PPCC: Pisitófilos Creditófagos. Verano 2024

[pollo]

https://www.eleconomista.es/empleo/noticias/12886589/06/24/el-teletrabajo-se-hunde-solo-un-19-de-la-poblacion-tiene-planeado-teletrabajar-este-verano.html

Saludos.

Todo en el mismo "periódico" (por llamar así al panfleto): "los precios de la vivienda suben y eso es genial", "España no está siendo competitiva" y "teletrabajo caca, es esencial la presencialidad para ser productivos".

[sudden and sharp]

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-dirty-little-secret-no-politician-will-admit-there-are-no-cost-less-ways-to-go-for-growth/

The dirty little secret no politician will admit: There is no way to ‘go for growth’ BY IZABELLA KAMINSKA

Everything now is just a euphemism for financial repression and austerity. That doesn’t stop politicians looking for magical alternatives.


Britain's Institute of Fiscal Studies described a "conspiracy of silence" about the reality of former Prime Minister Liz Truss's economic plan. | Leon Neal/Getty Images

Investment professionals and politicians who spurned Liz Truss's “go for growth” strategy for the British economy are slowly waking up to an uncomfortable truth.

The former U.K. Prime Minister's plan, which relied on unfunded tax cuts that were perceived to be inflationary, may have been the only growth plan for Europe's economies to escape over-indebtedness and low productivity without having to turn to austerity or greater state control of the economy. Not that any of them are prepared to admit it.

Britain's Institute of Fiscal Studies on Monday described parties' reluctance to admit as much on Monday as “a conspiracy of silence” arguing Labour's pledge to rule out tax hikes was a “mistake.” “We wish Labour had not made those tax locks and it will be difficult [politically] to break,” IFS director Paul Johnson said about the party currently leading the polls.

But it's not just British politicians who are refusing to face up to reality. In France, where an impending snap parliamentary election threatens to empower extremists on both sides of the political spectrum — to the cost of President Emmanuel Macron's centrist Renaissance party — there is a similar reluctance to admit there are only bad options on the table.

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire highlighted last week, after French bonds began to wobble, that anything short of centrism risks placing France under the supervision of Brussels and the International Monetary Fund.

What he failed to point out is that even supposedly sensible centrists face having to do the unthinkable in the longer run.

“They have to go to financial repression because high growth as a strategy out of over-indebtedness is not going to be funded by the bond market,” Russell Napier, an influential investment advisor who authors the Solid Ground newsletter, told POLITICO. “I think it doesn't matter who you vote for, you end up with roughly the same thing. So the market's not maybe saying ‘we're very sanguine about Labour [in the U.K.].’ They're just saying: ‘It doesn't really matter who you vote for. We are heading toward this route.’”

Incoming financial repression

That route, in Napier's opinion, means it's time for financial repression: putting a lid on the free movement of capital and having the government and other technocratic institutions increasingly determine which sectors benefit from public sector funding, and even more critically, from private sector funding too.

The pathway takes Europe much closer to the dirigiste policies that dominated the continent in the post-war period and away from the market-based liberalism that investors have become used to over the past four decades.

Truss's risky tax cuts had hoped to avoid a push towards state-guided credit rationing by unleashing the power of the private sector and the financial industry to stimulate such a high rate of growth that the accompanying inflation just wouldn't matter — especially if the Bank of England's interest rate policy acted in support.

But the dilemma facing France, one of the EU's largest economies, encapsulates three further political complexities: Paris does not control its own monetary policy, its public sector spending capacity is restricted by fiscal rules created in Brussels — which it is now officially in breach of — and any move to direct private sector financing domestically could clash with the bloc's greater efforts to create a single capital markets and banking union.

That doesn't leave much wiggle room for any incoming French government to experiment with a “dash for growth”, either of the free-market Truss variety, or — which is more relevant for France — the free-spending government interventionist one.

Politicization of the ECB

For Macron, the stakes are abundantly clear. In a speech to the Sorbonne University in April, he said: “We must be clear on the fact that our Europe, today, is mortal. It can die. It can die, and that depends entirely on our choices. But these choices must be made now.”

But in the same speech he, too, advocated a wholesale reordering of Europe's economic framework largely because he — like the populists on either side of him — can't afford everything he wants.

The current economic model, he said, is no longer sustainable “because we legitimately want to have everything, but it doesn’t hold together.”

