Contradictory reflections on Brexit:
1. Good that the process is completed but that free trade remains.
2. Sad to see the UK leave the EU.
3. Brexit is a reflection of obsolete British upper class imperialism.
4. Sad to see that UK liberalism disappears from the EU.
5. London is likely to lose out as a financial center, but none of Frankfurt, Paris, Dublin or Amsterdam is likely to be able to take over, so Europe as a whole will probably lose.
6. The excellent UK universities are likely to lose out, losing EU money, students & researchers.
7. The UK will become ever more parochial without Erasmus students, EU researchers & EU funding.
8. I see that the children of my Swedish friends who used to go to Britain, now go to Berlin or Brussels. Boris Johnson has made Britain unfashionable in Europe. Why go backwards?
9. The UK (fortunately) got free trade in manufactures (who go back to the stone age), but services are left out & the UK is a major exporter of services. This will get ever tougher.
10. As usual, the trade negotiators focused on fishery = the stone age...
11. As a Swedish supporter of the EU & the euro, I am in the end happy to see the UK go, because it became primarily an impediment to dealing with relevant issues. The rest of Europe cannot remain preoccupied with internal tory conflicts.
12. What I now hope for is that the EU draws closer. The support for the EU has never been greater in Sweden & Denmark. They do not want to go through the Brexit tragedy. The EU pressure on Hungary & Poland for rule of law increases. The UK was primarily an obstacle.
13. The EU should put down the foot. Hungary & Poland should stick to the rule of law & the EU should clamp down on Hungarian corruption. It should also push Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Czechia & Hungary to join the euro. The UK diversion is over.
14. For the history, I think that the decisive UK tory mistake was when David Cameron excluded the tory party from the European People's Party & opted for odd-ball nationalists. That he then campaigned for the EU could only be seen as hypocrisy.
Bye-bye, tory upper-class fools!
Enjoy the memory of your empire gone as well as you can!
Nobody will give anything but the memory back, & you can't eat memories.
(I regret the suffering you impose upon my alma mater, Oxford.)
You can follow @anders_aslund.
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