EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

Well. I obviously don't support 'Brexit', but that commentary misses out a couple of important nuances. The subtitles are also poorly done, as they fail to convey the tone of the original and also contain numerous translation mistakes.

As we know, what 'Brexit' became was a significantly more radicalised version of what people originally thought it would be. With better planning, whatever contribution 'Brexit' made to the current shortages could have been avoided entirely. Instead, you had a succession of increasingly bone-headed idiots calling the shots, so far culminating in people completely incapable of filling any kind of position in public office. 'Brexit' increasingly became a cover for the NF positions that Boris Johnson and Priti Patel are now enacting. While I wouldn't have supported a 'soft "Brexit"', either, had there been sensible exemptions to their total clampdown, things would have worked out much better.

Secondly, there's no telling how long the current 'crisis' will last. They'll undoubtedly have to continually correct the nonsense that has so far been carried out in response to further problems. However, I don't doubt that this will eventually get rid of at least the most visible problems, such as what has been happening in the last few days. Add a bit of management by the 'media', a bit of 'the Europeans are being beastly to us', and there you go.

Thirdly, I really think it's important to avoid the temptation of seeing the pre-'Brexit' state of affairs as a good one. It wasn't. The massive increase in unobstructed market size as including most of Europe led to the worst social policy since the Second World War, with conditions for poorer people described as akin to the Great Depression, long before 'Brexit'. The latter obviously doesn't help any of that, but it was hardly ideal before. The larger your market becomes, the greater the likelihood that there will be less regulation, and the inevitable consequence of that is that a few large players will dominate the market, reducing competition, reducing the number of jobs, reducing the number of smaller companies in the same field, and so on. I think that even with a large market, Europe would have functioned better had the euro not been introduced so hastily, and the blame for that lies squarely at the feet of serial idiot Helmut Kohl, who wanted to use it to help disguise his total mismanagement of the German economy, a version of which continues to this day, courtesy of hapless, unimaginative conservatives like Angela Merkel. Germany had to export because social conditions in the country had become far more unequal under Kohl and interior demand had gone down significantly, with many of the workers unable to afford the products of their own economy. Ironically, while the single market and the euro were designed to benefit Europe's larger economies, at the expense of its smaller economies, Britain couldn't really benefit from that because of the Thatcherite reduction of the diversity of its economy. For all these reasons, a German Tagesschau commentary is likely to see it from a perspective of what they see as German economic interests, read: the economic interests of German companies, particularly the largest ones.

While there may not be gloating, there's a distinct lack of self-criticism. At the end of the day, there's just a battle of Europe's conservatives, e.g. Johnson and von der Leyen went to the same school in Brussels.