Farage: Burnham reopening Brexit debate is gift for Reform - "Nigel Farage has said Andy Burnham has given him a “gift” in reopening the Brexit debate. The Reform UK leader said a referendum on rejoining the EU would “bitterly” divide the country, and accused the Prime Minister of contradicting his own plans for devolution. It comes after Mr Burnham said a second Brexit referendum was a possibility as part of his review of Britain’s relationship with the EU... Mr Burnham, who until June was the mayor of Greater Manchester, previously promised to “rewire the state” by moving power away from London. The Reform leader said: “This is the pro-devolution prime minister…to even consider rejoining the single market, the customs union, let alone the European Union itself, is the opposite of devolution. “A massive transfer of huge powers up to an authority, whereby there’s nothing Parliament could do to change any of it. “So I find the whole thing totally contradictory.” When Mr Burnham stood in the Makerfield by-election that propelled his return to Parliament, he promised not to “rerun” Brexit arguments and said he was “not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU”. The Prime Minister’s constituency of Makerfield voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU in 2016, at 65 per cent. Other parts of the Red Wall – historically a cluster of Northern Labour-voting, working-class constituencies – voted in favour of Brexit, with 59.2 per cent in the West Midlands and 58 per cent in the North East opting out of the EU."
Rachel Gilmour, MP for Tiverton & Minehead on X - "From today, EU citizens have a legal right to know when they're talking to a bot or looking at a deepfake, backed by fines of up to €15m. Thanks to Brexit, we're missing out on this protection."
Pro EU people think national legislatures are unable to introduce their own legislation. This is without even getting into whether it's a good idea
Brexit was supposed to limit immigration – it did the opposite - "Why, having promised more control over immigration, did net migration rise so much, an episode now sometimes described as the Boriswave. A small part was a bounce-back from the pandemic, but most of it was a result of policy decisions by the government and others. First, the government opened new humanitarian routes for Ukrainians fleeing the war there and for some Hong Kongers in response to the new national security law there which was felt to violate earlier agreements between the UK and China. These actions were unconnected to Brexit and were broadly politically popular. But the government also made a number of other changes to work and student migration visas which led to a very large increase in numbers. It made care workers eligible for work visas, with numbers issued far exceeding predictions. The implementation of this visa was incredibly poor: for example, 275 visas were issued to a care home that did not exist and 1,234 visas issued to a firm that had only four employees. In 2023 over 100,000 visas for care workers were granted. The skilled worker visa was extended to medium-skill jobs (as recommended by the Migration Advisory Committee – full disclosure, I was Chair at the time), but the government also decided that jobs deemed to be in shortage should have lower minimum salaries for visas, in some cases only slightly above the minimum wage. From an economist’s perspective, responding to a shortage in workers by lowering wages was a bizarre decision. At arm’s length from the government, NHS England decided to incentivise the hiring of migrant nurses by giving hospitals more money (£7,000) if they hired a migrant than a British nurse. I think the cash was meant to compensate for the extra cost of overseas recruitment, but it may have over-compensated, as over 60,000 visas for migrant nurses were issued over the years 2021-23. In total 337,000 work visas were issued in 2023 to people overseas, who brought with them 279,000 dependents. On student migration, the government introduced the Graduate Visa, giving all international graduates and their dependents an unconditional right to work in the UK for two years after course completion. They chose to ignore the MACs previous advice to be cautious about this because of the potential to create a demand for degrees (especially short Master’s degrees) that was based not just on the value of the qualification but on the subsequent temporary right to work in the UK (note: I was Chair when that report was written so might be biased). The results were predictable – an explosion in student numbers, concentrated in less selective universities, in one-year Master’s course, with more dependents. In 2022 and 2023, over 900,000 student visas were issued together with 275,000 visas for their dependents (for context, in 2019 there were 270,000 visas with 16,000 dependents). Each of these liberalisations to the managed part of migration may have made some sense taken individually but taken together, they added up to a level of migration which meant that the UK’s population grew at the fastest rate in more than a century. So why did this happen when more control had been promised? Part of the reason may have been the pandemic. Coming out of the pandemic vacancies were very high, the media was full of stories about terrible labour shortages and employers in many countries (not just the UK) used the opportunity to push for more liberal immigration policies. But more than that, I think the UK government at the time was simply incompetent. Within government the usual dynamic is that some departments push (backed by industry lobbies) for more liberal migration policies, and the Home Office pushes back. But some of the home secretaries at the time talked tough about immigration in public but simply did not do the day job. And the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was hardly renowned for his attention to detail. So a raft of policies, many now partially or wholly reversed, followed. But there was one other part of migration that was also rising at this time – asylum claims including those crossing the English Channel in small boats. Asylum claims rose from about 40,000 a year pre-pandemic to 100,000 afterwards. The number of people arriving by small boat crossings rose from 1,800 in 2019 to peak at over 45,000 in 2022 (in 2025 there were 41,000). Although a rise in Channel crossings would likely have occurred even if the UK had stayed in the EU, Brexit probably reduced control over this type of migration. With Brexit, the UK lost access to the Dublin convention on returns (imperfect though it was), cooperation with European countries was no longer automatic, and, perhaps most importantly, the UK lost access to databases about past claims and criminality of those claiming asylum in the UK. Brexit has made the UK an appeals court for some asylum-seekers in the EU whose claims failed – though we lack good data on how many. And here perhaps is the greatest irony. Brexit ended free movement with the EU giving the UK more control over work, family and student migration even if its government has not chosen to exercise much control at times. But Brexit has given the UK less control over asylum and unauthorised migration, the types of migration that trouble voters the most."
