I still get asked at times what I think about Brexit (mostly by people who don’t know me well enough).
Since the referendum result happened, I thought that it would be a disaster. Not so much for the EU (although it will hurt the rest of Europe), but especially for the UK, and its residents (both UK citizens and not).
The main reasons behind my thinking are as follows (in no particular order).
We live in a global world, and the idea that any country standing alone, will do better than being in a group of peers, seems to me illogical.
Disentangling 40 years of deals, treaties, laws, bureaucracy, etc, in just a few years, is madness. Somebody likened it to being equivalent of taking the flour out of a cake. That seems a good comparison.
UK politicians cannot agree what they think the UK should look like post-EU: how are they ever going to negotiate a deal with the EU, especially when the EU has no interest in setting a precedent where being out of the EU is better than being in?
The EU, with all its defects and faults, was very good at protecting its citizens against the excesses of national governments, and global corporations. A couple of examples would include legislation to prevent pollution excesses, privacy infringements, human rights abuses, etc, often in antagonism to national governments who were a lot happier to trample of their own citizens’ rights.
Oh, and the EU also pushed through the abolition of mobile phone roaming charges. I never heard anybody complain about any of these.
The ideal that any single county has got more sovereignty on its own, that as part of the EU, I think is debatable. Where a lot of day to day trade, travel, services, etc depend on multinational companies, and other countries, there will always be compromises, and concessions to be made, to get what one wants. While the UK might get away from (some, maybe) of the EU regulations and laws, there will be other restrictions imposed by other countries or multinational corporations, that will set their requirement for the UK to get what they want (services, goods, etc). I believe that when people will look back in a decade or two, they will realise it would have been a lot better sticking with the EU.
Immigration is what politicians blame when they don’t want to admit what a poor job they have done in managing the economy, the infrastructure of the country (hospitals, transport, schools, etc). As they never want to admit that, they always blame in on immigration. And given that the EU implements freedom of movement, they then blame it on the EU. So the EU, by via of the free movement of people (i.e. immigration), become the regular scapegoat of all the problems in the country.
Of course when employers try to point out that not only people from the rest of the EU are a fundamental part of the job market supply, but are often not enough to fill all the vacancies, and that people from outside the EU are also needed on top, they are accused of being scaremongers. Again when companies will have to close down, or move abroad, or raise prices because they are struggling to find the workforce they need, we’ll see who was right.
Now you might have read all of this, and thought that I am just repeating anti-Brexit propaganda, and maybe you have shouted some pro-Brexit propaganda to the screen while you were reading.
To you I say, I sincerely hope you are right and I am wrong. And if that proves to be the case, I will not be upset in the least: on the contrary I will be very happy to be proven wrong.
Luca Rastello 