i think what i meant was a fine idea was what people believed would happen rather than what was actually said and done. and i don't mean the racist bits, that was obviously part of it. my other reply goes into that more.
okay fair, brexit as presented was always a lie and their numbers were not only wrong, but about things that didn't actually affect anyone. but i've talked to people in england who are still pro. not because of what was promised, but because what they saw was an opportunity to get stuff made locally again. and i get that.
maybe it's a background thing. i grew up surrounded by old shuttered industry that used to make genuinely useful stuff only to be out-priced by imports, and that has continued into the 2020's. i used to live close to the world's most advanced paper mill of its type, but it closed and production was moved to a worse mill with lower output in another country as an economic decision. that place had been there for 200 years, the company owned its own hydro power dam and all the forests used for the pulp, the mill had its own rail connection... it was basically printing money, but dismantling it meant being able to sell the machinery for a quick buck.
like, sweden is exceptional at iron and steel. but we used to be exceptional at a lot more. turbines and jet engines. high-voltage transformers. copper. grains. cheap but safe cars. textiles. power tools. wood products. all very useful stuff that could be made entirely "in-house". now most of that (or the constituent parts) is made elsewhere, and almost purely for economic reasons. there was no need to close that paper mill, but it was done to get the numbers to look good. when the economy goes international it feels like the people get left behind.
the way i see it is, if you black-box a country to just look at imports and exports, the lower the ratio between the two the more money the country makes. yes the salary and living situation may differ from place to place but that's all internal, funded by those exports in some way or another. moving towards that is, in my mind, a laudable goal. and doing so in a free trade union is obviously better.
the problem is of course that it was never the goal of brexit.
i got accepted at a small specialist school at 15 and moved alone to the other end of the country. our family situation had unfortunately degraded a lot at that point.
of brexit, absolutely. it was insane. and of course you need to export stuff to keep your economy going. but the basic idea that countries should be self-reliant so that the entire market is more robust is good. they were just blinded by imperialism.
Edit: i want to hear alternative perspectives on this, because it seems i'm in a minority here and i've always taken it as self-evident. so if anyone feels like it, please explain.
i used to be on sweddit a lot until about two election cycles ago. something changed when the so-called migrant crisis happened. at the start of 2018, a lot of the old guard started posting less and a new wave of users came in that shifted the entire community wildly right. now it just feels like another flashback, but filled with bots.
also (as you probably know, but just for the sake of everyone else) people outside the three big cities in sweden basically live in the woods and almost never meet non-"ethnic swedes" (as sd loves to call them) and just get fed fearmongering shit on social media. it's a stark divide.
it's an interesting case study of a fine idea gone horribly wrong. shoring up the domestic market is good, making sure people don't lose their jobs because of foreign labor is good. but when you've got the history of an empire, that stuff was already taken care of, so they platformed on hate.
Edit: thanks for the good replies on this. valuable discussion to have.
a similar thing happened with arma reforger a few years ago, it was supposed to be a tech demonstrator for a new engine but it turned out to still be the same codebase as operation flashpoint from 1995. the engine is solid but it's super annoying to program for, they have this custom scripting language that's completely batshit insane because everything is infix by default, and an ui toolkit that is written as c++ classes meaning the actual game has a compiler in it for a subset of c++. so the scripts can be edited at runtime but if there is an error in the ui the game crashes at startup. people were hoping they'd finally switch to something that made sense but no.
you know when you see one of those dashcam videos where some idiot has run over a sign or a bollard or whatever and just kept driving with the thing stuck to the car, throwing sparks everywhere and making a big rip in the asphalt behind them?
if the election goes their way it's 99.9% they'll have to form a coalition government just like they tried to last time, and the other parts of the right still don't want to do that, not to mention that they've all shrunk in the polls.
the left is polling at like 54% but they also don't want to form a coalition because the center party thinks the nazis and the leftists are equally bad. this election is going to be a shitshow.
the current big talking point is about an 8-month old that is supposed to be deported alone and a family with an 8-year old that is supposed to be deported despite making enough money to stay, because the wrong parent is the earner.
i can only hope this is malicious compliance because the bureau enforcing it is displaying the actual text to everybody to show that there is no room for misinterpretation.
the media keeps asking the mp's who pushed for this law if this is what they wanted and they keep saying no.
one of my favorite notes in the linked article is that the guy playing damar constantly got sugar highs from actually drinking the corn syrup they used in the kanar props.
i think what i meant was a fine idea was what people believed would happen rather than what was actually said and done. and i don't mean the racist bits, that was obviously part of it. my other reply goes into that more.