How has Brexit affected daily life in the UK?

[Bum Driller]

I would very much like to hear how the Brexit has affected the practical aspects of daily life in the UK? I'm asking this because the media in my country rarely writes anything about the UK, and nowadays when it does, it's stuff like "There is food shortages in the UK because of Brexit" etc. So, what is the truth of the matter; how has Brexit affected the daily lives of those living in the UK?

 

[Beautiful Border]

It hasn't. If you didn't follow the news then you wouldn't be aware anything had changed. There's a meme on Twitter that Brexit is causing food shortages, but at best this is massively exaggerated. I've noticed in some supermarkets that the shelves have recently been slightly barer than they normally are, but you can still get whatever it is you're looking for. It's not a serious problem. The cost of importing goods from the EU is also slightly higher.

The only people who's lives will have been affected by Brexit in any meaningful way are people in the UK who want to immigrate to an EU country (or vice versa). For those people Brexit has been pretty disastrous because now doing so has been made much harder. The EU's freedom of movement policy previously meant that British citizens could live and work freely in 27 other countries, now the UK has left that's not the case anymore. If you're not planning to move to an EU country then there is no real reason to care or think about Brexit all that much.

 

[Coolio55]

@Beautiful Border
I'm sure the stock shortages are 100% Brexit and not uncertainty over the draconian coronavirus policies that the same people complaining want.

 

[Str8Bustah]

Brexit is a boogeyman for the middul class that they can blame for when everything else they backed goes wrong.

I've heard people complain about a shortage of eastern european farmhands but that would have never been a problem in the first place if farmhands were selected from the local families' kids or actually paid a proper wage (ie what used to happen 50 years ago) both of which are things that stopped happening as a direct result of shitty parenting and modern culture instilling poor values in the population.

of course your average normie is incapable of thinking that deeply and would much rather blame the surface level shit that didn't do anything except lift up the rug and expose all the cockroaches under the carpet.

 

[Death Grip]

The wages being offered by someone close to me who works in construction are slowly but steadily creeping up. Which is good news for us.
Food shortages? Not around here there ain't.

 

[SSF2T Old User]

Brexit is a boogeyman for the middul class that they can blame for when everything else they backed goes wrong.

So it's the UK's version of "GamerGate" and "Orange Man Bad" then?

 

[TheShedCollector]

Absolutely fucking nothing. Nothing has changed other than the hysterical whinging of the middle class whining about how it's the greatest fucking tragedy in human history that they now have to wait for a couple hours when they go through customs / immigration on their foreign holidays.

https://archive.md/wb4SX

Whaaaaa I had to stand in a queue for five hours when I got off an aeroplane from my skiiing holiday in France whaaaaaaa. This is the greatest injustice that has ever occurred to anyone anywhere in human history whaaaaa. My children were denied the ability for a taxpayer funded university semester in Italy, now they want ME to pay for it and for me to fill in some paperwork or some shit whaaaaaaaa and all becasue those racist ignorant gammon don't want their towns and cities taken over by refugees. This is the greatest injustice in human history and it's just like what Hitler did because fascism or racism or something.

I've heard people complain about a shortage of eastern european farmhands but that would have never been a problem in the first place if farmhands were selected from the local families' kids or actually paid a proper wage (ie what used to happen 50 years ago) both of which are things that stopped happening as a direct result of shitty parenting and modern culture instilling poor values in the population.

Brexit has also done a great job at reducing people traffiking. They were basically slaves. How anyone got away with it is a national disgrace.

They were mostly Polish or Romanian, and they would be brought to the UK being promised good high paying work. Once they got here they were basically kept as slaves. The men would go and work in car washes or as farmhands. When they were farmhands they would live 4 people each in a tiny caravan at the edge of the farm, earning far less than minnimum wage, working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week until they weren't needed any more and unceremoniously dumped back onto the British taxpayers. The women are basically sold to pimps who rotate them all around the country working in different flats and brothels for a few weeks at a time before being moved on to somewhere else.

How nothing is done about this is a national disgrace. Any Brit is welcome to test my hypothesis if you like. Go to a 24hr carwash and try to ask around about how those people got here and what their living conditions are like. You will find nobody really wants to talk about it.

