Originally published at: Brexit "considerably worse" than feared, says UK retail boss | Boing Boing
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Putin laughs in russian
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I actually think it was not properly thought out.
This must be one of those tycoons the Libertarians are always touting as having superior intellects because “if they didn’t they wouldn’t be rich”.
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He also warned that the UK needed a complete overhaul of business rates and rents if the High Street was to survive. “It is basic economics,” he said. “Bricks and mortar retailing is becoming uneconomic.”
The landlords and the banks that issued them mortgages will fight this tooth and nail. I predict pressure on the government to help them in some way.
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None of this hasn’t been obvious all along. What kind of magical thinking would let you believe that shifting all your trade to cross foreign borders would make it easier or cheaper?
Precisely zero of these “businesspeople” gave two thoughts what kind of damage Brexit was going to do to them personally. Instead they listened to Conservative, racist, xenophobic voices and followed them like rats followed the pied piper.
No different than the American rats following the orange cheetoh, really. (Just the American rats are particularly dim; and those that have recognized that they’re being led to the river were told “no problem, you rats are all good swimmers, the best swimmers”.)
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Watching the whole process unfold, from David Cameron’s weird humming just after he resigned to Theresa May’s “I strongly support my Brexit strategy; I just haven’t figured out what it is yet,” to Boris Johnson’s, “It’ll all just magically work out; if things go south with the EU, we can always just trade with someone else. No biggies,” I could not help but think, “This outcome is exactly what 52% of Britons voted for back in June of 2016.” It just took them 4 and a half years to realize it.
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Wonder if post-Brexit trade barriers will bring back the romantic heyday of the channel smuggler on dark nights (supposedly the origin of the word “moonshine” y’know the spectres of Romney Marsh (the Scarecrow) and eluding the Kings-men and whatnot if you will, withal
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If they do, don’t worry, the Famous Five will no doubt be there to catch 'em. Green and pleasant land FTW!
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It isn’t really though, is it? Most brexit voters likely imagined a norway style arrangement if they imagined anything at all. Transmuting that vague desire to leave into the hardest, coldest Brexit possible was an opportunistic strategy from the Conservatives.
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Now that Brexit is clearly the unmitigated disaster that we all knew it would be, I have a sincere question- how easy will it be for them to get back in? It seems likely a candidate will run on rejoining the EU in the next election? (Which is when?)
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Sigh, the craven cowardice of Cameron and all his followers-after is just pathetic. Not to mention that the Brexit vote was explicitly billed as a non-binding referendum. 52% is hardly a mandate.
Anyway, this is the worst performance of The Producers ever.
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Politically impossible in England. Brexit is a nostalgic, romantic, neo Nazi notion of ethno nationalist pride. The initial referendum was utterly botched by a constitutionally short sighted political class. You don’t do a referendum without an idea of what replaces what was there. It’s impossible to make a decision then.
For bad or good Britain (including Rump Britain) will most likely be looking into constitutional reform in the near future.
The revelations of the queen’s meddling in legislation are not damning by themselves for me so much as the fact it was nearly impossible to find out about. I mean she was just a rich person rewriting the law to avoid paying taxes. If that’s banned the fundamentals of western liberal democracy are threatened.
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I mean in the sense that they were deceived. They thought they were voting for perhaps a Norway style arrangement, but the logic of Brexit meant that they were always voting for what ultimately happened, whether they knew it or not. There might have been a point at which a Norway style arrangement could have been worked out, but the very people who had deceived the voting public into believing that’s what they would get made very sure that they would not, in fact, get that.
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They didn’t vote for anything. They voted against the ridiculous lies they were sold about totally out-of-control immigration and hundreds of thousands of rules about cabbages.
They were lied to and they swallowed the lies without ever wondering quite what it was they were voting for rather than against.
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To be fair, I think worse than short sighted business leaders were the masses of Sun, Telegraph and Mail readers, who sucked in the Brexit propaganda hook line and sinker. Probably the UK version of Americans who think Trump did a great job and the election was stolen. Although, I think the UK press is even more virulent than Fox News. Come the revolution, Murdock and his editors are first against the wall… 
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Rats are very good swimmers, though, just saying.
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Or 37.4% when looking at the total electorate. 
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That pretty handily sums up the current party divide in the US right now, too.
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Fundamentally, it is easier to unite a large percentage of the population against something than it is to come up with something that a large percentage of them will be for. That is why politicians are often intentionally vague, people with vastly different opinions can project onto the politicians their own values. Even when many people agree that something is not working, they may well have 10 different ideas of what exactly is wrong with it, and 30 different opinions on how to fix it.
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The EU is the currently the closest thing there is to a frictionless free trade area. EU directives are key to that, as they’re the mechanism for eliminating non-tariff barriers to trade. So I’m driven mad by people who want to leave the EU because of the directives and then cite a desire for “free trade”. It’s like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”. It’s mouth noises that coincidentally sound like English. It makes no goddamn sense.
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