Like all of the French presidents of the last 25 years, Macron has faced this constraint on domestic policymaking by trying to co-opt the one institution that has no formal constraints on creating money out of thin air — the European Central Bank. In his Sorbonne speech, he stressed that “you cannot have a monetary policy whose sole objective is to address inflation.”

The ECB's mandate can only be updated by changing the whole EU treaty, something for which Europe's leaders have no appetite. But even within its current legal straitjacket, the ECB has found plenty of ways to support national governments when it can, with a sequence of tools and programs that have allowed it to buy their bonds and keep their borrowing costs below where they would naturally have been.

It's the newest of these tools that is likely to play a key role in the next few weeks. The ECB has stopped net purchases of bonds as part of its broader policy to bring inflation down, but it has one tool — so far untested — that it can use to alleviate any market stress after the elections: the so-called Transmission Protection Instrument.

The TPI allows the ECB to buy the bonds of individual governments whose borrowing costs it considers out of step with macroeconomic fundamentals. The idea is to ensure that its single monetary policy applies reasonably equally across the whole euro area. But it creates substantial scope for the ECB to exercise financial repression on behalf of those it considers aligned with its own mission.

It implies that the ECB knows better than markets what the value of a government promise to pay is. And in not setting any ex ante limits to the scale of its interventions, it has bestowed upon itself enormous power to take on the markets if it disagrees with them strongly enough.

It's this power that Macron may want to harness if he is still able to present a budget he can call his own after July. But by the same token, he will want to ensure that the ECB denies that support to his opponents if they emerge victorious, just as it did to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Greece’s Alexis Tsipras a decade ago.

According to Napier, whether the ECB ultimately decides to use the TPI or not, the decision will have political implications, not least because it will change the parameters of what the central bank is really prepared to do save the euro, and on whose behalf.

“If you think Macron is an ally of the [European] project, then you don't use it until after there's some type of chaos,” Napier said.

Many things could still change between now and July 7. The far right National Rally's Jordan Bardella, for example, has already walked back some of the party's spendiest plans, aiming to reassure markets that conflict with the EU over its fiscal rules can be avoided.

But in an interview with the FT published on Thursday, Bardella upset the bond markets again by saying he'd campaign for a big rebate from the EU budget, only hours after his ally and mentor Marine Le Pen signaled that a National Rally government would try to wrest away Macron's powers as commander-in-chief.

In other words, the threat of major market instability in July remains alive and well. And, as Napier put it: “If bond yields blow up in France they can blow up anywhere.”

Ahí va... el sueño húmedo de todo tecnócrata ladrón.





Díselo tú, cariño...












----------
Not my problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rnEZ353pKQ

Don't blame your misfortunes on me
You've done this all on your own
So many others are too blind to see
Well, let me throw the first stone
You're not my problem
(Not my problem)
It's not my problem
(Not my problem)
Keep it to yourself

[Derby]

https://x.com/daveg/status/1807388422249558251

[Derby]

https://www.ft.com/content/0187827b-f755-47fd-91ff-c3e755548097

Citi was money launderers’ favourite bank, US law enforcement officials say

Alleged drug traffickers fed $36,000 into cash machines, indictment claims

Drug traffickers chose to launder money through Citigroup because they believed the bank was “more favourable”, with less robust fraud controls, according to senior US law enforcement officials.

In an indictment unsealed last week, US prosecutors detailed how two California residents, who allegedly worked with the notorious Sinaloa cartel, deposited tens of thousands of dollars at Citi ATMs.

On at least three separate occasions in January 2021, they allegedly fed a total of almost $36,000 in illicit cash into the machines, a few hundred dollars at a time, waiting just a minute or two between each transaction.

By splitting the sum into dozens of smaller deposits, prosecutors claim, they stayed below the $10,000 threshold at which banks are required to report cash transactions to the US Treasury.

Drug Enforcement Administration officials told the Financial Times that the duo, alleged to be part of a vast criminal network that cleaned at least $50mn in fentanyl and meth proceeds in the US, scoped out several banks before choosing Citi.

One senior official said: “There are banks that pay less attention than others.”

A second senior DEA official said: “I will name one [bank]. There were two instances where in this investigation we had money couriers making 24 back-to-back deposits totalling $16,000 to a Citibank ATM . . . There were 15 back-to-back deposits totalling $20,000 also to a Citibank ATM . . . They figure out the places that are more favourable to them.”