 

[Billy Beer]

Everything has been covered by the posters here, but I'll just chuck this in:

We are seeing shortages of lorry drivers, in the same way we saw a shortage of builders after 2008. That is to say, the companies went for the option of lowering wages, which meant skilled Brits wouldn't work for the pittance they were offered, leading to the companies relying on cheap, foreign labour, rather than paying a decent wage.

After decades of warnings from many, many industries, about how relying on foriegn labour was a bad long-term idea, and those whistle-blowers being called racist for raising such concerns, the chickens have come home to roost. Most Eastern Europeans who were here for free healthcare and higly paid work (vs where they come from) have now gone back home, leading to a shortage of lorry drivers.

And guess what? To get the English drivers back on the road, the transport companies are paying almost double wages vs 5 years ago. Instead of paying a decent wage and keeping the jobs home-grown, they cheaped out and now it's costing them more than it would have done.

So while some people panic and see empty shelves, I see a victory for the British work-force, and hopefully a lesson to not cheap out on foriegn labour.

 

[RSLUG30]

if you're not rich, a "free-spirit traveller", and/or in charge of a multinational company that operates in the UK and EU, nothing significant has changed.
at most you're going to be encouraged to purchase stuff locally now, which is a plus if you're not a bed ridden neet who orders everything from amazon.
won't stop tabloids and journalists trying to spin this into an apocalypse level scenario though.

 

[Tims]

Well, my Dad used to be on 19k a year driving bin wagons with a class 2 hgv license he is now delivering furniture for a living & driving the truck on 32k with another pay rose on the way so I'd say the British working class are coming our on top for once.

 

[Jarolleon]

Makes me wonder if half the whinging is because of the educated upper middle class, not just because of holidays in Spain as others have written, but because it disrupts the professional conference circuit that seems to constitute half of their work. I'd bet that's especially true for the kind of professions that have the most influence over the flow of information.

 

[Billy Beer]

Makes me wonder if half the whinging is because of the educated upper middle class, not just because of holidays in Spain as others have written, but because it disrupts the professional conference circuit that seems to constitute half of their work. I'd bet that's especially true for the kind of professions that have the most influence over the flow of information.

It is. Look at all of those who kicked off when we didn't join the single currency. What was their complaint? They have to change money when moving between countries. What % of the population has the luxury of travelling through multiple European countries, so often, that changing money is the biggest complaint they have? Those same people oppose Brexit.

Brexit was always going to happen because the Queen would have lost power and authority to the EU high courts.

 

[HarryHowler]

What I keep hearing is that the major impact hasn't been so much from Brexit itself, but it's created an atmosphere of such complete hostility towards the left (since they were mostly the ones trying to stop it) that the major left-wing parties and even left-wing values in general have been pretty much permanently discredited for the majority of the populace...

...and that Boris Johnson seems to be trying to fuck this gift up as hard as possible by deciding that what his party really needs to cement perpetual electoral dominance over the country is to become vastly more left-wing, even beyond the steps that COVID forced him to date.

Is that an accurate description of things?

 

[Miss Chance]

What I keep hearing is that the major impact hasn't been so much from Brexit itself, but it's created an atmosphere of such complete hostility towards the left (since they were mostly the ones trying to stop it) that the major left-wing parties and even left-wing values in general have been pretty much permanently discredited for the majority of the populace...

...and that Boris Johnson seems to be trying to fuck this gift up as hard as possible by deciding that what his party really needs to cement perpetual electoral dominance over the country is to become vastly more left-wing, even beyond the steps that COVID forced him to date.

Is that an accurate description of things?

No, in a word. The traditional British left, the real left rather than the new-right Blairites, traditionally hated the EC as it was. They pushed for an 'out' vote in the 1975 referendum on continued EC membership. Thatcher, post 1979. The working class left saw the EC/EU for what it was, a new-right project designed to create a conventionally right wing economic structure, masked by socially progressive attitudes to identity politics, the environment and so on. The working classes didn't like it for that reason, and for the fact that it later brought mass immigration and downward pressure on wages as a result. Eu membership also, funnily enough, requires a state to take a wrecking ball to the various pillars of traditional socialism such as national ownership of major assets and centralised economic planning. You have to be centre-right, or you ain't getting in, in a nutshell.

