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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

> Was it worth it?

Though I know yours is a rhetorical question, I'll answer: No. Brexit was essentially an anti-immigration and pro-deregulation movement. Simple small-c conservatism. (It was also anti-status-quo, but that was implicit.)

The, uh, "Conservatives" who were tasked with implementing Brexit supercharged immigration and, with considerable assistance from the EU, doubled down on ridiculous social and business regulations, paperwork, and red tape. There was no upside. They just made everything much worse. I know that they expected the Brexit vote to fail, and I think there's a term for their subsequent actions: "Malicious compliance."

Now England is a powder keg if there ever was one. If things are going to kick off, it'll happen there first. As Weimar as America is these days, England is worse.

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The main problem is that Brexit Meant Brexit: the Leave camp was promoting a dozen different and contradictory goals at the same time, and every pro-Leaver was free to cherry-pick their own interpretation of Brexit from it.

This obviously led to a massive issue when they actually won: you simply can't have your cake and eat it - especially when it involves another foreign power! There is no universe in which it would've been possible for the UK to completely detach itself from all EU rules, while still retaining completely free transit of goods, while also taxing import certain goods for protectionist reasons. Similarly it was never going to be possible for UK citizens to retain unlimited visa-free travel to the Schengen area while retaining the possibility for the UK to arbitrarily block access to certain groups of EU citizens.

The most obvious example of this is Northern Ireland: you can't leave the Common Market, and keep an open border between NI and RoI (thus not blowing up the Good Friday agreement and not starting another civil war), and keep an open border between NI and GB (thus not partially giving up sovereignty and suggesting acceptance of a slow move towards a united Ireland). Failing to deliver on all three at once (as promised piecemeal by various pro-Leave people) isn't malicious compliance - it's reality. Something has to yield, and if you don't decide up-front you'll of course get a nasty surprise later on.

The immigration betrayal was obvious to anyone familiar with UK history.

It's how the ruling class works. They import cheap labour from the (former) colonies to drive down wages. Then they pay their puppet politicians to hyperventilate about how terrible immigration is, how filthy these foreigners are, and how it Must Be Stopped.

It's been happening for centuries - the same scam, over and over.

Are you joking?

Estimates are that between 1870 and 1913 net emigration of British citizens averaged about 131,000 per year, i.e. more people left the UK than arrived:

>https://docs.iza.org/dp81.pdf

In the 1881 census of England and Wales, "natives of foreign states" were 174,372 people, just 0.671% of the population.

In the 19th century, England was a country of emigrants, with net migration at roughly -100k/year. From 2014–24, you're looking at typically +200k to +900k per year. This is totally unprecedented to put it mildly. And now, like it or not, I'm sure that things are going to get ugly.

Quick bias check: Do migrants or employers drive down wages?

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