UK. Time to call Brexiteers racist for wanting to reduce white EU migration and ramp up brown and black non-EU migration
Meme - Chris Rose @ArchRose90: "10 years ago since this gem."
Matt Gallagher @MattyWTF1: "Right I need some damn sleep. Good to see we'll be staying in the EU. If I wake up to Nigel Farage's smiling face I'll kill myself #EUref"
Matt Gallagher @MattyWTF1: "Oh my fucking god"
The Farage @TheFarage2016: "wakey wakey *Nigel Farage's smiling face*"
I have no Brexit regrets, and nor should you - "So had it all been for nothing? I never once doubted the common sense of the electorate if they were given the facts. Yes, they might think that Brexit had been a failure. But did they really want to return to the EU? Would they embrace free movement once more, including an almost indefinite number of non-European migrants legalised by various EU states? Would they welcome the euro? Would they happily resume paying a budgetary contribution perhaps now amounting to £1,000 per family? Would they allow the EU again to make British laws, and impose damaging restrictions on industry, agriculture and science? These questions the EU lobbies avoided, but I was quite sure what the public’s answers would be. An opinion poll this month confirmed it: only 27 per cent would be willing to give up rule-making powers in return for greater single-market access. Many people have a stake in Brexit’s failure: nationalists wanting to break up the Union, diehard Rejoiners, culture-war activists portraying British history as hateful, and Labour politicians eager to make Brexit the excuse for the damage done by their own energy and tax policies. They may still manage to tie us to an increasingly troubled EU. Yet in reality, the anti-Brexit case is increasingly discredited. None of the predictions of disaster made by Project Fear have come true. Even though pro-EU voices and the Labour Government still keep repeating that the economy has been devastated by Brexit, their arguments are not persuasive. Most European countries have suffered similar and sometimes worse problems, and the electorate is seeing this. Total trade with the EU (imports and exports) to a great extent recovered after short-term disruption, and ending the contribution to the EU budget compensates for any overall loss. The UK remains the most popular destination for foreign investment. Our advanced technology sector is third in the world (behind the USA and China) and was recently estimated to be worth more than double that of Germany and three times that of France, hampered by EU restrictions. Predictions that Brexit would make the UK friendless and marginal were disproved by its help to Ukraine, by its rapid negotiation of commercial treaties with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and by the strategic AUKUS pact. Above all, Brexit has given us back the power, and the obligation, to govern ourselves, just like the Japanese, the New Zealanders, the Swiss, the Norwegians and indeed most peoples in the democratic world. That so many found this a daunting prospect shows how debilitating EU membership had been for our system of government, and also how little confidence Rejoiners have in their own people... Brexit proved that our democratic instinct is still alive."
