The Seven Year Itch: Brexit Regrets Volume III

Has Britain “taken back control?”

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

On 23 June, 2016, the UK voted 52% to 48% to leave the European Union. As a longtime student of globalization, this self-annihilating stunt astonished me. 

Throughout the month of June, I will compare the actual reality of what has happened with the dodgy promises of arch Brexiteers like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage who vigorously campaigned to leave the EU in the full, cynical knowledge that Brexit would be disastrous. Seven years later, a majority of the British public realizes Brexit was a grave mistake and the data agree.

Volume III of The Seven Year Itch: Brexit Regrets analyzes whether Britain has succeeded in “taking back control” as promised by Vote Leave. If Britain has got its bladder under control now, are things better overall in the country post-Brexit?

I don’t know why I mentioned bladders. Really, sometimes my mind takes some bizarre twists. Obviously, when our noble Brexiteers talked of “taking back control,” they did not mean to intimate any reference to incontinence. Although if you look closely, maybe they did.

We’ll come back to that. One thing is for sure, if one associates taking back control with getting a grip or taking charge or steadying the ship or righting the course or any other metaphor you might choose, since 2016 when the Brexit referendum took place, the UK has had five different Prime Ministers – David The Toff Cameron who resigned after Vote Leave won, Theresa Brexit means Brexit May, Boris Partygate Johnson, Liz Lettuce Truss and now Dishy Rishi Sunak.

Steady as you go, mate!

Taking back control became a catch-all phrase for fixing everything that Leave voters believed was wrong with Britain, a potpourri of randomness from more control over fisheries to cutting VAT on energy bills.

Brexiteers and Brexiteer propaganda made explicit and implicit promises of more money for the NHS (National Health Service), fairer and more expansive trade deals, more secure borders and thus less immigration, a more stable sovereign union with more democracy, the axing of unpopular EU laws and regulations, and a better overall economy with higher wages for workers no longer competing with cheap foreign labor.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

It would be hilariously funny if the current situation in the UK wasn’t so hopelessly dire.

Let’s dig into the available data.  Opinionating sans reliable data is really a pastime best left to Rupert Murdoch-owned media.

The problem we have is that it is hard to disentangle the economic effects caused by thirteen years of catastrophic Tory rule from the seven years of economic activity since the Brexit referendum and the couple years since the UK finally officially left the EU. (Like any divorce after half a century of marriage, it happened in fraught stages).

Conveniently, the government has yet to publish an official economic assessment of Brexit (that’s how well it’s going, every government likes to hide good news as you know).

But the Brexit referendum was a direct result of Tory in-fighting so the economic apocalypse that is life in the UK in 2023 can be laid fairly and squarely at the feet of the Tories.

The conservatives are ever so quick to blame Covid and the Ukraine war and a global rise in interest rates for the current crisis.

Those one trillion Brexit benefits have been smothered by factors beyond our control!

NONSENSE AND MORE NONSENSE. Every country in the world is suffering the effects of the pandemic, the Ukraine war and rising interest rates. What is happening in Britain is worse and the Tory Party is 173% responsible!