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IMPACT OF BREXIT Britain’s Finally Figuring Out Brexit (Really) Was the Biggest Mistake in Modern History ... Want to Understand How Bad Brexit Really Is? Take a Deep Breath, Because Your Jaw’s About to Drop Original article: https://eand.co/britains-finally-figuring-out-brexit-really-was-the-biggest-mistake-in-modern-history-8419a8b940c6 Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
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Britain’s Finally Figuring Out Brexit (Really) Was the Biggest Mistake in Modern History Want to Understand How Bad Brexit Really Is? Take a Deep Breath, Because Your Jaw’s About to Drop Written by Umair Haque January 2nd. 2023 It’s hard to put what’s happening to Britain into words. Genuinely so. The sheer scale and scope of the disaster that’s unfolding beggars belief — and reduces even seasoned observers like me, of the mistakes societies make, to speechlessness. How, for example, do you begin to comment on stories like these? An A&E patient was forced to wait for ’99 hours’ before receiving a bed last week and parents have told how their ailing children were forced to sleep on chairs as the NHS faces a worsening crisis this winter. The unnamed patient was brought to Swindon’s Great Western Hospital by ambulance last week but was left waiting on a gurney for four days while staff urgently tried to source an available bed. One clinician at Great Western Hospital told the Sunday Times: ‘We’re broken and nobody is listening,’ Even telling the story that way doesn’t do it justice. Let me put it even more bluntly. Some poor soul went to the ER, and things were so broken, that they had to wait over a week — in chairs, on gurneys — for a hospital bed. Imagine that being your mom, dad, child, spouse. Just…imagine it. But that poor patient was one of the lucky ones. Here’s another story: Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), said hundreds of patients are dying while they wait in overpacked emergency wards. He told Times Radio: ‘We think somewhere between 300 and 500 people are dying as a consequence of delays and problems with urgent and emergency care each week.’ Did you get that? The President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine — Britain’s most senior ER figure — says that 500 people a week are dying because they can’t get care. Beds, ambulances, seen by doctors. Adjusted for populations, that’s nearly a 9/11 every week. It’s that level of horrific disaster and very real suffering and death. This is shocking. It is flatly crazy. For this to happen in an erstwhile rich, developed country. A 9/11 every week? Of people dying because they can’t get emergency care? What is even happening here? But this story isn’t just about Britain’s once-famed NHS, now a broken, dying, mortally wounded thing itself. It’s about how Britain got here. And to tell you that story, we need to begin again, in a different place. The world of cold, hard statistics. My world, as an economist. In that world, there are statistics, and then there are statistics. The kind that take your breath away, because they contain whole decades, millions upon millions of lives in them, hold the fates of entire nations in their hands. Let me give you one such statistic. The Centre for Economic Performance @CEP_LSE reckons Brexit has caused UK GDP to be 6.3% to 9.5% lower than it would otherwise have been, while @CER_EU says the shortfall is more like 11%. Brexit made the UK economy about 10% smaller than it would have been otherwise. That might not sound like a Big Deal to you, but it’s going to be, as I teach you just the smallest bit of economic history. What does losing 10% of an economy really mean? Let’s put that in perspective, with the simplest economic fact there is. “Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%.” Got that? Britain is already 2/3 of the way to…The Great Depression. In my world? The world of economics? It doesn’t get worse than that. Words, again, fail. It’s hard to even find an analogue. For a nation which until a few short years ago was the envy of the world — right up until perhaps 2010 or so — but then decided to basically inflict the Great Depression on itself. And no, that’s not hyperbole. Sadly — tragically — idiotically, it’s a fact. This has never happened before in modern economic history. Let me say that again, because, like I said, words are failing me, and that’s what Britain’s lunatics want — for all this to go unnoticed and uncommented upon, so that, in an Orwellian twist, it might as well have never really happened. This has never happened before in modern history. We have never seen anything — anything — remotely like these shocking, incredible, mind-blowing numbers. Happen to a rich country. Happen because a rich country inflicted them on itself. The only analogues we have for “shocks” to GDP of this magnitude? They’re a) the Great Depression. Or Latin American countries, like Argentina — where GDP fell by 10% in the most severe years of its currency crisis, and that was because it was unable to repay debts denominated in dollars. If that makes your eyes glaze over, don’t worry about it — the point is that the only other place we’ve seen economic shocks of this magnitude are…almost nowhere ever, period. To an economist like me? It’s like watching someone who was in perfect health, until last week, come in, and now, just a few days later, they have a case of cancer so advanced that there are tumors all over the body, and they’re going into organ failure. Never seen anything like it. Beggars belief. Shouldn’t happen. Shouldn’t even be possible. Apologies if all this sounds hyperbolic, but a serious point needs to be made here, with words