How Britain can finally make Brexit a success - "The truth is that it is impossible to assess precisely what the impact of Brexit has been because so many other things have been going on at the same time: Covid and the associated lockdowns, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the spike in inflation and interest rates, a major hit to the aerospace and automotive industries; a four year period of uncertainty about whether the UK would eventually leave the EU and on what terms; and a period of acute political uncertainty which culminated in the election of a Labour government for the first time for 14 years. A simpler guide is provided by looking at how the UK economy has performed relative to its neighbours. It hasn’t done outstandingly well, of course, and this is one in the eye for uber-optimistic Brexiteers who believed that we only had to leave the EU for prosperity to descend upon us like manna from heaven. But equally our performance has been incomparably better than what was envisaged by the Treasury and other uber-pessimists. Indeed, the UK economy has grown at about the same rate as France, and much faster than Italy, Germany and Japan. Admittedly, in per capita terms, its relative performance comes out a bit worse. But it has still done better than Canada and Germany. In practice, although I reckon that the damage was probably relatively minor, I suspect that Brexit has delivered some sort of blow to UK GDP. After all, we knew that Brexit would make trade with the EU more difficult, with more bureaucracy and delays at the border. Potentially offsetting this, there were gains to be had from free trade agreements (FTAs) with countries around the world, from the saving of contributions to the EU budget, and from a wave of deregulation. We have been fairly successful in securing FTAs, although their impact is unlikely to be huge. More concretely, we have saved our annual contributions to the EU budget, amounting to about 0.5pc of UK GDP, and this number will increase. The greatest failure, however, is that we have not deregulated. On the contrary, even under the last Conservative government, never mind the present Labour one, new regulations have continued to spew. One area where being outside the EU has brought regulatory advantage is artificial intelligence (AI)... If current trends persist and the UK continues to be a major force in AI while most of the EU languishes, then all those people currently saying that Brexit was a disaster will have to eat their words."
Left wingers want to regulate AI till it doesn't exist, so good luck
Meme - "All Under One Banner. SCOTLAND IS SCOTTISH, NOT BRITISH"
Lord of the Rings memes with politically incorrect themes: "Leaving the United Kingdom to join the EU whilst under the leadership a West-hating, unpatriotic follower of the religion of peace. You've brought a whole new dimension to the word, 'Nationalist'"
World Economic Forum ‘rigged data’ to make Brexit look like failure - "Klaus Schwab, the face of the Davos conference in Switzerland for years, allegedly intervened in the WEF’s annual Global Competitiveness Report, which ranks countries on productivity and long-term prosperity. In the 2017/2018 report, the UK’s ranking improved from seventh to fourth after a change in methodology. But Mr Schwab, 87, wrote to staff that the UK “must not see any improvement”, as otherwise it would be “exploited by the Brexit camp”. The final report published in 2017 showed the UK had dropped one place to eighth... Allegations that Mr Schwab ordered the figures to be changed were made in an internal WEF investigation, launched after a whistleblower accused him of misusing funds, making suggestive remarks to younger staff, and manipulating research. Switzerland’s SonntagsZeitung newspaper obtained some of the preliminary findings... During the preparation of the same report, according to the investigation, Mr Schwab allegedly ensured that India did not drop 20 places in the ranking. He was hoping to convince Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, to join the conference in the Swiss Alpine ski resort, which is attended by about 60 world leaders every year... The investigation carried out by Homburger, the law firm, also looked into some £836,000 in expenses submitted by Schwab and his wife Hilde. SonntagsZeitung reported the expenses allegedly lacked sufficient links to WEF activities. It is also alleged Mr Schwab sent suggestive emails and had “embarrassing interactions” with younger WEF staff. The final results of the investigation have not yet been published... Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, told The Telegraph: “Every conspiracy theory about Klaus Schwab now turns out to be true. He is a dangerous globalist manipulator.” Richard Tice, deputy leader, added: “No surprise the globalist WEF appears to have distorted facts to prevent sovereignty and independence being seen as a good thing. They are a dreadful organisation that Reform will have nothing to do with.” Lord Frost negotiated the Brexit deal that took the UK out of the EU when Boris Johnson was prime minister. He said: “It’s rare we get such clear direct evidence of the global establishment’s hostility to Brexit. Schwab’s alleged deliberate downgrading of Brexit Britain in his Global Competitiveness Report, directly contrary to the actual evidence, shows how deeply embedded distrust of national independence is, and how determined so many people are to suppress any discussion of its benefits.” He added: “Labour’s continued denunciation of our trade agreement with the EU, and their refusal to acknowledge that their trade deals with India and the US would have been impossible without it, are the direct descendants of Schwab’s censorship: ideology before evidence, belief before fact.”... The term “Davos Man” was coined 20 years ago by political scientist Samuel P Huntington to describe an elite who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past.”"
Starmer to bring back 76 EU laws - "Sir Keir Starmer is set to bring 76 European Union directives back on to the UK statute book as the Government seeks closer alignment to the single market. The Prime Minister will introduce new legislation in the King’s Speech in May to allow Labour to transfer swathes of European regulation covering the agriculture and food sectors."
