Help me understand Brexit

[maxrandb]

Can someone help me understand what the EU did to make the UK lose it's mind?

I've tried to follow this Brexit thing, but I can't find the root cause.

Part of me says hey, it's not too unreasonable to be able to get out of a marriage if it's not working for you. I also understand that it shouldn't be easy.

I guess I'm wondering what did the EU do that pissed off the UK? We're they caught with the maid schtooping in the royal bed?

It seems almost exactly like what happened here. We took a bunch of moronic statements from some fucking ignorant shitstains on hate Radio and cut and pasted them into legislative positions.

Seems like quite a few people stand to get hurt for the unhinged whims of a few loud asspickles.

That said, it's not really an agreement if you can't get out of it.

[OnDoutside]

1. Where do you start....

The English more than the British have never come to terms with who they are as a people, post empire. This unwillingness to compromise with foreigners has been nagging them since they entered the old EEC back in 73, now EU. Sections of the media have fed a jingoistic narrative while blaming the EU for everything bad, and repeatedly making up shit, like the EU demanding straight bananas which was actually made up by Boris Johnson....

The Brexiters fed people a lie that essentially said that they could leave, still have all benefits of trading with the EU, and negotiate their own trade deals. It doesn't work like that as they've found out to their cost.

[Pope George Ringo II]

2. It's not really about the EU

It's a perfect storm of several things.

Part of it was just sticking a middle finger at the establishment because the British economy is basically being carried by the London financial services sector, and an awful lot of the country feels that the government doesn't represent them.

Part of it is pining for the days of empire when Britain really made the rules rather than had to work with anybody else on anything. This is worse because it's not even the actual empire, but an idealized one, they're pining for.

Part of it is racism, tied to the empire fantasies.

Part of it is sheer perversity because everybody told them it was a bad idea.

And there's no problem getting out of the EU. At least not from the EU side. Part of the problem is that the Good Friday Agreement required certain things from Britain as part of the peace process in Northern Ireland, which assumed EU membership and no borders on that island. Leaving the EU is one thing, but breaching the Good Friday Agreement is a problem. So Britain proposed a solution to be used as a "backstop" if all else failed, and the EU agreed to the British solution. Then all else failed, and now the UK doesn't like its own solution to the Irish border problem. Rather than accept responsibility, they blame the EU. There's a pattern there.

As to how all else failed, that has a lot to do with the promises made in Brexit for a complete Brexit, a customs union, a Norway-style arrangement, and ultimately the Brexit of the referendum was impossibly all things to all people. Delivering this unicorn was rather problematic in the flesh.

For its part, the EU government laid out its position, and was very clear on what was sacrosanct and what could be negotiated. Britain ignored those things and has spent most of the last two years negotiating with itself. The EU has been very frustrated by the UK's sheer incompetence as a negotiator, rather than the EU being a tough negotiator in its own right. The Four Freedoms will not be compromised, and it's frankly hilarious the way the UK is outraged that the EU negotiates based on what its members (Ireland has had a huge voice, for obvious reasons) want, rather than what a non-member country needs.

It should also be kept in mind that the UK has historically done quite a good job of getting special perks out of the EU. Things like keeping its own currency, getting favorable financial transactions, and so forth. The UK was very much a case of "in with special deals" and since that still wasn't enough, the likelihood of "out with special deals" wasn't encouraged. Of course, Britain took "in with special deals" to mean that "they need us more than we need them" so "out with special deals" was assumed to be the starting point of negotiations. They were very disappointed by reality, and this is somehow the EU's fault.

It was an awful idea, and the execution has been simply wretched. At every step of the way, it's all been Britain's fault.

Full disclosure: I'm British, I'm Irish, and I'm American. I'm also quite disgusted.

[malaise]

3. Thanks for an excellent summary

Let me add that this entire mess was precipitated by British arrogance linked to that 19th century imperialism.

[Pope George Ringo II]

6. Thank you

I'm sure somebody has a front-row seat for this debacle and can improve on what I've gleaned while stuck on the other side of the Atlantic, though.

[maxrandb]

8. Thanks

My grandfather was actually involved in the Easter Uprising. He fled to America.

Putting a hard border back in Northern Ireland would be a shitshow IMHO.

Seems like the UK feels it can just throw their weight around... kind of like "Make Brittain Great Again" or some such shit.

