BrexitAnother disaster that never happened

There’s been a re-occurring theme throughout my lifetime. I get told that some enormous disaster is inevitable, or that it will occur if a certain course of action isn’t taken. I am promised death, carnage, and misery on an unimaginable scale. But the disaster never happens. In my lifetime I’ve survived the “population bomb”, ozone depletion, the Y2K bug, the triump of Islamic terrorism that would occur if we didn’t win the war in Iraq, the budget “sequester” in 2013 that would financially ruin the USA, the Rapture, and the Mayan Calendar Apocalypse, just to name a few.

And we can now add another to that list: Brexit. Many folks told us, before it happened, that if the British voted for Leave, economic disaster would result. After they voted for Leave, those same folks told us that the economic disaster was occurring. Here’s an example:

Okay, so the idiots did it; they broke the UK … bigoted, emotional, don’t-need-to-know-facts impulses that powered the Brexit vote … It should be noted that all the horrible things that are currently happening because of Brexit were called by the very experts that Michael Gove asserted, correctly, alas, that voters were tired of. This does seem to suggest that perhaps, for future reference, experts might be listened to from time to time. … the UK economy is likely to plunge into a recession … I like many Americans have retirement stock investments, which look to take a 2008-sized pummel.

There were countless other examples just like that, in which people declared that the largely working-class voters who voted for Brexit had been proven to be utter idiots and that the economic chaos was not only engulfing Britain but would spread to America and worldwide, while the experts have proven their superior knowledge once and for all. So what actually happened?

Stocks? The day after Brexit, the FTSE 100 plunged. This was widely cited by those who opposed Brexit as proof of the economic disaster unleashed by the idiots. A few days later, it had recovered what it lost and was going up. Opponents then told us to ignore the FTSE 100 and focus on the FTSE 250 instead. A few days later that index was going up as well. Over the past year, the FTSE 250 is up 12% and the FTSE 100 almost 20%.

Currency? The pound plunged after the vote. 1 pounds now equals 1.18 Euros, so the pound is worth about what is was worth 4 years ago. No one said that the exchange rate was a disaster 4 years ago, so there’s no reason to view it as a disaster now.

What else? Unemployment is down. Economic growth is up. In short, the economic catastrophe that was guaranteed to happen simply didn’t happen.

Of course, Britain and the EU are now entering a new stage of negotiations. There’s guaranteed to be uncertainy and some bad moments in the process, and doubtlessly some swings in the stock market and the currency will occur, and the same voices will clamber out with a “see I told you so” line. But overall, those who predicted total devastation from Brexit have been totally wrong. Those who predicted worldwide economic disaster were even more wrong.

isn’t it not supposed to happen for another year or two?

You know that the reason these weren’t disastrous is because people actually took action to avoid them, right?

And as running coach pointed out, Brexit hasn’t even happened yet. It’ll still be a couple years before Britain actually leaves the EU.

I’d answer at length, but I’m too busy reinforcing my home against killer bees.

Brexit hasn’t happened yet.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Currency? The pound plunged after the vote. 1 pounds now equals 1.18 Euros, so the pound is worth about what is was worth 4 years ago. No one said that the exchange rate was a disaster 4 years ago, so there’s no reason to view it as a disaster now.
[/quote]

Brexit hasn’t happened yet.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
What else? Unemployment is down. Economic growth is up. In short, the economic catastrophe that was guaranteed to happen simply didn’t happen.
[/quote]

Brexit hasn’t happened yet.

Also there’s just huge uncertainty. Things could turn out okay, but they could also turn out very badly, based on a huge number of factors that aren’t all in Britain’s control. And when the uncertainty is so big, and the consequences could be so bad if they come to fruition, that’s why a lot of people were against it.

<checks history books>
Apparently, disasters do happen. So the fact that some predicted disasters didn’t happen shouldn’t make us complacent.

On the subject of Brexit specifically, I think it’s something of a straw man. Most Remainers, I think, are like me, in that we think Brexit is a bizarre, self-inflicted wound, but hardly a mortal one.
It only has downsides, but I don’t think the downsides are catastrophic.
And of course I agree with posters above that we haven’t actually seen the level of fallout yet.

And even if it had already happened, the negative results could still take years to set in.

