Thread for documenting effects of Brexit in your own situations

Last night I talked to a friend (originally from the Middle East) who said things like: "after the Brexit vote I didn't recognise this country ... I haven't felt the same since ... this isn't the Britain I knew ... it's the worst thing that's happened to Britain in my lifetime".

This seems to me quite a standard sort of (liberal?) line.

But I reflected and said that I did not agree with it.

I did not vote for Brexit and I am not convinced that it is good policy. I think it was often voted for for bad reasons, and it has been advanced and pursued by very bad people.

But I do not think it is the worst thing that either the UK state, or the UK people, have done in the last 40 or 50 years.

I think my #1 contender for that would be the Iraq War.

And if you think "the British people are decent and moderate and I can't believe this jingoistic vote", you may have missed the Con election victories of 1983 and 1987, among others.

Compared to several other policies - including "austerity" (as well as war) - Brexit arguably has been a peaceful process and has not killed or physically hurt people. (This does not mean that I endorse Nigel Farage's false occlusion of the murder of a politician during the Brexit campaign - but I do not think that that murder was intrinsic to leaving the EU.)

Again, I do not personally think Brexit is a good policy. But I think that the view that it is worse than all these other things is, in fact, an ideological delusion.

Some things that might be worse than Brexit:

Iraq War
Afghanistan War
(other wars)
Miners' strike
Privatizations from c.1980 to the present, including rail
Sell-off of council houses without replacement, making it harder for people to find homes
University policy esp on fees
Ecological damage / contribution to climate breakdown (though I don't have figures for this)

I conclude: It might be accurate to say something like:

"Brexit appears to be a bad policy, voted for for bad reasons, and executed by bad people. It could make a bad situation even worse.

However, it is not at all exceptional in UK policy, but is in fact quite a *typical* instance of bad and damaging policy, executed for bad reasons, in the last 40 years, and actually so far minor in its effects compared to some of the even worse policies."

how does anyone articulate anything in this area given how thoroughly enclosed it all feels and how even the things in it that are real are embedded in this sort of discursive sludge of ideological bullshit so many levels deep

everything in the above post is true but there's no denying brexit has materially made everything much worse both in its immediate wake and apparently indefinitely and as much for its symbolic / ideological flexibility as the actual legal bullshit it's means supposed to mean on paper at any given moment (ie it's impossible to know where it ends and the general rightward fashy trend begins). "remain" should be considered part of the larger catastrophe of "brexit" here (I make no sense to people when I try to say this irl) which is in many ways a fairly typical british catastrophe but I wouldn't want to understate the catastrophe part

or the british part- a lot of people invoke notions of imperial decline but it rarely seems to go beyond metaphor & symbolism partly bc i suspect liberal & frankly left attachment to the british imperial project is way too real to seriously interrogate in a way that would actually maybe break through some of this mystification