UK NOT OK

Around 4:30 a.m. on 24 June 2016, the news organisations called the Brexit vote in favour of the Leave campaign. Joy was unconfined:

The eventual count would be 52–48% in favour, with leave voters overwhelmingly concentrated in just two of the UK’s nations: England and Wales. I remember encountering dazed Remain voters in the days after the vote (as a non-citizen, I wasn’t able to participate). One told me that it was like waking up and realising half the people around you are zombies. (I remember commiserating with them—having lived through G.W. Bush’s re-election, I thought I understood what that felt like, but whooaaaaaaaa Nelly, I really understand it now.)

Leavers were triumphant. Daniel Hannan, a eurosceptic Member of the European Parliament (and somehow considered the “intellectual” of the Leave campaign; he has, of course, since been elevated to the House of Lords), predicted at the time that Britain would forever mark 24 June as a holiday:

I’m afraid I can’t endorse Baron Hannan’s predictive powers: I am sitting in Britain and there are no fireworks streaming through the summer sky, even though it is a fine and dry evening. Since the actual leaving happened in 2020, economists’ predictions that leaving the EU would slice 4% off the GDP have been borne out: an article from over the weekend in The Times (archive.is link, no paywall) puts the price tag at £40 billion, and adds:

The 4 per cent productivity loss translates to an approximate £40 billion tax loss for the exchequer between 2019 and 2024, a period in which the government raised taxes by £100 billion. “A large chunk of [the tax rises] would not have been necessary if the UK had voted to remain in the EU or chosen a softer form of Brexit,” Springford said.

So we pay more tax, we’re less attractive to investment, and we’re also still bitterly divided—in no large part due to the same foreign influencers that may have pushed Brexit over the line in the first place—and we still have to endure Nigel Farage, one of the faces of the Leave campaign, as a major force in national politics.

And yet, somehow, choosing to Brexit is only the second dumbest thing an electorate has done to itself during this century. Small mercies, I guess.

I realise there’s an awful lot going on, but if you would like to get the UK a ninth anniversary gift, research suggests the traditional present is pottery. I recommend smashed, heavily used chamber pots.

Open thread.

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It’s been an exciting few weeks here on the Island of Strangers. The government signed a memorandum of understanding on trade with Trump’s people, then negotiated an actual trade deal with the EU that, among many other things, may lead to lower food prices here (eventually). It also indicated it will pull a U-turn on two major—and majorly unpopular—policies it adopted early in its tenure: cutting the winter fuel allowance for seniors above a certain income level, and continuing the Conservatives’ version of the child tax benefit, which caps the number of children families can claim credit for at two. (Lifting this two-child benefit cap, according to the not-particularly-left-wing  Institute for Fiscal Studies, would lift as many as 540,000 children in the UK out of poverty.)

Of course, any kind of understanding you come to with Donald Trump is worthless. There was relief in the media here when it was confirmed that Trump’s new 50% tariffs on steel that went into effect today around the world won’t apply to the UK. This relief was tempered by the fact that the gradual lowering of tariffs on UK steel that was supposed to start happening this month won’t. The UK is stuck at the old rate of 25% for now. If the UK and US don’t sign a final deal by July 9th, the tariffs go up to 50%.

The UK government is also trying to put through more bills that are causing consternation within its own ranks. There’s a threatened revolt by the Labour backbenches on the new planning bill, which would open up more opportunities for building housing while also handing over vast tracts of nature to developers. The government’s insane AI-first growth plan, which essentially breaks copyright for creatives to help AI companies, is also looking DOA: the House of Lords just voted it down a fourth time, thanks in part to loud opposition by a newly radicalised Sir Elton John. The policy behind this bill, it’s worth noting, appears to have been drafted in consultation with people from the tech industry, not creatives.

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