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The economic cost of Brexit has just been laid bare – and it’s devastating
(www.thelondoneconomic.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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okay fair, brexit as presented was always a lie and their numbers were not only wrong, but about things that didn't actually affect anyone. but i've talked to people in england who are still pro. not because of what was promised, but because what they saw was an opportunity to get stuff made locally again. and i get that.
maybe it's a background thing. i grew up surrounded by old shuttered industry that used to make genuinely useful stuff only to be out-priced by imports, and that has continued into the 2020's. i used to live close to the world's most advanced paper mill of its type, but it closed and production was moved to a worse mill with lower output in another country as an economic decision. that place had been there for 200 years, the company owned its own hydro power dam and all the forests used for the pulp, the mill had its own rail connection... it was basically printing money, but dismantling it meant being able to sell the machinery for a quick buck.
like, sweden is exceptional at iron and steel. but we used to be exceptional at a lot more. turbines and jet engines. high-voltage transformers. copper. grains. cheap but safe cars. textiles. power tools. wood products. all very useful stuff that could be made entirely "in-house". now most of that (or the constituent parts) is made elsewhere, and almost purely for economic reasons. there was no need to close that paper mill, but it was done to get the numbers to look good. when the economy goes international it feels like the people get left behind.
the way i see it is, if you black-box a country to just look at imports and exports, the lower the ratio between the two the more money the country makes. yes the salary and living situation may differ from place to place but that's all internal, funded by those exports in some way or another. moving towards that is, in my mind, a laudable goal. and doing so in a free trade union is obviously better.
the problem is of course that it was never the goal of brexit.
Yeah, globalisation has caused lots of problems, working class people have suffered even as the wealthy have flourished. But there’s no going back. A small nation like Britain couldn’t be completely self-sufficient without essentially regressing to a lower technology level, at which point they would just get invaded by somebody with an advanced military.
Instead we need to look at other ways of righting those wrongs, new strategies to ensure that the people can live happy and healthy lives. Lots of people want UBI, and I can see the attraction. I think it’s worth a try, even if it doesn’t work as advertised we could get feedback and adjust things until we find something that does work. The status quo is just not tenable.
yeah lowering the standard of living is not popular. i don't think complete self-sufficiency is necessarily the goal i'm thinking of, as much as minimising logistics costs. there's also the resiliency factor; every european nation being self-sufficient in crucial areas like food, medicine, electricity etc and trading the surplus would make for a very strong continent.
there's a lot of talk here about buying local now, like i'd imagine there is in most of europe. we still have local farms, but buying meat from brazil of all places is still marginally cheaper because they produce so much and have more lax standards for, say, how much antibiotics can be used on the animals (here that makes the meat prohibited to sell). i'm not saying to artificially modify pricing to privilege local production but i feel like there must be... something.
i think the finns did a ubi experiment pretty recently. the execution was a bit flawed, but the results were positive.