There are indeed several layers of issues with the Brexit. The people who actually vote on it are citizens of the UK (and commonwealth citizens) living in the UK. UK citizens living and working in other EU countries and citizens of other EU countries living and working in the UK do not get to vote. So right away, you can see that there are
millions of stake holders who stand to lose the most if the Brexit goes through who do not get to vote. For the people who
do get to vote, the issues are mostly ones of economic impact. The UK is not going to stop being a member of NATO or lose its nuclear arsenal. No foreign country is going to seize portions of their territory and tell them to suck it.
Brexit discussion in the UK is therefore delightfully tone deaf. Economists are in
virtual unanimous agreement that Brexit will carry short term costs - the only issue is
how much poorer the people of the UK are going to be ten years from now if Brexit passes versus whether it doesn't. And that has more to do with what assumptions you make about what, if anything, the UK is going to negotiate to replace their EU membership in the two years it takes for the "Leave" vote to kick in. And the second question is whether the losses can ever be made up or whether it's simply a permanent reduction in output. The floor here is a few percentage points of lost productivity - which of course translates on the ground to thousands of lives destroyed. The ceiling... well as I've said earlier there basically is no ceiling. If the migrants issue goes badly, the UK could end up trading over two million working people for over two million unemployed people with different skills and have a recession and a debt crisis and empty shelves in their grocery stores and shit. There is no particular reason to believe that the economic downturn couldn't be
worse for the UK than the Great Depression was, there are some pretty bad worst case scenarios. And that's
without invoking worst case political end states like becoming a pariah state or going to war.
So the chattering classes in the UK are going on about how all the economists and the partisan and non-partisan portions of the government all agree that the UK will be poorer in the short run, and then they just sort of gloss over the tail risks that things will go really bad and also barely discuss the fact that many economists believe the costs will continue to be large ten, twenty years down the line.
What will happen to the rest of the EU countries is not and will not be discussed by UK punditry. The BBC attempts to be "balanced" on Brexit, as you can see
Here. This basically means that Vote Leave's statements are presented in an "opinions differ on the shape of the Earth" sort of way. So here's their presentation of the economic issue:
Leave | Remain
|
UK companies would be freed from the burden of EU regulation | Brexit would cause an economic shock and growth would be slower
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Trade with EU countries would continue because we import more from them than we export to them | As a share of exports Britain is more dependent on the rest of the EU than they are on us
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Britain would be able to negotiate its own trade deals with other countries | The UK would still have to apply EU rules to retain access to the single market
|
Now, what do you notice about those three bullet points? Well, the bullet points for the Leave Campaign are fucking fairy dust and unicorn farts! Where have we heard "economic growth will come from being freed from the burden of regulation" before? Oh right, that's been the conservative answer to where they are going to get growth from to replace their contractionary policies for the last
forty fucking years. And it has never ever worked, because it's bullshit. And the BBC doesn't call them on this bullshit, because
balance.
And the next two bullet points are just Leave claiming that they will be able to negotiate yuuuge beautiful trade treaties after they've unilaterally walked out of a bunch of trade treaties because they have terrific hands. There's nothing there. The claim is really that having given themselves a self imposed time limit and proven that treaties they sign aren't worth all that much that they'll be able to negotiate cool new treaties with the entire planet and they'll be great treaties. It's
literally the Donald Trump argument. And no, it doesn't sound any better with a British accent. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the UK could get better deals as a free agent than it does as part of the world's largest common market - it's like claiming that a Walmart store could get their stock for less after they left the company and became an independent store.
The future relations with the EU issue is particularly strange. The entire run of punditry in the UK, from both sides, pretty much assumes that the rest of the EU does nothing at all and continues to work productively with the UK to the limit the British government allows them to. I have
no idea why they think this will be the case. The EU leveling any kind of sanctions on the UK for treaty breaking
at all is undiscussed. The EU could make pretty much any demands they want for the UK to retain access to the common market, and as I noted earlier it is to the advantage of everyone who wants other countries to not leave the EU for a Brexit experiment to be a demonstrable failure. The
only issue here is
how badly it has to go for the people of Albion for the Eurocrats to consider their point made. This is another issue where there is a floor of how badly it could go and no ceiling. The UK punits seem to all assume that we'll be at the floor of "no reprisals at all" but there's no reason to believe that will be the case.
-Username17