like “shocking” and “unparalleled” and “unprecedented,” which in this case, are absolutely necessary. This is unreal. And until it’s commented on in these terms, Britain itself isn’t going to understand the gravity of the crisis it now finds itself in. It has become the rich world’s Argentina, and that’s not exaggeration. It has plunged itself into something that’s already 2/3 of the way to the Great Depression, and that’s not overstating the case at all, it’s an empirical fact. Worse, nobody has ever seen anything like what Brexit has done to Britain before, because it’s never happened. The only way I can even attempt to put it into perspective is to use episodes like the Great Depression. Why is that? Well, for example, in America, every slowdown in GDP since the Great Depression has been maybe 2–3%. Even when Covid first broke out, the economy slowed by double digits…for two months. But Brexit is forever. I have to reach for outlandish comparisons like the Great Depression and Argentina because there aren’t any others that even begin to compare. So the scale and scope of this self-made disaster is…mind-boggling. Britain’s closest cousin used to be America. But in the last almost century of American history, nothing, and I mean nothing, no natural disaster, no terrorist attack, no garden-variety mistake, no disease, no cyclical slowdown, has caused anything even remotely close to the magnitude of Brexit. Nothing. Earthquakes, hurricanes, 9/11, Trump, nothing. Brexit is in its own category of ruin, by a very long way. Nothing, and I mean nothing, apart from The Great Depression or becoming a poor country, put in perspective how serious and grave and catastrophic it really is. Now. Brits might have made a terrible mistake, but they aren’t fools. They are beginning to realize, to their horror, that Brexit has been a calamity of historic proportions. That’s not because anyone’s telling them the straight facts above, because they’ve got some kind of theoretical knowledge about it, but more simply, because they’re living it. Hence, in the latest polls, 2/3s of Brits want another referendum, on rejoining the EU again. That’s because they are beginning to see what “Brexit is already 2/3 of the way to the Great Depression” or “Brexit turned Britain into Argentina” really means. They can see it means absolutely ruinous things, like emergency room patients waiting 99 hours — over a week — for a hospital bed. Or 500 people a week dying because they can’t get ambulances. Britain’s once famed high streets shuttered. Its economy decimated. The average Brit can very much see that their living standards have gone into absolute free-fall. You see, “your economy’s now 10% smaller” is just an abstraction. What it means at the everyday level is things, though, that everyone can understand, because, well, they’re terrifying forms of social collapse. Don’t bother calling an ambulance, because chances are, one is never going to show up. Need healthcare? Take care of yourself — now it’s DIY time. Jobs? LOL, good luck with those. Paying the bills? Everyone’s now dipping into their meagre savings. Living standards are going into free-fall, in a way we have never seen in a modern, advanced society. This is the worst case scenario, but even worse. You see, we economists — the good ones, at least, who aren’t biased by political partisanship — estimated that Brexit would hit the economy to about 10%. That’s already happened, and it’s just barely a year and some after Brexit really went into effect. We have never, ever seen a slide like this — it can only be called a collapse. Precisely because even most economists making that prediction thought the 10% hit would take a decade. Few thought it’d happen in a year or two. But it has, and that’s how fast and hard Britain is falling apart. It’s why nothing works. It’s why people can’t get healthcare, feed their kids, save, afford their mortgages — why a shocking plunge into Neo-Dickensian impoverishment is now unfolding at a social scale. It’s not just about “the poor” — this time, it’s about the middle and working class, falling into shocking levels of poverty, because of course, that’s what living standards plunging in two years to levels predicted to take ten really means. The stories, too, of all that abound. Elderly people shivering and freezing, kids who can’t afford lunch, families who can’t afford food, and so forth. Americans, to some extent, are the only ones in the rich world who tolerate such levels of privation — but even Americans aren’t falling into the kind of Dickensian poverty that Britain is. The stories are endless, and they’re horrifying. But the tales of woe aren’t the real horror story here. The real horror story is that both sides of British politics refuse to admit Brexit was a mistake. Let me say it again. Both sides. The Labour Party — which was once the world’s most progressive party, once its most innovative and forward-thinking political institution — now… backs Brexit. And so, of course, do the conservatives who made it their crusade. But now that I’ve put it in context for you, you should understand what that really means, and a certain sense of horror should chill you, right in the gut. What “both sides in British politics back Brexit,” at this juncture, means, is that both sides back a Great Depression, or turning Britain into a poor country, because that is what’s already happening, at light-speed, with the shocking fury and pace of an avalanche. But what do you do when both sides..are on the side…of self-made calamity? In the midst of all this, the British government’s response has been truly shocking. So shocking that it’s been noted with utter amazement and bafflement around the capitals of the world’s great