The top-line costs alone expose the raw deal we’ve ended up with. The so-called divorce settlement from the Union tops £30 billion, and the loss in goods exports stands at £27 billion. UK food exports are estimated to have decreased by £2.8 billionannually.
Businesses have also been hit terribly. Up to 56% of dairy producers are struggling to find workers (as per an Arla survey). According to the Marine Management Organisation, seafood exports have dropped by 118,000 tonnes in the UK since 2019.
Over 16,000 companies with European customers have simply stopped exporting to the bloc. There’s also been a dramatic spike in immigration, and although 1.2 million EU nationals have left the UK in the wake of Brexit, net migration has soared by 2.3 million.
In fact, Brexit’s biggest promise was to control immigration – but we’ve ended up here. In total, 3.6 million immigrants have entered Britain since the freedom of movement laws were curtailed. Meanwhile, EU students at UK universities have fallen by a third.
Brexit is one of the reasons I question if democracy is the best system we can come up with.
Democracy has incredible legitimacy. Anything else we have come up with so far was usually legitimized using religion or simply by violence. Both kinda meh.
I think it’s going to be hard to beat democracy in that respect.
Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…
Winston Churchill
It’s just that with Brexit there is nothing to blame, no first past the post, no electoral college, no two party system, nothing, it was a pure vote of direct democracy and people still chose against their interests. What hope is there for everything else.
Yes, the people can be blamed and that’s exactly the point: legitimacy.
There are issues with direct democracy, though. You just cannot expect regular people to be informed enough to make good decisions on everything. And some things like protecting minorities are especially hard with direct democracy.
Electing representatives through a sort of vibe check, who then consult experts, is actually a pretty good compromise. This principle also has pretty high legitimacy, but just generally makes more informed decisions.
In the US, while the electoral college is a fucking mess, I can at least understand why the founding fathers implemented it. People will say it was to ensure the elites were kept in power; and maybe that’s true to some extent. But the real reason is simple: they knew that the average citizen is a fucking idiot and leaving leadership decisions up to them would be a race to the bottom.
I thought it was to ensure the more populated states doesn’t have too much decision making power over the less populated states