To be fair, I don’t think many Leave voters want/wanted to leave with no deal. Which of course was one of the problems - but we have been over this ad nauseam.
My own position as a Leave voter remains that while I didn’t expect it all to be plain sailing/milk and honey, I don’t think it was foreseeable that the UK would cock the whole thing up to the extent that it has so far. I am still reserving judgement on whether I regret my vote, overall - it’s too early to tell.
No disrespect to you but oh yes it was, given the individuals involved. Admittedly it also required a heavily cynical outlook.
The ERG wanted, and still want, a no-deal finish.
That’s exactly why we’re going to get one (in spite of his apparent majority, Boris is terrified of them).
I’ve thought that from the start, and I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong on 1st January.
My own position as a Remainer (now, Regainer) remains that I still predict it will be a disaster. I predicted it from the start, and said so to anyone who would listen to me.
We now hear lots about the forthcoming difficulties: importing, exporting, foreign travel, the Irish border, the collapsing pound etc. etc. But they’re not being blamed on ‘Project Fear’ any more, are they? So who will get the blame?
But it’s going to happen. Let’s talk about it again in, say, February.
We ran into that a lot in the run-up to the Quebec sovereignty referendum back in 1995. People would say that they were voting for sovereignty, but assumed that they would keep their passports, and Quebec would use the Canadian dollar, and they would be able to work in the rest of Canada after separation, and so on. It was very frustrating.
On the Irish border: my manager is from NI and still has family there, and he is of the frank view that this will be the start of the reunification process. The “de facto” border is already being effectively built not on the Ireland side but at the ports, where customs checkpoints are being expanded, and even amongst the Protestant community (where he’s from) there is a desire to keep the freedom of movement with RoI. After 20 years of relative calm, a lot of the kneejerk violent opposition to even thinking about unification has faded somewhat (although he notes that this doesn’t mean the Unionist parties have lost a single vote over it in any election); it just remains to be seen what leaving the EU means on the ground in NI once it beds in and which way it pushes the general populace.
Funnily enough, ST:TNG (in “The Higher Ground”) pegged Irish reunification as happening in 2025. It’s not inconceivable that they may not be that far off the mark.
Really? Theresa May campaigned for Remain, but then ended up making the biggest cock-up of the lot in triggering Article 50 prematurely and without a viable plan. And I don’t think her advisers (who were presumably behind this - Nick Timothy and Fiona whatsit) were public figures at the time (ETA: at the time of the referendum, to be clear). I’ll give you Johnson and Gove, but I don’t think anyone expected them to be in charge either. Cameron’s sudden resignation was not unpredictable perhaps but at the same time not exactly expected. Had he stayed on, given his previous experience of EU negotiations he might have made a better fist of it than the current rabble.
You’re right about the cynical bit though - I am a relentless optimist, which is a blessing and a curse.
I agree that by February it might be clearer what exactly the major problems are and how concerned we should be about them. Then again, such dates have come and gone several times already with no further clarity.
There are certainly difficulties but I hope we will all find that ‘disaster’ is an overstatement, whatever happens. I could be wrong.
As an American deeply interested in UK & EU affairs it had always seemed to me that the EU held all the cards and no-deal was likely to be the final outcome simply because EU could / would push harder than any Leave-ish government, regardless of competency, could stomach accepting or selling to the UK public. Partly from spite, but far more from their own needs to manage their publics and the fissile nature of the whole alliance.
As to the pithy question:
The EU. Witness the cite a few posts ago to UK expat’s fury at the EU over their emerging predicament.
There’s plenty of honest but mistaken judgment, political scheming, and abject malfeasance among the factions in the UK to go around. But the details are murky enough or unpalatable enough to enough people that IMO the mainstream narrative 20 years from now will be something akin to:
The UK decided to leave the EU for a mix of arguably good, arguably bad reasons. Then in a fit of pique the EU screwed us.
To be sure the various political traditions in 2040 will each put either more salt or more pepper or more mustard on their parochial version of events. But the big story will be “They done us wrong.”
Human politics is ever thus.
Why did you vote to leave?
I mean, the vast majority of Leavers voted that way due to xenophobia and racism, but since you are here, that seems kinda doubtful.