While there were no reporting requirements for the individual transactions, the pattern of the deposits should have aroused suspicion, the DEA official said.

The two men — Guillermo Zambrano and Luis Belandria-Contreras — “were definitely trying to keep [the deposits] below the threshold so as not to send up any red flags, but I would imagine that 24 back-to-back deposits by the same person, totalling $16,000 would set off some type of an alert”, the senior official added.

A lawyer for Belandria-Contreras did not respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Zambrano, John Targowski, said his client engaged in the alleged acts only because he was in debt and threatened with kidnapping by a cartel member, and that he intended to “pursue a duress defence”. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Citi declined to comment on the specific case, citing secrecy requirements around transaction reporting. The bank said it had “robust anti-money laundering policies”, adding: “When we find evidence of such activity, we notify the authorities as required and fully co-operate with any investigation through appropriate legal processes.”

The indictment also details how another defendant, Jiayong Yu, allegedly deposited a cashier’s cheque at a JPMorgan Chase ATM, and “approximately $100,000 of United States currency at a Chase Bank teller window” last year. There was no suggestion that Chase failed to flag the transaction. Chase declined to comment. Yu has pleaded not guilty to related charges. His lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

Law enforcement officials have for years warned that Mexican drug traffickers and Chinese accomplices have become ever more adept at laundering cash via the legitimate banking system.

“We’re seeing a huge uptick in money, cash being deposited in banks and then wired wherever,” the first senior DEA official said. They added that tens of thousands of dollars were being sent back to China each month via money transfer institutions in Flushing, New York.

In 2012, the Department of Justice fined HSBC $1.9bn for failing to prevent money laundering by cartels in Mexico, after an investigation found that hundreds of thousands of dollars were being deposited with the bank each day through teller windows at HSBC Mexico branches.

Prosecutors said drug traffickers even “designed specially shaped boxes that fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows”.

Money-laundering schemes have since become much more sophisticated, through a mutually beneficial arrangement with Chinese nationals in the US who use encrypted apps, cryptocurrency and mirror transactions in underground Chinese banks to hide their tracks.

“The cartels are desperate to get cash made from the sale of drugs in the United States back down to Mexico,” said Martin Estrada, the US attorney for the Central District of California, last month.

“The Chinese money-laundering groups, on the other hand, are in the business of helping wealthy Chinese nationals obtain cash in this country and thereby circumvent export controls in China on the movement of cash.” Thanks to the explosion in fentanyl trafficking, this results in “virtually limitless supplies of cash”, Estrada added.

Tracking such transactions has been difficult for law enforcement. “The growth and the expansion of this,” the first senior DEA official said, “has gone past what law enforcement track and monitor”.

[Neuromante]

De la Torre pide una reflexión de todas las administraciones y el sector privado sobre la vivienda


https://www.diariosur.es/malaga/alcalde-malaga-problema-vivienda-reflexion-20240630231703-nt.html

Al margen del tradicional pasarse la pelota los unos a los otros, lo que me parece más significativo es que Sur ofrezca este contenido en abierto. Da la sensación –si las sensaciones valen para algo– de que se ha oficializado por parte de los CCGG del Capitalismo que la vivienda es un problema o, mejor dicho, el problema.

[pollo]

De la Torre pide una reflexión de todas las administraciones y el sector privado sobre la vivienda


https://www.diariosur.es/malaga/alcalde-malaga-problema-vivienda-reflexion-20240630231703-nt.html

Al margen del tradicional pasarse la pelota los unos a los otros, lo que me parece más significativo es que Sur ofrezca este contenido en abierto. Da la sensación –si las sensaciones valen para algo– de que se ha oficializado por parte de los CCGG del Capitalismo que la vivienda es un problema o, mejor dicho, el problema.

Y las propuestas siguen siendo tímidas, con toneladas de condicionantes como declaraciones de "zonas tensionadas" (asqueroso eufemismo) para asegurarse de que no pierden el control del cotarro y no pierden demasiados votos.

Luego que si viene la ultraderecha y demás mierdas. Es lo normal dada la pusilanimidad de todos los políticos que sólo se dedican a marear la perdiz.

