Remainers and Leavers: Can you switch identities?
Well that’s been the problem hasn’t it. With the referendum result being so close, half the country wanted to make a go of it, and half didn’t. Unfortunately for the dreams of most brexiteers the people who make decisions in the UK were on the remain side and had to be dragged kicking and screaming (and still are) into a world without the crutch of the EU to cover up their mistakes and poor decisions. Had the remainers took it on the chin and pulled together to make it work, life would have been so much better than the mess we now find ourselves in. It’s a bit like Bruce described the changeover from imperial to metric. Had we all been made to accept the metric system at the outset, most people would now be comfortable and happily using metric and not looked back. Instead, we have a system where half the people use metric, and the other half are still using imperial…
So you blame the remain camp for the failings of Brexit. Sorry, that does not wash nor does it reflect the events from 2016 to 2020. The Johnson government was primarily full of Brexit supporting ministers and the influence of the ERG group was strong. The agreement reached was always going to be a fudge - because Brexit itself is problematic and harmful. The fudge was the balance between separation and harm. Re-writing this as mendacious remainer influence has no basis of fact. It is simply a poor attempt to divert blame away from the core cause of the problem, Brexit itself.
I strongly disagree Lincs, Boris only used brexit to feather his own nest…Wasn’t he originally a remainer that changed sides?
Even though some of the government were supposedly supporters of brexit, why cut off the hand that feeds you. A bit like you Lincs…
I understand. Your only hope that Brexit is not a bad idea is that it was simply badly put in place. And if those who really, really wanted a really, really proper Brexit were unable to achieve this then, for you, the only explanation is that some people prevented that. It could not possibly be that putting a really, really proper Brexit in place would be much more damaging that the Brexit we ended up with. It could not be that even ardent Brexit fans in parliament could see the damage such proper Brexit would cause. So that means some people, and they must have been remainers, scuppered it all. Obvs.
Or, rather, it was plain as the nose on your face that the harder the Brexit the more damage caused and no-one (apart from those blind to the realities of trade) thought that a no-deal Brexit would be workable. Even hard line Brexiteers sided with Johnson’s quite hard, quite damaging agreement. Which all sounds like exactly what happened.
Maybe (and probably) not everything is more difficult. However I have not yet seen a pro/contra list showing the benefits and the drawbacks on either side.
Maybe you will remember last years long thread here about finding the benefits of Brexit. It was nearly impossible to find any at all if I remember correctly.
My impression is that elderly people see no difference as they are barely affected and younger people see huge differences (for the worse) as they are are affected.
We could open a google online document where you can write down all benefits and drawbacks of Brexit.
That could be interesting…
Looking from outside I am having a hard time to figure out why some try to present the EU as the big enemy which the UK can now be glad to be freed from.
The UK was one of the big players and rule makers. There are statistics about how many laws and “stupid” regulations were created or at least supported by the UK.
How is the EU suddenly the biggest enemy? That does not make sense I think.
Why were there so many laws? I thought the EU was simply to encourage trade between countries in Europe? To dispense with all the red tape of bureaucracy? To be a member of an institution that makes trade easier between nations is a good idea and it’s certainly one that I would vote for but apparently the EU is a closed shop tp outsiders and they have to sell their country out to be eligible.
I do not know why. I do not even know whether there are “so many” laws as I am not a lawyer. It *feels * as if there are many laws and that there is a lot of bureaucracy in the EU I admit. However I have not and cannot compare it to other countries or other trading blocks bureaucracy.
I voted remain but I see many faults in the direction the EU is headed. Just because the original idea was “ever closer union”, it doesn’t mean you have to take that slogan literally and keep trying to push individual nations that do not want to be one country, and for historical reasons of hating each other didn’t become one nation over the centuries, together despite them kicking and screaming. There’s a lack of respect there at the centre. Many nations do not want an EU army and do not want to be told what they can and cannot do legally and with their domestic policies.
I’m very much in favour of a shared trading block and free movement. I think most people are. (perhaps some are misguided about the latter but they complain when the prices of goods go up, or they can’t find a builder or the hospital is understaffed).
I think that I can imagine what you mean. There is one Brexit benefit - at least for me and maybe others too - and that is: The EU has been there and I always took it to be inevitable. I felt only advantages (easy travel, same currency, buy things from each country, no roaming costs). Now that the UK referendum was on the table I began to invest time into investigating what the EU is, what it means, how little I knew about details.
Having learned so much in the last years, if there was a German referendum today, I would vote remain.