[Pope George Ringo II]

11. Not at all.

I forgot to mention: May tried to use Brexit as a mandate and called a snap election in 2017...where she lost her outright Tory majority. She then forged a coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland in order to maintain control of Parliament. That lot make America's GOP look like a bunch of gay hippies. They're responsible for gay marriage being illegal (they wound up allowing "civil unions" at least) in Northern Ireland, and they've managed to keep abortion illegal there too. They campaigned against the peace process, campaigned for Brexit--partially to get a hard border back--and they also create all sorts of problems working with Sinn Fein (who create their own problems, though generally less relevant to Brexit) in local government. The DUP would probably be against fire if they found out it was keeping a gay Irishman warm somewhere.

The DUP hold the pivotal votes in May's Parliament, and they know it. They've extorted cash benefits for their constituents, they've held the Brexit process hostage several times, and generally been a complete PITA at every turn. No analysis of how things have gone wrong is complete without mentioning them.

Also, as has been mentioned elsewhere, lies and foreign interference had a role. But I think those make more sense against a backdrop rather than as an entire explanation by themselves.

The Easter Rebellion seems to have come at a time when I didn't have relatives of the right age. I have several relatives who were local heroes for dying in hunger strikes shortly before the rebellion, but nobody able to fight in it.

And I confess I can't be annoyed right now about the UK throwing its weight around. Ireland is being taken care of by the EU, and that's absolutely baffling to the UK. Spain has been able to have a British MEP removed over his objection to defining Gibraltar as a British "colony." And Japan recently told Britain that it's going to get a worse trade deal than the EU because that's what happens when you leave a powerful trading bloc. Britain is trying to throw its weight around, failing utterly, and has no idea why.

[uponit7771]

10. Sounds like the UK has its own version of MAGA Cult where up is down and bears pee in Porta Potty's

[Pope George Ringo II]

12. It might be worse.

The hold of empire on the imagination is hard to overstate. Whatever the US may have been at some point in the past and may become at some point in the future, it will never look back on a time when it ruled half the planet's land and basically all the planet's water, nor had family ties to most of the ruling families of Europe, nor kept up such glories for as long as Britain did. And then it bankrupted itself in WW1 and basically lost the last of Empire after WW2. The final straw was the Suez Crisis in '56, where France and Britain were put firmly in second-class seats by the US and USSR. That sort of decline and fall--and it really was over that 40 years--is hard to stomach, even if it happened before you were born. If he's not careful, an Englishman can be a prisoner of nostalgia in a way Americans have never really been vulnerable to. If he starts to look around and wonder what changed at the time of that fall, and he doesn't think about the human and financial costs of those wars, or the technological shifts, and so forth, but he sees people from Africa or India living in England, and decides they're the problem. And then things get ugly.

[Goodheart]

4. A few synonymous words and sayings

Delusion
Cutting off your nose to spite your face
Throwing the baby out with the bath water
Narcissism
The Empire has no clothes
Exaggerated self-importance

[struggle4progress]

5. Russian Bots, Bucks Helped Push Brexit

January 19, 20197:01 AM ET
SCOTT SIMON

... MAYER: So it's interesting. It's much the same. There are parallel investigations going on in the United Kingdom to the one that we've got with the Mueller investigation here in the U.S. And they're looking at many of the same problems, many of the same tactics. And both are trying to follow the money that they think maybe came, in part, from Russia. And so it's interesting that there are even some overlapping characters in both countries.

SIMON: Well, that's what I - like Cambridge Analytica, for example.

MAYER: Cambridge Analytica, which is a big data company that worked for the Trump campaign in the end - and it was owned principally by one of Trump's largest backers, Robert Mercer - was also involved in helping the early stages of the Brexit campaign in England.

And the man who spanned both countries and pushed for both, really, was Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Trump and a great, you know, force for nationalist kind of right-wing politics in both the U.K. and the U.S. And he was bopping back-and-forth ...

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/19/686830510/senate-finds-russian-bots-bucks-helped-push-brexit-vote-through

[mshasta]

7. yes indeed ,

specially hitting a nerve on white people , telling them that immigrants are taking over it was a racist campaign

[UTUSN]

9. It's the equivalent of SHITLER on an abstract, national scale.