A ver si alguien tiene huevos a abrir la veda de verdad (como lo del otro día de Barcelona, pero en serio).

[cujo]

Se está liando parda en Francia, y nunca mejor dicho.

Los grandes culpables del alza del pardismo en europa son los partidos de izquierda con sus políticas alejadas del trabajador y dedicados a luchar por cosas anecdóticas alejadas del día a día del trabajador q madruga y sus familias .
Espero q ardan en el infierno por esta deriva estupida que ha dejado huérfano al trabajador de a pie

[Raf909]

https://www.eleconomista.es/empleo/noticias/12886589/06/24/el-teletrabajo-se-hunde-solo-un-19-de-la-poblacion-tiene-planeado-teletrabajar-este-verano.html

Saludos.

Todo en el mismo "periódico" (por llamar así al panfleto): "los precios de la vivienda suben y eso es genial", "España no está siendo competitiva" y "teletrabajo caca, es esencial la presencialidad para ser productivos".

Buff... yo no sé si estáis buscando trabajo últimamente o que , pero la cosa está muy mal en cuanto al teletrabajo.
Conozco un caso de cerca (trabajo de oficina, administrativo) que está buscando cambiar de trabajo en la zona de Barcelona, y el tema es vergonzoso. Desde totalmente presencial, hasta "híbrido" (1 o 2 días desde casa sólo). En su actual empresa, desde el COVID, para conciliar debajan hacer teletrabajo en Agosto... pues este año NO.
Y si tienes algún tema personal (como niño enfermo y trabajas desde casa) tienes que "devolver" el día de oficina, aunque eso signifique ir otro día donde la oficina estará vacía de tus compañeros de departamento.

Luego las empresas se preguntan porqué los jóvenes les hacen la peineta. Ninis los llaman...

[Negrule]

Mucho hablar del tema pero con la boca pequeña. Se han puesto todos los huevos en el modelo que se empezó a diseñar después de la última crisis, acentuándose después de la pandemia, y donde la vivienda en todas sus versiones es el pilar central. Creo que irá a más hasta su explosión final, cuando? Quien sabe

De la Torre pide una reflexión de todas las administraciones y el sector privado sobre la vivienda


https://www.diariosur.es/malaga/alcalde-malaga-problema-vivienda-reflexion-20240630231703-nt.html

Al margen del tradicional pasarse la pelota los unos a los otros, lo que me parece más significativo es que Sur ofrezca este contenido en abierto. Da la sensación –si las sensaciones valen para algo– de que se ha oficializado por parte de los CCGG del Capitalismo que la vivienda es un problema o, mejor dicho, el problema.

Y las propuestas siguen siendo tímidas, con toneladas de condicionantes como declaraciones de "zonas tensionadas" (asqueroso eufemismo) para asegurarse de que no pierden el control del cotarro y no pierden demasiados votos.

Luego que si viene la ultraderecha y demás mierdas. Es lo normal dada la pusilanimidad de todos los políticos que sólo se dedican a marear la perdiz.

A ver si alguien tiene huevos a abrir la veda de verdad (como lo del otro día de Barcelona, pero en serio).

[sudden and sharp]

Se está liando parda en Francia, y nunca mejor dicho.

Los grandes culpables del alza del pardismo en europa son los partidos de izquierda con sus políticas alejadas del trabajador y dedicados a luchar por cosas anecdóticas alejadas del día a día del trabajador q madruga y sus familias .
Espero q ardan en el infierno por esta deriva estupida que ha dejado huérfano al trabajador de a pie

Sí, pero si (sin acento) aceptas qué es la izquierda... según los media. Piensa mejor en izquierda por los sindicatos... Pon todos los filtros que consideres... necesarios.   

[newclo]

https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1807707802959335487

[R.G.C.I.M.]

Parece que ayer Rusia ganó la paz en Francia. Y la semana pasada en la tele de USA.


Aunque seguro que nos dicen que hemos ganado nosotros.
Y qué más da...


La fiesta se ha acabado en Ucrania, pero empieza aquí, parece.
El caso es que me gusta.

Sds

Los anglos se retiran de ucrania.
Francia como representante del poder e independencia europeos, parece que ya no enviará tropas porque su republicana población ha dicho que nanai.

Así que se va a USA a ver cómo cerramos el capítulo entre todos dignamente.

Como era aquello?
Tó pa ná!