It’s not like in the movies. Governance and large scale economics don’t instantly play out in order to get resolved within the short attention span of an audience, (though clearly politicians, like Trump, present things that way in order to pander to voters who don’t understand this.)

Well, not so much a prediction as Government policy: Treasuary statements

Of course you can argue not enough time has passed, but yu could say the same about the French Revolution (to paraphrase Zhou Enlai).

The point is the government predicted immediate catastrophe:

I’m pro-Brexit but the OP is way off track here. We won’t know the full consequences of Brexit for several years, maybe even a decade. It is far far too early to either celebrate or on the other side to say ‘we told you so’.

Time will tell but we’ll need a lot more of it before it utters the final word.

The disasters, including WW3 and a global financial collapse, were supposed to happen after merely voting for Brexit, not after Brexit itself.

I’m still struggling with the aftershocks of the Y2K disaster.

As a conservative, do you ever ask yourself why you and your ilk seem to fall for the doom-and-gloom rhetoric so easily?

Because it’s not the liberals who are crying about the illegals taking our jobs and raping our womenfolk, even when the evidence shows this isn’t true. It’s not the liberals who think this threat warrants bankrupting the treasury to erect a giant wall that’s not going to do a damn thing but symbolize our stupid our generation is.

It’s not the liberals who think the fate of society hinges on people peeing and pooping in the “right” restroom (whether it be colored vs. whites, or male vs. female).

It’s not the liberals who scream COMMUNISM! every time the conversation steers to social welfare spending, single-payer healthcare, or ways we should be dealing with income inequality.

It’s not the liberals who buy up all the guns at Walmart whenever a Democrat is in the White House.

Yes, liberals are scared about certain things. Maybe even sometimes irrationally. But no one can seriously argue that conservatives are less paranoid than liberals, on the whole. Every time liberals identify a problem and propose ways to fix it, the conservatives bend over backwards to convince everyone that such a plan would cause the sky would fall. And they’ll do everything in their power to make it so.

See Obamacare.

Over here in the UK, doom-and-gloom seems to be the province of the Left. Brexit, Global Warming, etc ad nauseam.

Hear, hear. Bravo. Cheers. Word. QFT.

(That’s my first QFT ever, BTW.)

Liberal Chuck Norris predicts 1000 years of darkness if Obama is elected to a second term.

Doom and gloom about Brexit came from bankers and business leaders too. And Remain had doom and gloom about waves of foreigners bankrupting the welfare system.

Of course if you had paid attention you would had seen the many times I pointed at evidence was to evidence and testimony from right wing scientists showing that Global Warming was/is not supposed to be a partisan issue (they agree with the vast majority of experts in the subject). What happened was that conservative businessmen managed to make Global Warming a political issue and we should not fall for it.

As for Brexit, not all conservatives did go for it,

As I noticed before, the most likely outcome of the climate change and ocean rise coming will be to see even more refugees coming to places like England. Something that the supporters of Brexit did not want and a very significant number of them did go for xenophobia to vote for Brexit.

Nice Job Breaking It Hero right wingers! *

  • Yes, only that last link is to a TVtropes cite, it is there to explain the “hero” line used there. It points at how many right wingers that think that are doing the right thing are in reality falling for bad ideas nowadays. So once again that is not a cite about the issues, but the trope of the would be hero thinking that they are fixing a situation when they are making it worse. **

** Kinda sad that that needs to be explained because most of the time conservative posters just think that the point was just to link to irrelevant info; nope, that link is there to explain only why that line about people that think that they are heroes when in reality they are breaking things.

However, we were promised those negative consequences as early as the second half of 2016 from voting Brexit. We were not promised them only after a legally triggered Brexit.

Very true.

The other reason that you manage to avoid true catastrophe, is that when liberals identify an issue that needs solved, they actually work in good faith to try to solve it. ITR helpfully pointed out the ozone layer depletion and the Y2K bug. Both of those could have ended up being a problem, but actions were taken that prevented them.

Brexit will be softened, not by right wing rhetoric, but by progressives seeing the shitty situation that others have created, and nonetheless, making the best of it. This is opposed to those of a conservative bent, the leavers, who see a problem, and take an action that has no relation to the solution, because the problem was just a distraction to get through some more tax cuts or remove some regulations.

In this sense, it makes sense to show the conservatives as the party of doom and gloom, and most primarily fear, while the liberals could be viewed as a party of caution and vigilance, and primarily hope.