By: Iman Ahmed, Mikaela Curtis, Gracie Lusk, Ashley Pickering, Rachel Vowell
You know in the show You on Netflix when Penn Badgley’s character, Joe, winds up essentially shooting himself in the foot in every relationship he starts because he forgets about the amazing qualities of his current girlfriend? The United Kingdom is Joe, and Brexit is the “oh-so greener” grass that was actually just an ugly lawn spray-painted green.
The aftermath of Brexit is the unlucky girlfriend who has found herself dead in the basement of a bookstore. After 47 years of being tied to the European Union, the U.K. officially pulled out of the international organization during the Brexit negotiations in December 2020, which occurred after the U.K. triggered Article 50. They are not the first state to leave the EU, but interestingly enough, the U.K. has seemed to deliver a vital blow that has boomeranged to bite them in the butt.
Turns out, leaving the EU was a grave error. At first glance, what was believed to be a fantastic plan to up economic advantages and deter immigration into the state has pulled the very real rug out
from underneath the U.K.’s feet by not only damaging their domestic economy but also exacerbating the flow of undocumented immigrants. Brexit, fueled by austerity and immigration politics, has ushered negative views not just towards welfare recipients but has stoked anti-immigration rhetoric as well.
Before Brexit was even fathomed in the minds of former Prime Minister David Cameron and current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, U.K. citizens were unhappy with the number of immigrants entering the country. Most of the immigrants were legal, with a majority coming from Hungary and Poland, but British citizens felt their jobs were at stake and feared losing state sovereignty by remaining in the EU.
Despite evidence that immigration actually boosts economies, voters ignored the facts and allowed economic growth to slow to snail speed. Now,
employers are struggling to find help for low-paid hospitality jobs, and EU citizens have stopped seeking work in the U.K.
To make matters even worse, the U.K.’s recent point-based immigration
system has a rigid set of requirements meant to curb illegal immigration into the country but will only nosedive the U.K.’s GDP, setting off a domino effect that is bound to be felt by the backbone industries of society, especially fishing and agriculture.
The agricultural industry in the U.K. feeds and produces about 65% of the whole country, and when they were still in the EU, they had major import and export deals. Based on the CIA World Factbook, 1.3% of the population produces agricultural needs, 15.2% works in industry and 83.5% are in the service sector, which provides jobs such as healthcare, financial, retail and waste disposal.
Because of Brexit and the loss of crucial imports and exports, lower-income workers have now seen an inflation of the price of goods, and higher-income workers have seen a drastic loss to their annual wages. A decision they thought would slow immigration and fluff up their wallets came to haunt them like Joe’s regrets about his dead exes.
When U.K. residents participated in the 2016 referendum to leave the EU, about 51.9% of the votes were in favor of Brexit. All U.K. residents saw were immigrants who took up space in their home country and “stole” jobs from them. Consequently, they failed to notice the thousands of U.K. nationals that were living in EU countries. Because of departure from the EU, U.K.
nationals can no longer enjoy the same benefits they had before, such as visa-free travel and living in any EU state. In Spain alone in 2019, there were about 359,471 U.K. nationals who faced consequences of fines, deportation and their stay being labeled as an illegal residency.
It is not just those outside the U.K. that are feeling the brunt. In a poll by Statista, as of September 2021, 47% of people in the U.K. think that leaving the EU was the wrong decision compared to the 40% who think that it was the right move. As Joe disastrously discovered (though never learned from)
in the show that sometimes what you have is all you need to stay happy, the U.K. came to that same conclusion. Despite the feelings that accompanied the decision of leaving the EU, Britain’s residents will soon enough continue seeing drastic changes to the life they have considered normal for so long.
No matter how much the U.K. wants the EU to be the villain who suffers in the end, reality is, the EU will always come out on top as the victor. The EU knew they did not need the U.K. nearly as much as the U.K. needed them, and U.K. residents did not realize their girlfriend, pre-Brexit conditions, was already perfectly swell.
They became too entranced by the fake assumptions that life would be better if they parted ways with the EU. Assuming everything would be sunshine and rainbows after leaving, the U.K. lacked awareness of the grim realities that would come from their decision. Unfortunately, Brexit was the breaking point that set an example to other countries who considered leaving the EU. The chaos showed that it was pertinent for EU members to get their affairs in order before they found themselves in a dark basement with no way of coming out alive. The EU wanted to prove a point to the rest of the members by making Great Britain suffer on the way out the door, leaving the U.K. to unsuccessfully pull themselves out of this dark basement. They are, without a doubt, paying the price for their misguided recklessness.
The authors of “The Grass Was Not Greener” are undergraduates at the University of Tennessee at Martin under the supervision of Dr. Adnan Rasool, assistant political science professor and expert on democratic transitions, regional organizations in Asia and the foreign policy of small
states.