Starmer’s ‘Brexit betrayal’ after handing Gibraltar border controls to EU - "Sir Keir Starmer has agreed a Brexit deal that hands control of Gibraltar’s border to the EU. The Prime Minister was accused of plotting to undo Brexit after negotiations to keep the border with Spain open finally ended after almost four years. Under the terms of the deal, Spanish border guards will have the final say on whether a UK citizen can enter the British Overseas Territory."
Brexit was not an economic catastrophe. Here’s the proof - "Since 2007, UK productivity has been broadly flat, breaking a more than 200-year history of productivity improving every decade. This catastrophically poor performance is, from the evidence, nothing to do with our membership or otherwise of the EU, and everything to do with poor government policies from 2008. The Government has damaged our largest and most productive sector, financial services, by increasing taxes and adding layers of onerous regulation. In addition, governments have disincentivised entrepreneurial enterprise and investment with increasingly intrusive regulation, together with a large influx of cheap labour both before and after Brexit. From an economic perspective, both the political and managerial classes have got the EU completely wrong. The EU is a large, protective trading bloc, erecting high barriers to trade with outsiders by a combination of explicit tariffs and very high regulatory compliance requirements. Until 2020, the UK was an insider, and now we are an outsider."
Brexit causes tumble dryer shortage in Northern Ireland - "Shoppers wanting a tumble dryer in Northern Ireland have been left high and dry after new EU rules restricted what can be sold. Under the Windsor Framework, Northern Ireland follows hundreds of EU rules that the rest of the UK does not have to abide by. Laws in Northern Ireland were changed earlier this year to align with the EU’s eco-design and energy labelling regulations, which are meant to make appliances easier to recycle and more green. That means Northern Irish consumers cannot buy certain types of condenser tumble dryers and will be forced to purchase more energy-efficient models, such as those with a heat pump... Mr Allister said that the Brexit deal was designed “for the purpose of breaking up the UK economy and forming an all-Ireland economy.”"
The UK is now a sectarian state - spiked - "People who blame Brexit for everything assume that everything in the world was going swimmingly until Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016 – or until we left officially in January 2020. Just as ignorantly, they think the rest of the world has blossomed since then, while the UK alone has been plunged into poverty and financial distress. But things were never fine here, and things everywhere else have continued to get worse. It’s not just that our current problems have plenty to do with Labour’s decision to torpedo the economy with tax hikes – the fortunes of European countries have hardly ever been worse, either. France is in an even more precipitous state of political turmoil than we are, while Germany is experiencing its longest economic slump since 1871. Their respective crises are clearly nothing to do with Brexit, and instead owe far more to the effects of the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The bogus conjecture that Brexit is to blame for the UK’s weak economy has its origins in a prediction made in October 2021, when Richard Hughes, then chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, said that Brexit ‘would reduce our long-run GDP by around four per cent’. That qualified prognostication is still routinely regurgitated as a fact. Only this month, a letter in The Times repeated that ‘as a direct result of our leaving the European Union’ there had been a fall in the United Kingdom’s GDP by four per cent. Not content to spread their own ‘misinformation’, EU diehards and a grasping Labour government are now reduced to quoting prophecies from yesterday’s soothsayers."
Europe is becoming a Remainer fever dream - "Andrej Babiš, squillionaire agri-business tycoon and former prime minister, has clinched a coalition between his ANO movement, the motorists party Motoristé sobě, which translates roughly as Motorists for Themselves (love the name, guys), and the far-Right Freedom and Direct Democracy party. Together they now control 108 seats in the 200 seat lower house. This is not a simple tyre refit. It is a complete engine replacement for Czech politics. The resulting programme appears to be a blend of screw Ukraine, protect borders, cherish spark plugs, and give the European Commission palpitations. What does this mean for Czechia? Should we even worry? They are, after all, allowed to vote for who they like. And Eastern Europe right now is entitled to look at Western European management of, say, migration, and think: Pfff. However, this does affect us, deeply. And here’s how: this is yet another EU country shifting further to the Right – but this huge tectonic movement has yet to register on British political radars. As we all know, ever since June 2016 British politics has been painfully divided between Leavers and Remainers. Generally, the Remainers are on the centre/centre-Left, from Starmer down. Most of them are desperate to rejoin the EU. And they will try soon enough. But what happens when they finally realise that the cosy, social democratic, solar-power-loving EU that we exited has gone, and the hard-Right is in or sharing power in Hungary, Italy, Belgium, Finland, Slovakia, Bulgaria? And they might soon be joined by Germany, France, and others? Put it another way, what will happen to the fey, earnest EU flag wavers at the Last Night of the Proms, when that sweet circle of EU stars has a big nasty imperial eagle in the middle?"