(P. S.: I have placed the commas in the last sentence where I would place them when writing in German) 
I’m not sure your farmers would agree. I understand why some want to go the way they are headed but it is very much a “frog in boiling water” mistake the way they are doing things - to integrate with stakeholder engagement would take at least a century of incremental changes. There is a lack of respect from the centre which is not to be unexpected with such a collossus of a system. It seems Brussels is very out of touch and far too interfering.
I am also not so sure. However that means nothing. I am still on the way to get deeper into the farming problems before I have an own opinion based on facts. Still farmers have been producing too much over decades (the phrases “Butterberg”, means butter mountain and “Milchsee”, means milk lake) as they receive subsidaries. The more you produce the more you receive subsidaries, which is guaranteed. Hence milk is so cheap in Germany.
The problem seems to quite complexe in my opinion and I cannot yet blame Brussels for that. Anyway Germany is a pretty big part of “Brussels”, so we are also responsible for the situation.
Sorry I have conflated the farmers with the rest of my comments, but the next bit should have been a new paragraph as relates to general pace of change (non farming).
But in terms of farming - it’s a good example. They are suddenly try to stop a situation that was caused by the system in the first place for reasons unclear other than funding.
The way the UK manages such changes is to ensure they are buried in the long grass of “no change” - so if you have a supplement it doesn’t increase with inflation, which in reality means that over time there are incremental reductions which people do not physically see. This has a similar effect without the political outfall. Other changes here used to be pushed through by blaming the EU. We no longer have that option 
Annie, we have to keep in mind that “butterscotch” opened this thread for a different reason and we are being increasingly off-topic here.
So: sorry butterscotch, we will take more care, I promise. 
About your comment: I hope that this will not become a race against time, when more EU producers avoid business with the UK (fresh food producers) and at the same time UK must produce them in the UK or import them from the other side of the planet.
My comments weren’t off topic though because as I explained I voted remain but I have criticisms of the EU with which many leave voters would agree. The discussion becomes one not of identifying with “leave” or “remain” as separate tribes so to speak, but more about a venn diagram where people overlap into the opposite camps. There’s far too much emotion attached to the labels, which is unhelpful and a total distraction to the mess our government is making in general.
Ah ok, that was my misunderstanding then. Sorry 
Is it possible that being part of a very large organisation, and producing butter and milk for the whole of the EU it’s very easy to over produce? When these things are produced locally from small family businesses there is less likely for over production and waste? The EU is not a family business friendly organisation. I would rather purchase local produce, albeit more expensive, than have it travelled the world and be full of preservatives or covered with some kind of protective supposedly edible, plastic…
Brits living in other part of Europe complain they can not find and buy their favourite UK food anymore and some even complain that they have to leave their properties and exit the country the reside every six months… What a mess for all parties involved.
OGF had a look at the labels on fruit at breakfast. Cherries from Chile, Strawberries from Spain and lychees from Madagasgar. I don’t think I’d find any of these grown locally at this time of year. Plus I am sure you drink tea or coffee - the fairtrade coffee is from Kenya and now having a nice cup of breakfast tea made of a blend grown in both Kenya and the Brahmaputra estate (Assam). There is absolutely no chance that we will ever grow our own coffee and tea to any standard worth consuming. The goats milk (for tea) is from Yorkshire by the way (St Helen’s farm). But we can only produce a fraction of the foods we like to regularly consume.
I’m sure they can reduce the number of farmers in the EU over the longer term, but those at the center should do so gradually and with sensitivity rather than this bossy and officious approach.
Until 1984 there was a price guarantee for milk. This was changed into a quota system (which ended 2015) as over production was too high.
I found an interesting article (in German) about that. Here is a small section which I had translated through deepl.com:
"Liberalisation of the EU dairy market
Since the early 1990s, the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has aimed to integrate the agricultural sector into a more open global trading system through liberalisation. As part of this liberalisation process, the decision was made in 2003 to extend the EU milk quota system for the last time until 2015. This was because the EU milk quota system was no longer able to adequately support the producer price in the internal market due to the lower level of foreign trade protection in the milk sector.
Dairy farms were given back the responsibility to determine the volume of raw milk produced themselves. The state no longer intervenes in the decision on production volumes.
The crisis measures implemented during the 2015/16 milk crisis were also voluntary and non-binding in terms of their influence on milk volumes.
"
I found it at BMEL - Agrarmärkte - Paradigmenwechsel am Milchmarkt – von der Milchquotenregelung zu mehr Verantwortung der Marktakteure
Why do you think that the EU is not a family business friendly organisation?