We were right to leave the EU

Very little has been achieved by Brexit. It has been a disaster. The UK has to rid itself of unsustainable delusions about Global Britain, great power status and similar Johnsonian claptrap. The way back will be difficult but I hope progress can be made by the coming Labour government.

Katie59

The reality is that for practical coexistence we have to comply with all the EU rules when traveling or trading with them without any influence whatever over their decisions.
Even trade deals with third countries they make deals disadvantageous to us when previously we could have vetoed them. Third countries are very careful not to give advantage to us because EU is a much larger market

Big win.

Precisely this!

There is certainly a softening in the EU’s attitude to us. Originally we had to prove to the Dutch tax office that we paid tax in the UK every ten years. After Brexit we had to do it annually. Now it has been extended to 5 years.

Some British students do study at Dutch universities as the courses are taught in English and a Dutch friends daughter has just returned from 5 months studying at our local university.

In the Guardian and BBC News yesterday it was reported that the UK has rejected EU's free movement offer for young people.

Cossy

Oh so right that I’ve just heard a news report strongly suggesting that we are suffering from shortages of medications now much of which is due to Brexit, a pharmacist was interviewed in this country, along with an Israeli supplier, both of whom stated Brexit has had a detrimental effect on the delivery of drugs to the UK

Wrong. There is a small element of Brexit related to shortages but there are more factors other than Brexit.
Why is 95% of the eu having the same problem. 🤷‍♀️

www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/14/why-is-uk-being-hit-by-medicine-supply-shortages

Now the border checking arrangement which the U.K. are supposed to be implementing are in disarray, and have been postponed yet again( surprise ?)

Young EU workers take advantage of the opportunity to improve their English thus opening up more career choice
in International companies.
Sadly the British aversion to 'foreign' languages keep many
from reciprocating in the EU

FranP your statement that we will continue to pay billions ££s to the EU until 2057 troubled me. Source please?

I found only this on the BBC Reality Checker:
“ Continuing contributions
The UK will also continue to make contributions to take part in three EU programmes for 2021-27:
Horizon Europe research scheme
Euratom nuclear research programme
Copernicus, the earth monitoring project
As part of its participation in Euratom, the UK will also continue to be involved with the ITER project to use magnetic fusion to develop a new type of power plant.
It will also be able to access the services of the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking programme, although it will not participate in it.
However, the UK's participation in EU programmes has not yet begun, according to the House of Commons report from June 2022.
The delay has been attributed to wider political disputes between the UK and EU, including over the Northern Ireland protocol.
We do not yet know exactly how much the UK will end up paying to be involved with these programmes - it will be calculated based on the size of the UK's economy, compared with the size of the whole of the EU economy.
The government said that if the UK could not take part in Horizon research scheme, funding would go to UK Government research and development programmes, including those which support new international partnerships.”

Our ‘settlement for Brexit’was estimated to be £42 billion in TOTAL.

The EU has exactly the same problem we do, a shortage of workers in the service industries

I heard about this new scheme for young people a couple of days ago, and now I’ve just found out (on Gransnet) that we’ve rejected it. I guess that must be because there is high unemployment among the young in many EU countries, and we have a high number of young people here who are economically inactive and presumably the government would prefer our own young people to work rather than leaving them to continue to be economically inactive, whilst pulling in yet more youngsters to perform jobs the British could do. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I see it.

Marg75 i Absolutely agree with you! Thank you.

Add it all up, and one point is clear. Young British people hardly ever went to work elsewhere in the EU for anything more than a summer job in the sunshine; neither did they study there.

One of mine did!
And a cousin who lived and worked in Brussels for years, but she wasn't young.

Greta

The UK has rejected EU's free movement offer to young people.

Who has rejected it, exactly?

The UK has rejected EU's free movement offer to young people.

Well, given that according to you, the EU will benefit more from this arrangement than the U.K., it’s hardly them caving in is it? U.K. businesses certainly did benefit from young workers and students who could come here freely. Yes there are fewer going the other way but that’s because we are one country and there are 27 in the EU. Lots of British young people did go and benefitted hugely. Plus Brexit has hindered many of our young musicians from tours in Europe which were supremely easy before but now massively difficult. Let’s hope that ridiculousness is sorted.

news.sky.com/story/eu-proposing-post-brexit-joint-youth-work-and-study-scheme-with-uk-13118080

As expected it’s a reciprocal offer we have to accept their young workers.
UGs enthusiasm is somewhat dimished.