The old fashioned right never liked it, fearing that it would erode sovereignty. They also saw latching on to Europe as something damaging to the Commonwealth, which they love to bang on about as it's the last vestige of the Empire.

The new right, including the modern Labour party, love the damn thing. Why? Because they want everything it provides and dislike the traditional working classes.

There's also the silent majority: those on the right who don't toe the modern party line. Nigel Farage is their Godhead. They hold some of the ideals of the old fashioned right, and also cling to somewhat hubristic beliefs about going it alone and 'cutting red tape'. It would all be fine and dandy if there was no red tape. A likely story.

The modern establishment left: Labour, the SNP, the Greens, the putrid remains of the Liberal Democrats and so on are not really left wing in any meaningful sense. They are just soft Tories who are seen as nicer because they want to turn the entire country into a multi-faith, ethnically diverse, disabled-access, all genders safe space for the chattering classes whilst the politically exiled landfill whites sit unemployed in their crumbling wrecks of social houses or prostrate themselves before Jeff Bezos.

Brexit is the first decisive thing the disenfranchised class has done for decades. As noted above, wages have risen in some sectors. Nothing else has happened.

The establishment left has, to a degree, been discredited. It has become apparent that they offer nothing more than the Tories, and more to the point they offer nothing different to the Tories. Red, Blue, whatever, they're all the damn same. That's what has led to them becoming discredited. There just isn't a reason to support them any more; the demographic that economic right/social left appeals to is small, and is likely to vanish in the event of a severe economic shock.

Opportunities? I think so. The economic left has been battered, but is ripe for resurgence.

 

[ClownBrew]

I've heard Roger Waters and Robert Plant screeching in the news about how the poor oppressed musicians will now have to get travel visas and pay fees to tour Europe.

My heart goes out to them.

 

[teriyakiburns]

...and that Boris Johnson seems to be trying to fuck this gift up as hard as possible by deciding that what his party really needs to cement perpetual electoral dominance over the country is to become vastly more left-wing, even beyond the steps that COVID forced him to date.

Boris (the retard turk) isn't going further left, he's going paternalist and authoritarian. Paternalism runs strong in English social structures; it emerged from the relationship between the landed aristocracy and their tenants, which was a mostly mutually beneficial relationship at the time, though obviously far from ideal and definitely more beneficial for the land owner. It created the idea of a doting, father-like figure of leadership, who would be loved by his people and who would give them the discipline and reward he knew they really needed, in order to improve their moral being, while keeping them firmly in their place in the social structure.

That's how the state views itself in this country (especially the civil service), but also how Boris particularly views himself. The image he crafted for himself over the years, of the loveable buffoon who wants to do the right thing and make the world a better place, is part and parcel of that whole idiom. It's to make him appear jovial, non-threatening, and idealist, when in actual fact he's a slimy cunt. He's also an idiot.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that yes, he's fucking the gift up, but because he wants to create a legacy of himself as a kind, caring leader, and because he thinks we're all poor, simple peasants who need his firm and disciplined hand to guide us.

 

[RMQualtrough]

Harder to return imported goods. In fact they just send it back to me jfl.

 

[Nopenopenope]

There are no food shortages, just some things unavailable at times. Think more along the lines of the pepperoni pizza you like not being in stock one week but back again the next. That is because of the ongoing HGV driver shortage though, not because we can't get food in the country.

We are short of HGV drivers because that was a job mostly done by eastern Europeans, Brexit contributed to them going home but covid had a much larger impact. However, look at it this way, it was mostly working class people who voted for Brexit. Those same people are now seeing pay increases because there is no cheap labour available, all while the various managers etc are turning into pink wojaks screaming at the government to allow special visas for low skilled jobs like driving. So far though the government has said no.

 

[totallyrandomusername]

Has the overall economy or any various sectors been negatively impacted (taking into account the China virus)? I would say economic impact is paramount. If there really has been no impact, then no big loss, and most likely for the best overall.

The loss of foreign labor will be a good thing. Back when I was studying in the UK, which was during membership in the EU, you couldn't spit without hitting an eastern European doing a menial job somewhere. It just let the people running businesses rip off foreigners by giving them shit wages and screw the natives by being able to hire foreigners for such shit wages.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

How much money is no longer going to the Brussels circle jerk? And has it been re-allocated to pay for 11 year olds to troon out?