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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Radical plans to tear EU regulations off Britain’s statute books en masse have already been abandoned. The benefits of buccaneering free trade agreements (FTAs) have proved elusive. Britain's public services, far from receiving a promised boost, have in many cases almost stopped working. The number of people moving to Britain from abroad is higher than ever. It’s not what advocates of Leave had in mind.

No, but it's what the establishment who wanted nothing to change and Brexit to fail had in mind.

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Of the three Prime Ministers we’ve had since leaving the EU, two had campaigned for Brexit. (The other was outlasted by a lettuce.)

If Conservative Prime Ministers aren’t part of the establishment, who is?

We've had four: May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak.

May was prior to leaving the EU; even if you accept that it left in 2020 (it formally left in Jan 2020, but realistically was still part of the EU for the remainder of the year), she was already gone.

>two had campaigned for Brexit

They used it as a marketing trick and got stuck with it when the vote came in. Didn't plan to implement the changes people wanted it for, and didn't.

Has anyone outlasted a Doritos bag?

... Eh? Is this the new line now? Brexit was a disaster not because it was an extremely silly idea, but rather due to saboteurs? I mean, I suppose you can tell yourself that if you want, but...

That was the narrative only weeks after the vote. In realising nothing could be delivered, the saboteur story was invented to shift blame on to some Others. Scapegoating is a story as old as time.

On the brightside, this narrative probably contributes to the potential death of the Conservative party today as a plurality of brexit voters are projected to abandon them for Reform.

Recent tweet from them:

> YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU: Only one party can save Britain from the corrupt establishment.

> Today, vote with your HEART and vote for what you TRULY believe in.

I find it remarkable that, if it really is an existential crisis, it'll be because the Lib Dems outnumber them. Just a decade ago it was a terrible alliance with the Lib Dems that put the Tories in power in the first place, setting up Brexit.

All they got in exchange was a failed referendum on alternative voting. They proceeded to get crushed and almost vanished.

But here they are, potentially taking over from the Tories. There's some nine dimensional chess for you.

> All they got in exchange was a failed referendum on alternative voting

Which was sabotaged by the Tories reneging on promises they made to the Lib-dems, and the campaign against it led by Dominic Cummings, using the same "lets spend the money on the NHS instead" lie that he re-used for brexit.

The irony that passing this would have potentially saved them from destruction at the hands of Reform UK (and indeed avoided Brexit altogether) is an added delicous irony.

The Conservatives are bleeding support to every other party, not just the Lib Dems. Labour's drift to the centre and UKIP/Reform's attacks from the right and over Brexit have an important part to play here.

> Brexit was a disaster not because it was an extremely silly idea, but rather due to saboteurs?

The mostly likely things that has made Brexit not work, if it could ever have worked, and other than the people in charge being terrible at their jobs, are the enormous headwinds of Covid and the war in Ukraine.

I mean, if anything, the invasion of Ukraine likely _masked_ problems for longer; continental Europe was far harder hit than the UK by energy deficits (most UK gas comes from the North Sea fields and Norway, and it also had LPG importation facilities on a greater scale than did, say, Germany on the eve of the war). Without it, the economic divergence would look worse, not better.

Covid was largely in the rear-view mirror by the time the UK _really_ left; the really disruptive changes didn't start til mid 2021.

The divergance might look worse, but - jealousy aside - the real measure is absolute improvement / decline, not relative.

Yeah, seems unlikely that Ukraine made any difference there.

It's incredibly likely. Lots of money spent on weapons and helping refugees, which has to come from somewhere; huge amount of fuel prices going up, which drives most other goods up. Straight after Covid.

And World War I was lost by Germany because its army was stabbed in the back. And Communism never failed because true communism was never implemented anywhere including the USSR, only state capitalism. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

You can never reason with cults, as their logical system are closed, self-referential and unfalsifiable.

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