It was a political storm few had predicted.
Hmm, I recall quite a lot of people predicting it, actually.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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No, no, no, that was Project Fear, remember?
People are still voting Reform. I love how they want to get fucked even harder. Good luck UK. You're going to need it.
I hope Scotland quits the Union. They don't have to suffer from the mistakes of the southerners.
The impact on the economy is worse than most remainers feared during the campaign, because few anticipated the hard Brexit that resulted.
Personally I expected something like hard Brexit, and expected a slowdown compared to remaining of about 1% per year for 10 years. And the estimate today is about 8% total decrease after 10 years compared to if UK had remained.
I am not aware of any segment of life in UK that has improved due to Brexit, and politically UK is way weaker internationally than they were as a member of EU.
The internal politics of UK have been almost absolute chaos since Brexit, because Brexit has been a political and economic disaster with no upside. And AFAIK almost everything in public services has gotten worse than it was before Brexit. Especially NHS and mostly everything relating to social services have gotten a lot worse.
This was all an incredible example of how incompetent a major democracy’s government can truly be.
Not only did they allow the single “leave” option to remain completely undefined, but they ran it as a simple “majority wins” referendum. So all those negotiations, all the arguments, all the billions spent and billions lost. It was all to achieve a supposed 4% increase in satisfaction.
Now 52% of the country could be happy instead of 48%. Game changing!
It was surreal being British and supporting “the other side” the whole way through. We were absolute clowns and outclassed in intelligence and decorum at every turn.
Not only did they allow the single “leave” option to remain completely undefined,
They can't really define it, because the UK is only one party in a negotiation that defined the outcome. The EU also has a say in that outcome.
If they put hard constraints on it, then it'd be easy for the EU side to demand unreasonable concessions that the UK would have to accept in order to achieve the referendum-imposed requirements. Or, hell, even just block Brexit by refusing the mandated form of relationship entirely.
I guess technically they could have had a referendum that mandated that there be no form of future EU-UK relationship at all, rather than the TCA, and the British government could guarantee that outcome but that'd probably be a bad move, and I think that very few people in the UK would want that.
Thats ironic cause Switzerland is also going into a brexit kind of direction with the referendum tomorrow about a cap on immigrants at 10 million: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/12/europe/switzerland-referendum-population-cap-10-million-intl
I hope UK comes back and Switzerland stays and Poland too...
The initiative was defeated. We will not be shooting ourselves in the leg, thankfully.
Switzerland voted no 🎉
Well the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, Brian.