What have we lost, and how has that effected you?
Often those who voted leave are demanded to produce the unicorns of the impact of their decision. Itโs only fair that we put the boot on the other foot and see the evidence of how measurable worse off you are because weโre no longer in the EU.
I think one, if not THE, way in which we are worse off through Brexit is the consequences of pretty much taking our eye off every other ball in town for at least three years after the vote and in some respects still doing so.
I'm not saying that we'd have seen covid coming and been fully ready for it, but we would have probably had a leader better suited to dealing with it AND perhaps at some point heeded the background advice from years earlier to build some sort of pandemic stockpile and strategy?
Frankly I cannot remember what the main issues being discussed in political circles prior to the vote being announced even were, (or what others have come up since, only to sit too far down the to-do list) but cannot help thinking that an awful lot more good could have been achieved on a myriad of fronts (at home, abroad and the relationship between the two) had the whole landscape not been focused on trying to transform some vague concept that meant so many different things to different people into some sort of actual coherent government strategy and then negotiate where that placed us in the world.
Social care, mental health, environment and climate change, canning HS2 before billions were already wasted and it goes past the 'mastermind' tipping point (I've started so I'll finish), NHS, employment rights, etc, etc - and I would suggest we could even have made some headway on the immigration front to the satisfaction of some of those who saw this as their main reason to vote leave. All of this could have come without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Finally, the one thing that we all could have done with losing back in 2016, that we've had to suffer for too long since - Dominic Cummings!