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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

"Chocolate teapot no good for hot tea".

No surprise whatsoever. What on earth did Brexiteers think was going to happen?

Still, at least we now have £350m a week for the NHS (oh wait, we don't) and a whole bunch of trade deals with others (oh wait, we don't) and a thriving economy (sigh).

Obviously Covid will be used as the fall guy from now until eternity, but it's so blindingly obvious that we've been stiffed by a bunch of nutters with some totally false sense of "Being Free Again". Free from trade, partnerships and an easy way of doing business, yes.

Sorry. Bit bitter about the whole thing.

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> What on earth did Brexiteers think was going to happen

I'd wager some wanted this to happen, it makes buying up public infrastructure and companies very cheap. The sale of ARM just after the referrendum is just one example.

Well of course, there is a reason why there was so much wealth behind the leave campaign. Crashing a country and then buy up their stuff was already completed in Greece so they found a new victim.

£30 per hour for picking broccoli and they still can't fill the roles...basically says it all IMO. I love the UK too.

Everyone realizes how bad these sorts of jobs are. Backbreaking work, and you can't really take the job if you don't have childcare, cannot physically do it, or cannot travel with the job for some reason.

Oh, and do I need to mention that the jobs aren't year-round? If you want to work all year, you probably need to be able to travel, which is going to be more difficult since brexit than it was before and the pay certainly won't be as good everywhere. In some places, you aren't even afforded the same protections under the law because you are a temporary migrant worker.

When you simply quote the amount paid per hour, you cannot get the whole story here. And that's assuming that your £30 an hour quote is a flat rate per hour: I don't know how it is there, but in many cases, farm workers get paid per piece, so it might realistically be "up to £30 per hour" instead.

To add some detail, Intel has a major presence in Swindon. I was an intern there many years ago, and I still know people at the firm. Some big bosses were based there, and it would be natural for a UK fab to have been staffed from among those people.

So it's not just that Intel could have put the site anywhere in Europe, there would be some natural advantages in the UK that are undermined by Brexit.

Rent is deducted from pay for 'letting' the people stay near the farm.

> and a whole bunch of trade deals with others (oh wait, we don't)

I’m all for bashing brexit but let’s stick to facts here (otherwise you’re no better than they are), I’m pretty sure the UK has done trade deals.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47213842

We have - most of them just transfer the terms we had as EU members to us outside the EU. Good for continuity though. The big one is the one with the EU, which our government negotiated, signed and now say is awful and must be changed.

It's really no surprise international companies are not feeling the encouragement to invest in UK operations. The Prime Minister recently lied in his speech to the Conservative party conference about inward investment levels, claiming we rank much higher than we do.

OP did say "a whole bunch". Although that's rather vague, I think the point is that we haven't done any trade deals that will come anywhere remotely close to making up for the increased friction in our trading relations with the continent.

Trade deals which leave us worse than where we started or offer too little value to offset the damage of what we lost. The deal with Australia is reportedly very one-sided.

Yes and over time these can be renegotiated. It's short-sighted to think that once you have a trade deal then that's it "for life".

It depends what you call a deal. Are they new trade deals from scratch, absolutely not. Are they trade deals that have been copied from the EU trade deals to satisfy ongoing deals ("rollover" deals), yes they are. Are we getting the trade deals that Boris promised, absolutely not.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/58818531

Just about all of those are rollover deals from the existing agreements the UK already had when it was part of the EU. That's not a bad thing, but at best it just maintains the status quo. You can count on one hand the number of truly new deals that have been signed, none of which are particularly significant. Meanwhile, trade with the EU, the UK's biggest trading partner, has fallen off a cliff.

Trade deals take years (if not decades?). The fact that we're only just out of the EU and we had a pandemic to take everyone's mind off the ball I'm not worried (yet) about the lack of trade deals. IMHO opinion people are too quick to shout "see Brexit is bad!", it's been 40 (?) years of EU membership - of course there's going to be issues whilst we untangle ourselves from the EU. None of what has happened so far is surprising.

You're mischaracterising the criticism.

The problem is not that it's surprising that trade deals are hard, nor even that the ones got so far are either relatively low volume affairs or involve concessions that some (all?) experienced trade negotiators consider unwise.

It's that the political class that engineered Brexit claimed that trade deals would be easy, labelled anybody who pointed out that they were wrong "remoaners", harassed career civil servants for giving honest advice, and hamstrung efforts to prepare for this frequently predicted situation.

I expected Brexit to be bad, but I was perfectly capable of having civil conversations with people who supported it. I didn't expect Brexit to be this bad, because I did not expect the Tories to be this incompetent, or the Brexit-supporting media to be this dishonest.

Now I know better.

So I agree with what you are saying, but I think you (and many people) misunderstand what a politician's job is for. They are there to deliver, and simplify messages to try and get people on-board with whatever idea they are campaigning for. This may mean over-simplifying a complex system, or "bending the truth" (a good politician can do this in the face of accusations about lying and claim that what they are saying is true if you look at the data in a certain sort of way). A politician is not your friend...again none of this is surprising.

> I didn't expect Brexit to be this bad,

I think we have different ideas of what "bad" is. There are understandable difficulties, but black-swan events in recent years have completely overshadowed any damage that Brexit may be causing. COVID-19 is "bad" in my books. Chinese/Russian influences are "bad". Also see chip shortages, global supply chain issues, etc. Arguments about fishing are not - unless you are one of the small number of people affected by this...again on the scale of a country I'm not convinced.

> I think we have different ideas of what "bad" is.

I think we don't: I think we have different beliefs about what the most important facts of Brexit are. I guesstimate Brexit will cause more suffering to the British people than Covid-19, though with low confidence, since one thing we agree about is the likelihood of game-changing surprises. Brexit has been a huge success for Russia, although something of a problem for China. Brexit has magnified the impact of the poor global economic situation on Britain. The fishing spat has caused quite a bit of injury to the UK's once very high reputation for diplomatic competence, although far less than the conduct of the UK's top negotiators between invoking Article 50 and signing the WA.

>What on earth did Brexiteers think was going to happen?

I assumed this sort of thing and worse, and thought that on balance, it was worth it.

You aren't alone, I dream of a day when I get to punch Boris in the head for putting the UK in this situation.

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