democracies, dropping jaws from K St to Paris’s 8th Arrondissement to Brussels. Most of the time, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has a weird grin plastered on his face. One that’s totally, completely, shockingly inappropriate. My man! People in your country can’t get ambulances. Hospital beds. Antibiotics. They can’t feed their kids or afford heat. What are you grinning at? But when he’s not grinning, he says, shrugging, that these problems “won’t go away.” Wait, what? They won’t go away? It’s your job to do something about it! What planet is Britain on, every single figure in the halls of the world’s great democracies is wondering. How does a Prime Minister just grin — and then shrug — as his nation collapses? What the? And yet this is where Britain is. You see, its leaders are grinning and shrugging because this was the point. The point of Brexit wasn’t really just to break up with the EU — it was to turn Britain into a playground for the theories of the furthest, most fanatical, most deluded reaches of the American right. Rishi Sunak isn’t a politician, really — he’s a Stanford MBA. Imagine that America was governed by…a Stanford MBA. LOL, shudder. Imagine France was. Canada. Germany. Impossible, right? The vision that Britain’s leaders have is now basically an American fairy tale — a libertarian one. Sunak’s grinning — grinning — while the NHS collapses, which means people can’t get medicine, hospital beds, ambulances, and they die…because to the way of thinking of someone who’s a true believer in ultra hard American right wing economics — the kind they teach religiously at Stanford…there’s not supposed to be an NHS. There aren’t supposed to be any public goods at all. Public transport? Get real! Buy a Tesla — they love those at Stanford. Public media? Get a clue, hey, just use Twitter, so what if it’s full of disinformation and hate and bigotry spread by fascists — what do you think, having a BBC was better? Healthcare and medicine for all? No, no, my friend — to ensure that the strong survive and the weak perish is the moral duty of a society, and anything that gets in the way of that is, well, immoral, not to mention unproductive and inefficient. The entire idea is that Britain should have be Americanized, have an American style social contract, which is to say, not much of one. But there’s a big difference between Brits and Americans, and that’s money. America’s average income is over twice Britain’s, and that means Americans can make up for that lack of public goods. Brits? LOL. The average Brit has just $500 in their bank account. Good luck affording American style healthcare. Transport. Media. Education. Food. Anything. Hence, the insane, staggering plunge into poverty. But it doesn’t matter, because the delusional fairy tale is the plan. Sunak’s grin? It’s the smile of the true believer. The one of True Faith. Of Absolute Piety and Wholehearted Belief. Salvation is almost here. Heaven is surely going to arrive. All this? These are just the tribulations that test the pious and faithful, and separate them from the weak. This calamity? It’s a great ritual cleansing, which prepares the way for salvation. This salvational thinking — and it’s smile of pity at those who are repelled by, say, human sacrifice and slaughter to the gods of fairy tales — is the stuff of cults, fundamentalists, fanatics, extremists, lunatics. It isn’t the stuff of the leaders of modern countries. To put it in context, can you imagine…Justin Trudeau…Emanuel Macron…Joe Biden…grinning like a goddamned religious whackjob…and then telling people that a Great Tribulation was to come, but it’d be good for them…and then shrugging and walking away from the podium? Those nations would all go up in manias of disbelief within hours. That’s how odd, unhinged, creepy, insane all this is really is. Brits aren’t there yet, because they don’t see it. Nobody much is telling them how bad Brexit really is. 2/3rds of them have already turned against it because they’re living it, but they’re still not quite as appalled as they should be, because, well, in Britain, you still can’t talk much about Brexit. You can live it, experience the grinding poverty, know that something has gone badly wrong. But if someone like me comes along, and points out reality? Which is that, literally, the only comparisons we have for such calamity are the Great Depression and nations like Argentina imploding into poverty? Well, I certainly won’t invited back on the BBC anytime soon. We all know that, because the fanatical exponents of Brexit are invited back, forever, and that’s despite saying things like they’d rather be Andrew Tate…who’s detained for rape and human trafficking…than Greta Thunberg. That’s how off-the-charts right-wing Britains is made to be socioculturally, how little dissent is allowed, how much the God of Brexit must be worshipped. Fanatics who think of sex abusers as wonderful people are legitimized and lionized just because…they back Brexit. And nobody who doesn’t gets a minute, second, sentence, phrase in to point out reality. Orwell smiles wickedly. Maybe he knew this day would always come. Maybe, from his little house in Kentish Town, his ghost watches, and grimaces. Or maybe he’s just dead and gone. Like the Britain that once was. A modern, sophisticated, wise, prosperous nation, that used to be the envy of the world. And then became something like its greatest cautionary tale, instead, one of such scale and scope, that everyday words could barely even begin to really its story of ruin, despair, suffering, and collapse. Umair Haque
| The text being discussed is available at | https://eand.co/britains-finally-figuring-out-brexit-really-was-the-biggest-mistake-in-modern-history-8419a8b940c6 and |