[Raf909]

Se está liando parda en Francia, y nunca mejor dicho.

Los grandes culpables del alza del pardismo en europa son los partidos de izquierda con sus políticas alejadas del trabajador y dedicados a luchar por cosas anecdóticas alejadas del día a día del trabajador q madruga y sus familias .
Espero q ardan en el infierno por esta deriva estupida que ha dejado huérfano al trabajador de a pie

Sí, pero si (sin acento) aceptas qué es la izquierda... según los media. Piensa mejor en izquierda por los sindicatos... Pon todos los filtros que consideres... necesarios.   

Entre todos la mataron y ella sóla se murió.

En Europa, ya sea por el wokismo de la izquierda, o por la caspa de la derecha las soluciones todas han ido en la misma dirección (con ligerísimos matices). Las política con la vivienda y la inmigración ha sido la misma, pero con diferentes caretas. Todos se han remangado para que entre immigración barata con la que poder contener salarios, y todos se han esforzado en tener vivienda escasa y cara (y especular con ella, ya sea por acción o por omisión).

Continuemos peleandonos por tonterías como izquierda/derecha, lo que tiene cada uno entre las piernas, el color de la piel o el lugar de nacimiento... así los culpables podrán escurrir el bulto. Una vez más.... una generación más.

[R.G.C.I.M.]

Yo me estoy partiendo la caja.
Manis!!
QUEREMOS MANIS!!!
Y LIKES!!!!!



🤣😂🤣😂

[Derby]

https://www.wsj.com/world/uk/brexit-british-regret-uk-election-837cbf4c
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/brexit-backlash-brits-now-regret-their-populist-revolt/ar-BB1p619c

Brexit Backlash: Brits Now Regret Their Populist Revolt

In 2019, Boris Johnson rode to a big election win on a promise to “Get Brexit Done” and finally strike a deal with the European Union for Britain’s departure. Next week, the Conservative Party that delivered Brexit goes to the polls again, this time facing a deficit of more than 20 percentage points and almost certain defeat by the opposition Labour Party. The only question, it seems, is the scale of the wipeout for the hapless Rishi Sunak and his Tories.

Eight years after the referendum, it is safe to say Britain has a serious case of “Bregret.” About 65% of Brits say that, in hindsight, leaving the EU was wrong. Just 15% say the benefits have so far outweighed the costs. Most blame the decision itself, others blame the U.K. government for not taking better advantage of it, and still others say Brexit suffered from bad luck: It took effect shortly before the pandemic and Ukraine war, both of which distracted the government and damaged the economy.

In the years since 2016, Britain’s economy has slowed to a crawl, growing an average 1.3% versus 1.6% for the G-7 group of rich countries overall. By putting up barriers to trade and migration with its biggest trading partner, Brexit slowed trade and hurt business investment. It caused years of political turmoil as Britain debated how to untangle itself from the EU. And it deeply polarized the country, half of which saw it as a unique chance to regain British sovereignty and half of which felt it had to apologize to Europe for jumping ship. It has left Britain exhausted and its self-confidence dented.

“I’m angry,” says Steve Jackson, a burly taxi driver and part-time construction worker in Boston, a town of 70,000 in eastern England. Boston is known in England for having the country’s tallest parish church, as the birthplace of several founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and as the country’s euroskeptic capital, with 75% of voters having chosen, eight years ago this month, to leave the EU.

But many people here who backed Brexit feel betrayed. Jackson said that none of the promises made by politicians who lobbied for Brexit have come true: higher wages, cheaper food and energy, more money for healthcare, and less immigration. “We’ve been lied to—lock, stock and barrel.”

Despite the disappointment, polls show that only a slight majority of Brits want to rejoin the EU and fewer think it is realistic, not least because the bureaucrats in Brussels are unlikely to welcome back their troublesome former partner with open arms. They would probably insist on new conditions like joining the euro single currency and a guarantee that Britain wouldn’t simply leave again in another decade or two. In both London and Brussels, there is a sense that Britain should now do what it does best: Keep calm and carry on. Labour, the likely election winners, say they just want to make Brexit work better.

Brexit was the first in a series of populist earthquakes to rock western politics, followed soon after by the election of Donald Trump. Both will go down in history as revolts by those who felt left behind by globalization, taken for granted by traditional politicians and looked down on by urban elites. Both set in motion forces that are still playing out.