Immigration is to blame for Britain’s productivity woes, not Brexit - "the OBR has been consistent with its analysis of Brexit’s impact since 2016. Imbedded into its forecasts for years has been the suggestion that it would reduce productivity by 4pc and trade intensity by 15pc relative to remaining a EU country. They also believe that most of this productivity impact has already happened. It would take a lot to say they had underestimated this impact in any meaningful way... Business investment is key driver of productivity. And there’s not much in the recent figures to suggest a change is needed, given that business investment rose through 2023 and early 2024 before weakening again. And the OBR already includes this weaker business investment in its current forecast. They could reduce this still further, but it is hard to see how they can do so because of Brexit when business investment has been low by international standards for a long time. The truth is that Britain’s productivity problems predate Brexit by years. Productivity growth collapsed after the 2008 financial crisis and has never recovered. There was no sudden or dramatic fall after the 2016 referendum. Instead, we just saw a continuation of the long period of weak productivity growth that has sadly been a defining feature of our economy. Then there’s immigration. It is this, and not Brexit, that has really confounded things. High levels of net migration have meant that firms could do without investing in either training or productivity enhancing technology. As such productivity per worker has grown slowly. Brexit hasn’t made that any worse. While workplace investment in training has continued to fall, this decline has been persistent for more than a decade and definitely not caused by Brexit... The OBR has also promised to look at Labour’s Employment Rights Bill next month, something they say will most likely have a “net negative” impact on productivity."
Times Radio on X - "“I’m fed up with going away to Europe and apologising…you feel embarrassed.” Lorraine Kelly says queues at passport control post-Brexit make her feel like a “untermensch.” @reallorraine | @HugoRifkind 📻"
Thread by @admcollingwood on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "We underestimate the power of this. A certain class of Britons -- the sort who Orwell said would feel more embarrassed to stand for the national anthem than to steal from the church poor box -- did not like being or feeling English, but still needed to feel part of something bigger than themselves (man cannot live by bread alone). The EU gave them the opportunity to feel part of a grand and noble project that rose above pretty and abhorrent nationalism, while enjoying a facsimile of patriotism. Given they had always preferred European cultures to English (per Orwell, it was easy enough to do. Brexit took that away. Now, every passport queue is a reminder that they're no longer 'citizens of Europe.' To imagine this pain, think how you'd feel if Britain was conquered and colonised."
We're still told that left wingers don't hate their countries
All these supposedly worldly people can't conceive of a world outside of the EU, where you need a passport
The EU is no friend of working people - "[The EU] inflicted crippling austerity on a desperate Greek economy, cutting public services and ruining lives. At the peak of the Greek crisis, more than one in four people were unemployed. And all this was done over the heads of the Greek people, who explicitly voted against the EU’s outrageous bailout terms in 2015, only to have an even worse deal thrust on them by Brussels. It’s the same EU that limits state aid and the ability of national governments to intervene in their own economies. This ties their hands when trying to rescue failing industries and save livelihoods. It’s the same EU that repeatedly sides with big business over small firms, putting the fate of millions of workers in the hands of the super-rich. And, most importantly, it’s the same EU that denies individual countries – and therefore their voters – the right to decide what rights their workers must have. This is where the heart of the problem lies. From the Remainer perspective, it is better for the EU to dictate our working conditions from on high than it is for workers in our own country to determine them for themselves. Diehard Remainers claim to be protecting the rights of the working class. But, in truth, they do not trust the public to elect the right government. It is in part for this reason that supposed left-wing ‘Eurosceptics’ ended up backing the EU when push came to shove. For them, we could not risk leaving the EU while the Tories were in power. They reduced a generation-defining decision to the question of which party was in power at that particular moment. These leftish Remainers prefer to outsource important political decisions to Brussels, where they are protected from interference by the masses. In the name of prioritising workers’ rights, they would deny those same workers the right to decide their own political futures. They think they are keeping workers safe from a rapacious Tory government, but they are really just trying to keep them safe from themselves. This points to one of the key problems with the contemporary left: it sees working-class people as victims rather than agents who are capable of forging their own futures. It offers high spending on public services, but very little that will empower the working class as citizens of a democracy. There is also a strange tendency among Remainers to treat the EU as the source of all goodness. But many of our most valuable rights were not won by the EU, but rather by the determination of the British working class and the labour movement."
