significant rise in rates. If all the valuable talent is gone surely that means I'm going to be worth more?

>Meanwhile, inflation is so bad the supermarkets are quietly reducing the quantity in boxes

That's how inflation always works in supermarkets.

If all the valuable talent is gone surely that means I'm going to be worth more?

I'd be more inclined to think, deadweight losses notwithstanding, that this means a lot of the work will go elsewhere ..

This would presumably mean fewer roles advertised. I haven't noticed that either.

I alluded to a deadweight, or economic intertia, so yeah ... it's early days yet ... but it doesn't really matter because Brexit probably won't happen the way most people think it will ...

Dead weight losses occur in the case of distorting subsidies/tariffs or one side of the equation is a monopoly.

I don't see the relevance to Brexit's effect on the job market.

Funny you mention economic distress, because people always seem to ascribe the Trump victory to it to. Except that it's not borne out by any actual analysis of who voted and who didn't.

Yes, some very depressed areas voted for Brexit. But Liverpool didn't, and it's seriously poor.

> Funny you mention economic distress, because people always seem to ascribe the Trump victory to it to. Except that it's not borne out by any actual analysis of who voted and who didn't

The non-existent statistical analysis of who voted and who didn't that ascribes the vote to economic distress:

http://voxeu.org/article/brexit-cry-financial-pain-not-influ...

In case you're curious.

In your opinion, what do you think the consequences with regards to Scotland will be given some time? Might they seek another independence vote to then rejoin the EU?

In some circles, it has been mooted that the discussions going on over Northern Ireland are in preparation for this eventuality. That the UK is hedging against an eventual break up and wants to figure out how best to mitigate any ill effects of this for all concerned.

If we get a "hard" Brexit i can see Scotland voting to leave within a few years, ill put 90% odds on it.

Ireland maybe unifying? Not impossible.

The union looks very weak from where i'm sat right now.

My take: The evidence right now is that the SNP are all in favour of a second independence referendum, but that Scottish people in general are not. Scotland's caught between a rock and a hard place. It wants to be in the EU but the majority of its trade is with England.

Charlie Stross famously gave up on his Rule 34 series of novels because he was having trouble predicting where Scotland would be in ten years. It's still not obvious and is probably going to be governed by future events.

Yes, but everyone is aware that we would normally get one vote no more frequently than every 20-30 years on the subject. It has to be after the outcome of Brexit is clear. Which may mean short-term disastrous exit from the EU.

(e.g. while Scottish fishermen have a noisy anti-EU contingent, the fish processing industry relies on EU workers and also mostly exports to the EU due to differences in UK and Continental preferences in seafood. People will need to see the actual consequences resolve before they will change their view.)

There’s been a lot of FUD about brexit, the only damages if any are because of it. Too much propaganda from both sides.

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