Oh come on. It’s one thing to overpromise somewhat. If the promise had been what it was and the reality had been, “Okay, we’re not getting all of what we want, but we’re getting most of it, and we’ll have to pay more for German cars or French wine”, your statement would make some sense. But… that’s not what happened. Instead, the UK was promised an end to european immigration, more money for the sick, and more independence for Britain outside of the stuffy EU system. And they got…
…fucked. They got fucked. That’s the long and short of it. This isn’t simply “overpromising”, this is promising a moonshot and delivering a trip down to the local Tesco in your mom’s minivan which then loses a wheel and careens into a ditch.
And the funniest part was, this really wasn’t hard to see coming. It didn’t take an “expert” (although the experts were pretty much on point with this) to realize that unilaterally abandoning a trade union that makes up your largest market for all of your most important exports and imports is a really fucking stupid idea! Especially when those imports include things which are literally necessary for survival - medicine, food, etc.
I don’t remember the threats of World War 3. I remember mostly level-headed experts warning that this would be bad for the economy and that Britain has zero leverage against the EU and that the financial sector would leave Britain if it can’t trade with the EU. Y’know, stuff that’s actually happening. There were some exaggerations, sure - find a large enough crowd and you can nutpick whatever you want. But we don’t have to nutpick to find the dishonesty or insanity on the leave side - their leading argument, slapped on the side of a fucking bus, was an intentional lie; a promise memory-holed the moment the vote ended.
Honestly, when you start saying that remain was caught in too many obvious lies, and then follow that up with this:
…Well, I have to wonder if there isn’t some cognitive dissonance here.
Also, waitaminute - don’t you support these people? Because to me, this reads as an incredibly damning condemnation - “Yeah, they lied and shirked on the details about what they wanted, because they knew if they didn’t, people would point out the numerous serious problems involved and they wouldn’t get support.” Yeah, no, that’s a really bad thing. You’re essentially bragging about how clever the people who swindled you were. (Which is also silly because they weren’t particularly clever, either!)
Ah yes. How did the leavers put it? “Britain has had enough of experts.” Such a shitty, anti-intellectual statement. There’s little reason to believe that the EU and UK elites held the UK public in contempt in any meaningful way, mind you (although idiots who want to consider themselves important are very quick to believe this chestnut, making it a populist standby - and I say populist in the most derogatory way possible). If they weren’t contemptful before, I bet they are now, and rightfully so!
This version of events paints the leavers in entirely too kind of a light. “They saw the poor deal” - but the deal wasn’t poor. It wasn’t a bad deal to begin with, and it’s definitely a better deal than whatever the UK is going to get after Brexit. You admit it yourself - they didn’t put forward an actual Brexit plan because no such plan would have survived scrutiny. This, to me, is proof positive that Brexit is, was, and always has been a terrible fucking idea! It also means it’s absolutely no surprise that, years down the road, Britain is struggling to cut any deal with the trade union they just left (that holds all the cards, as predicted), in large part because any deal that isn’t a catastrophic “hard brexit” comes with conditions set by the aforementioned trade union about things like immigration.
The kindest thing I can say about leavers (i.e. “this is how I explain their insanely irrational actions without just calling them evil racists and calling it a day”) is that they were fooled by propaganda and didn’t stop to think or consult the experts on what might happen if the UK left the EU. (At this point I feel I’d be remiss to not at least mention the different types of brexiteers.) That’s the nicest thing I have on offer, because Brexit was always a fucking terrible idea. And if it were possible to short a country on the stock market, I feel like that would be an easy and obvious investment to make. Brexit is like Trump’s tariffs: a massive and stupid self-destructive own goal where the best possible scenario is “only slightly worse” and the worst possible scenario is “massive catastrophe”, depending on how badly it’s handled - and how well they’ve been handled thus far does not inspire confidence.