How accurate were the Brexit arguments?

Hindsight is not always needed to spot nonsense...

A friend of mine, Peter, found a selection of Brexit advertising in his loft and we thought we should look back on it to see just how accurate the arguments turned out to be. He doesn't exactly know why he kept them, but it is kind of fun to experience the misery again almost 8 years later.

'Lets Brexit' by UKIP

Truth 1 discusses us still selling into the single market and how it is financially beneficial to pay tariffs rather than have free movement. That is simply not true.

Truth 2 (above) starts by detailing that so many young people did not vote in the referendum and in many ways it is correct. I struggled to disagree with the first page.

Truth 3 starts as nonsense. Everything stated in it is completely biased and trying to justify as positive what many warned would happen is childlike.

It then moves to a selection of 'benefits' of Brexit-

Lower Food Prices - the opposite has happened

Lower Energy Prices - the opposite has happened

More Money for the NHS - the NHS has had more money, but not enough and technically less than in pervious decades when inflation etc is calculated in. The government has also included many one-off provisions for Covid in their figures which is misleading.

More jobs and better wages for UK workers - we have not seen more jobs and wages overall are worth much less than they were when the Brexit vote happened.

Better support for our farmers - the absolute opposite has happened

Revival of our fishing industry - there has been no revival at all, if anything it has gotten worse

More foreign investment in the UK - the opposite has happened

Truth 4 moves on to sovereignty and uses the same old vague arguments that mean little in the real world. Overall the pamphlet is either skewed or not true.

'The OUT Post'

I don't have time to list all of the untruths in this rag. From Turkey joining the EU to us being better off out of the EU to UK science not being reliant on EU funding, it is all nonsense backed up with either no evidence or lies.

'Why Vote?'

This is such a bland piece of work which offers little to counter the emotionally charged rhetoric from the leave side. It is a perfect example of what went wrong for remain.

'Government's remain message'

Hard to argue with anything in this document, but again it is so bland and easy to overlook. Looking back, I can kind of see how the 'hard of thinking' would have voted leave. Remain messaging looks corporate and dull.

'Brexit Wrecks It' from the Liberal Democrats

Sadly this was all a bit too late. There was a big head of steam already up with the Conservatives and once the vote had been made we were done for. I can only hope that the damage Brexit has done will become clearer to more people as time passes and we try to find a deeper relationship with the EU again.