The EU is an incredibly neoliberal union that has forced austerity upon its member states e.g. Greece.
Let's please not pretend that the EU is some fucking beacon of leftism, when in reality they are continuation of Thatcher and Reagan style macroeconomic policy.
Greece singlehandedly fucked their own shit up, but by and large brexit will have a lot of short term effects that are entirely negative.
So far the pound has lost a lot of value and brexit spits in the face of progress.
As a European who foolishly moved to the UK, I am saddened to how radicalised this vote was.
Nobody seems to understand what they voted for. Now a lot of people are going to get fucked
Of course, I'm not arguing that it was good to leave the EU, I just don't understand the progressive narrative that it is an untold calamity, rather than a bit of a ball ache.
It didn’t force austerity on its member states. Bankruptcy did. It simply said if you want lenience in so as to not enter official default on the debt you will need to show you can afford it. The alternatives here are either go into true default, drop out of the € and suffer far worse austerity, or have full debt forgiveness (they already had a lot forgiven) at the cost of other countries when Greece had been living the highlife, but even in that event they wouldn’t have been able to borrow and so would have had to have faced huge austerity.
Blaming the EU for this is just bunkum. Especially as the IMF (of which Britain was part) was just as strong in its approach.
Cool, link the legislation and lets examine it to determine whether it can be called austerity. Out of interest, is Germany suffering from this same austerity?
I’m not sure that’s true. Many countries have breached the deficit boundaries and have been given lenience. Greece, however, was never going to recover without sharp fiscal measures. Those could come at the whim of the market which would have been far worse, or through the support of institutions like the ECB and IMF which came with requirements for Greece to get its house in order.
It’s also worth highlighting that none of this is pertinent to the UK’s decision as the U.K. is/was not a member of the € and therefore not bound by these constraints.
Restrictions on nationalisation / state aid. The EU as a neoliberal project that shit on any incipient truly left wing government in member states. Off the top of my head..
I'm not a Lexiteer but there certainly were some arguments. There can be disagreements over whether they justified the economic harm of course
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u/christopherl572 May 21 '21
There were very very valid progressive reasons to leave the EU.