Does this come with reciprocal workers from the EU?.

So …

“ Add it all up, and one point is clear. Young British people hardly ever went to work elsewhere in the EU for anything more than a summer job in the sunshine; neither did they study there.

They don’t speak the language, and there aren’t any jobs anyway. In effect, the EU dumped its youth unemployment on us, in the same way the Chinese dump cheap phones and cars.

It made sense for them, but it was a rotten deal for the UK. And now they want to do it all over again.”

😁

And yet …

“ If we rewind to the heyday of free movement, the traffic was overwhelmingly one-way. The government estimated that three million people had moved to Britain from 2000 onwards, but since no one counted the figures properly it was hard to know precisely.

As it turned out, officials had got the estimates completely wrong. Under the “settled status” rules that allowed people from the EU to stay in Britain if they were already here, there were over seven million applications, or more than double the number expected, and given that some people decided not to stay, the real total could have been eight or even nine million.

And how many went from the UK to Europe? The UN estimates that there were about 900,000 UK citizens living in the rest of the EU in 2019, many of them retirees on the coasts of Spain or Portugal.

Young Poles, Hungarians and Italians flocked to Britain, assuming that they could make better money here than they could at home, or else to escape suffocating regulations that locked them out of the labour markets.

Likewise, under the Erasmus programme for students, statistics from 2018 show that 32,000 EU nationals were funded to come to the UK, while an estimated 17,000 British students went to study in the rest of the Continent.”

Hey some GOOD NEWS re Brexit from the Telegraph today:

“ You will be able to work from the beaches of Ibiza, the cafes of Crete, or the cool startup hubs of Berlin.

The European Union’s big offer this week to restore a form of freedom of movement between the UK and the EU for 18 to 30-year-olds will certainly be welcome news for anyone who fancies a year or two abroad.

They would no longer need work permits or visas. They could just move to whichever EU country they wanted to.

But for those with a memory long enough to stretch back to the tortured debate over our departure from the EU from 2016 onwards – and the condescending lectures from the chief negotiator Michel Barnier – the EU’s offer will also have come as something of a surprise.

We were told during the Brexit negotiations that it was impossible to “cherry pick” parts of the EU package.

You couldn’t have single market membership or free movement, nor host its financial markets or take part in various programmes, without paying huge budget contributions and accepting its full rulebook.

Not only that, but the hardcore Remainers told us at insufferable length that the EU held all the cards, and that it would always out-negotiate us.

There is a deafening silence from that quarter now. Less than four years later, the EU is back offering arrangements that were deemed to be completely impossible while we were in the process of leaving. We have already rejoined Horizon, and now a form of freedom of movement could be back as well.”

It’s not all of us remainers thankfully Gillycats but yes, I agree with your comment.

Ah the usual unpleasant personal comments about those who voted (including myself) for Brexit. Give it a rest, it’s shameful. Just because someone has different political views to you doesn’t warrant the nasty and uncalled for responses. Be kind and grow up!

The reality is that for practical coexistence we have to comply with all the EU rules when traveling or trading with them without any influence whatever over their decisions.
Even trade deals with third countries they make deals disadvantageous to us when previously we could have vetoed them. Third countries are very careful not to give advantage to us because EU is a much larger market

Big win.

I suspect many of the older, white, population do feel closer to countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada since they were largely formed by migrants from these isles and Europe. But the argument that many of the ethnically diverse British population have some affinity toward the Commonwealth as an organisation per se, rather than merely having a family link with the countries they or their ancestors hailed from are is totally unsubstantiated - what evidence can be shown for this? The Commonwealth, if polls are anything to go by , means very little to the UK population and practically zilch to most people under 25.
Back to Brexit, I recall one bright spark saying the reason they voted leave was they "liked New Zealand Lamb"

I suspect the poster who said that means those commonwealth countries that have a largely white immigrant population

As for that remark, it shoes how dated and out of touch your views are about Commonwealth countries.