The sunlit meadows

Those who championed Brexit said that it would allow the U.K. to take back control over issues like trade, regulation and immigration that it had ceded in joining the EU decades earlier. Johnson promised voters a Britannia unchained from a slow-growing and bureaucratic continent. “We can see the sunlit meadows beyond. I believe we would be mad not to take this once in a lifetime chance to walk through that door,” he said. A month later, 52% of the country agreed.

Brexit meant different things to different people. For many working-class Brits, it offered the hope of less immigration and less competition from low-wage workers. For some in business, it offered the prospect of a capitalist Britain charting its own course—a Singapore-on-Thames. Many in Europe openly worried that Britain might actually succeed and provide a blueprint for other countries to quit the EU.


Brexit Backlash: Brits Now Regret Their Populist Revolt © Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Today no one in Europe loses much sleep over that threat. Goldman Sachs estimates that the British economy is 5% smaller than it otherwise would have been without Brexit, though it is hard to untangle the effects of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a U.K. think tank, estimated that Brexit has resulted in a lost annual income per capita of £850 (over $1,000) since 2020.

After the 2007-08 financial crisis, investment spending in the U.K. had recovered faster than the combined average of the EU, U.S. and Canada, according to research by Nicholas Bloom, a British economist at Stanford University. But from 2016 through 2022, U.K. investment was 22% lower than the others. Businesses spent years unsure what new regulations they’d face and whether they’d still have export markets in Europe. Many held off spending to wait for clarity.

“Suddenly, Brexit happens, it goes sideways,” says Bloom. “You’re in a race, and the cars are going around the track, neck and neck, and then your car gets a flat: That’s U.K. investment.”

Investment is now finally picking up again, but businesses still face hurdles. Early this year, the U.K., after four years of delay, released a set of rules on border checks for European imports, including inspection requirements for food. But shortly after, shops like German Deli, a specialty shop in east London, had trouble finding inspectors with the time to certify the imports, forcing it to cut back on everything from liver pâté to German meatloaf, says Susann Schmieder, the shop’s account manager. Sales in March fell by 25%. “We had the first sausage delivery from our usual supplier in May after it took them four months to sort everything out—the paperwork,” she says.

David Frost, a former British diplomat who spent months in Brussels negotiating the free-trade deal Britain struck with the EU back in 2020, says that he gives Brexit a score of “6 out of 10,” and argues that it is still too early to pass judgment.

Britain is joining the Trans Pacific Partnership, an Asia-based trade club. It is introducing regulatory reforms to bolster its financial center, including axing an EU cap on banker bonuses. It is overhauling its agricultural subsidies and introducing tweaks to labor-market rules to lessen administrative burdens on employers. It hopes to have a lighter regulatory footprint than the EU on artificial intelligence.

Frost says that Britain should have gone further. “Overall, the wish was to change the way things have been for the last 20 or 30 years. And we haven’t really done that,” he says.

Loss of faith

Beyond the economic hit, Brexit has become a byword for unkept political promises and poor governance. Britain wrestled back control but then struggled to exercise that power. Politicians could no longer simply point the finger at faceless EU bureaucrats.


Brexit Backlash: Brits Now Regret Their Populist Revolt © Anton Dani

Perhaps the most surprising policy response to Brexit was the U.K. government’s decision to allow a sharp increase in legal migration to help prop up the economy. In the last two years, 2.4 million people have been allowed to come and settle in Britain, dwarfing any such influx before. The government is now tightening rules, but for many who voted for better control of the borders, it has come too late.

Disappointment is palpable here in Boston, where Polish supermarkets and delicatessens inhabit old Victorian buildings and teams of migrant workers in high-visibility vests work the nearby fields. In the last generation, Boston’s population increased by a third, largely as Eastern Europeans came to work and live there. According to a 2021 census, 20% of the Boston population describes themselves as not British.

Anton Dani, who runs the Cafe de Paris in Boston’s main square, enthusiastically backed Brexit. Dani is an immigrant himself. Born in southern France to Moroccan parents, he moved to the U.K. decades ago and set up his own business. He wants a more competitive Britain and likes immigration but thinks that too many people enter the U.K. to take advantage of government benefits.