I take your point, but at the core of it was:
The various versions of the “deals” we were promised by the Leave campaign were always going to be unachievable because they were profoundly unrealistic (particularly the assertions that we would somehow get better trading terms being outside the EU than we had within it).
There was literally no one on either side who had particularly strong negotiation skills, and given the aforementioned profoundly unrealistic aspirations even a hypothetical strong negotiator was never going to be able to agree a deal that wasn’t significantly worse for the UK.
The people who were there and were willing to pursue an agenda to leave the EU were, to put it mildly, a bunch of fucking muppets. Cameron was tepidly pro-Remain (as was May) but even if he had stayed, the best you could say is that he wouldn’t have pulled the trigger on Article 50 so precipitously and we’d still be muddling along with no plan or negotiation strategy now.
Given the above, the best case scenario was that we came away with a bad deal, but as already pointed out the most influential cabal within the Leave camp wanted a no-deal exit and was willing to lie, manipulate and bully to achieve it. Undermining a bad deal in favour of no deal was never going to be that hard for them.
So the fact that we are where we are was always the most likely scenario. And “Project Fear” is looking more and more like Project Reality.
Indeed - for me it certainly wasn’t about xenophobia, immigration has been a great net benefit to this (and most other) countries, though like most countries there are concerns about uncontrolled migration - we do seem to be a destination of choice, I think mainly due to the language (if I were forced out of my home country, I’d be happier in a country where I could make myself understood, too). But leaving the EU was hardly like to help deal with that.
I voted to leave because I had direct personal experience of three separate issues where EU rules had resulted in changes that were actively unhelpful to consumers in my industry - in other words, the opposite of what is supposed to be achieved. I therefore felt (and still feel) that the EU as an organisation has outlived its usefulness/overstretched itself. There’s more to it, of course, but those are the headlines.
I don’t think this was clear at the time, but I admit I may not have worried enough about it. I mean, I’m not super-worried about it right now (albeit I post from a position of immense privilege compared with much of the population, in terms of being economically insulated) - we will indeed muddle through one way or the other. The medium to long-term consequences of that could be bad, maybe they will just be indifferent. I agree they may not be ‘better’ than had none of it happened, but as I’ve said before, I personally consider that a risk worth taking - again, acknowledging that I’m privileged to be in that position. I’m not saying ‘and screw everyone else’, or that I know better, I just voted in line with my personal views because I don’t think a significant number of people will be harmed by that choice.
Well, I sincerely hope you’re right.
Oh no doubt, the EU bureaucracy is a nitemare. But you gotta take the good along with the bad.
A No Deal on top of the COVID crisis is going to hit the economy very seriously, but it will hurt the EU as well.
So I waiting for some kind of face-saving fudge agreed between both parties that puts off all the unresolved issues to some point in the future.
Kicking the can down the road and spinning the announcement to sound like we won a titanic struggle with a wily and implacable foe.
I daresay Boris Johnson is at this moment scribbling away, crafting flowery metaphors.
If anything goes wrong, we can always blame it on the French.
Yes it will. But hardly as much!
It’s worked for us so far!
That’s not ironic. This is literally the only tactic that has ever permitted this farago to make progress of any kind.
This farago has made progress of any kind? 
In January all the years of bullshit will hit the fan, then we’ll see what progress has been made.
I didn’t say it was progress anywhere good!
But at every impasse, rather than actually solve the problem, we have agreed to fudge and postpone. Eventually we will reach the end of the road, and most likely that time is soon upon us. But if there is a way out, it’s to fudge something and postpone solving the new problems it creates as well as the existing ones it ignores till some later point.
Isn’t that the art of politics, from time immemorial?
Nigel Farago?
What the can-kicking has achieved is to draw out the impact of Brexit, in large part because it’s hard for businesses, markets and governments to react decisively when there’s such a high level of uncertainty as to what the impact is. So there’s been a slow drip-drip of reactions as everyone tries to plan for the most likely scenario at any given time.
The moment we reach a point where it is clear and more or less irrevocable what Brexit is, then you’ll see the big effects of it start to kick in, for better or (as I fear) worse.
It’s already begun, of course.