Today Dani says he is angry. Migrants have continued to come from Europe to Boston, he says, pointing to a group of Romanians walking past his cafe. Life in Boston meanwhile hasn’t noticeably improved, he adds. “We have achieved nothing,” he says. “You learn what you already knew: That politicians are liars.”

Today a record 45% of British people “almost never” trust the government to give priority to the nation’s interest, up from 34% in 2019, according to a 2023 poll by the National Center for Social Research. “Some people will say Brexit’s been an absolute economic disaster,” says Raoul Ruparel, a director at the Boston Consulting Group who advised former Prime Minister Theresa May on Brexit. “I think it was actually a much bigger political disaster.”


Brexit Backlash: Brits Now Regret Their Populist Revolt © Rui Vieira/AP

Matt Warman, the local Conservative lawmaker, won 76% of the vote in Boston in 2019, campaigning on the message “Get Brexit Done” and a promise to “level up” forgotten places around the country by improving their social and economic prospects. Today he is fighting for political survival. Some polls show him losing the district to an upstart anti-immigration party called Reform UK.

Sitting in a hotel bar on a recent day, Warman concedes that his party dropped the ball on immigration, but he says there were real trade-offs after Brexit. The local farming industry continued to need cheap labor to function, and the local hospital needed nurses, he says.

Politicians can say “I have a great idea, it is really simple,” says Warman. “And if you then turn out not to be able to deliver your really simple solution, because the solution isn’t really simple, people wonder whether they weren’t lied to in the first place.”

Problems that remain

Brexit has become an example of what the American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky called “The Law of Large Solutions.” As he saw it, big policy solutions intended to fix a big problem often just create a bigger problem, which then “dwarfs the [original] problem as a source of worry.”

For years, Brexit engulfed the British government. In 2018, lawmakers spent 272 hours debating the EU Withdrawal Act, while a full third of the U.K. Treasury’s civil servants worked on Brexit-related matters. The opportunity cost meant that other problems festered while British talent and resources were all aimed at untangling the relationship with Europe.

“If you think about Britain’s big problems, Brexit solved none of them: the crumbling public services, weak economic growth, a shortfall of housing and a need to modernize the energy infrastructure,” says John Springford, an economist at the Centre for European Reform think tank in London. “We’ve lost eight years.”


Brexit Backlash: Brits Now Regret Their Populist Revolt © Victoria Jones/PA Wire/Zuma Press

A few miles north of Boston, Will Grant, who runs Fold Hill farm, spends a sunny afternoon driving around his flat fields of wheat. He voted for Brexit because he believed Johnson was credible, and he was impressed by the business leaders who advocated for the project. “I am not going to apologize for voting for it. But I am not proud of voting for it,” says the 35-year-old. “To think about what we wasted. All that oxygen talking about it, all the words written, all that time spent,” he says. “And this is the result: Something that is minorly bad.”

Once outside the trade bloc, Britain had to in-source a lot of administration that had previously been handled at an EU level, from trade to food and medicine regulation. Since Brexit, the U.K. civil service has expanded by around 100,000 people.

The British government copied and pasted nearly 50 years’ worth of accrued EU laws into its own statute books, pledging to amend or remove unsuitable ones. It first estimated there were some 2,000 laws it needed to import. The actual number sits at 6,700 and rising. Just a third have been amended or jettisoned.


Brexit Backlash: Brits Now Regret Their Populist Revolt © oli scarff/AFP/Getty Images

Even Brexit’s central aim of reclaiming national sovereignty proved complicated. To quit the EU, the U.K. agreed to place a customs border through its own country to avoid inflaming sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. The U.K. province of Northern Ireland remains aligned with EU law in some areas to ensure goods can flow without customs checks between it and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member.

Politically, Brexit is now coming full circle. In 2016, when then Conservative leader David Cameron called the referendum, it was in part to neuter euroskeptics in his own party and another upstart politician: Nigel Farage, a cigarette-smoking populist with a big grin who had launched the UK Independence Party, drawing millions of votes from the Tories on a platform to quit Europe.

Now Farage is back, with a campaign charging that Brexit has been betrayed and immigration left unchecked. His Reform U.K. party will likely siphon hundreds of thousands of disillusioned Brexit supporters from the Tories. Farage says he wants to then engineer a reverse-takeover of the party.

The man whom Brexit was supposed to sideline now wants to run to be prime minister when Britain is due to hold its next election in 2029.