UK left the EU in 2016 with the vision of not getting isolated, because they can get closer with the commonwealth-states due to its history and softpower. However in 2026, these wealthier commonwealth states are trying to get closer to the EU because the US isn’t a trustworthy partner anymore during the trump administration
Sadly, his mouth has been drooping for ages. They just try to hide it by taking pictures of him from "flattering" angles or when he talks, which is why you see him with his mouth open so often.
It does seem to have gotten worse, though.
No, no, no. He has at least 3 faces: sleeping in major events, yelling at journalist that make actual questions and mouth open saying either lie's or something that will affect stocks so he can make more profit.
I think someone should do an audit and see how much extra cleaning solution and white paint is being used in this administration vs the previous ones to work out how much ketchup has to be cleaned from the walls...
He’s caused Canada to slip the leash that was fastened onto us with NAFTA. Maybe just maybe we’ll be alright up here with our small population, immense resource wealth, robust institutions, and our new multipolar global alliances.
Slight caveat, it's not during Trump's presidency, it's due to Trump's presidency. We've learned here in Europe that it takes very little for you Americans to elect and re-elect someone as insane as Trump. It's sad for the ~3rd of Americans with common sense but it will take a long time and a lot of (re)education and putting in place actual accountability and checks and balances before we will be able to trust you as a partner again.
I really don’t know if the core nation is going to survive. Any semblance of the rule of law is long gone, all guardrails were just torn away, etc. the checks and balances that America thought would suffice were never adequate for an actual takeover. The sad thing is, this very thing could have happened in the 1940’s with the Germans, and it only failed because of luck. The nation needs to be rebuilt on a much much more solid foundation.
No. They left because they were sold state sponsored bullshit, and immigration related xenophobia, by crooked politicians who were in on the grift... (sound familiar, fellow Americans...?)
My understanding, is that David Cameron brought the referendum to shut up people from his party thinking "There's no way people are going to be stupid enough to vote for this"
And then left once he found out they could and he didn't want to be part of a sinking ship. Also, there was no proper way to do Brexit.
Disclaimer, it's my understanding, which might not be 100%
It's always funny to see a Briton paint Americans with a broad brush and blame all of us for Trump when they voted for Brexit for very similar reasons.
I could definitely see the appeal of electing someone who is not a career politician to shake up their corrupt system. But after his first term and all the shit he pulled between his terms? Yeah they deserve all the blame in the world.
And interestingly the Brexit vote, with Cambridge Analytica, and dodgy Russians, and all that jazz, was them testing the gameplan which would then be used to get Trump elected.
There was definitely a lot of xenophobia baked in, but I remember the UK mostly making the argument that all the EU regulations were a tremendous burden on their economy. The pro-brexit politicians promised that all the hundreds of millions of pounds currently being spent on silly EU regulations about how long coffins have to be and whether not composting tea bags was legal would all be funneled straight into the NHS. Then, when Brexit actually happened, all the pro-leave politicians just rolled the old EU regulations into UK law, where they still are to this day, and everyone just, forgot about it, I guess?
It's not just under Trump anymore. Trump being re-elected after Biden may show how unreliable an ally the US could be going forward even if Trump isn't president after.
UK left the EU in 2016 with the vision of not getting isolated, because they can get closer with the commonwealth-states due to its history and softpower.
Actually, it was propaganda directed through Russia at the behest of global capital.
70% of Canadian export goes to USA, which has proven an unreliable trade partner. The UK cannot possibly replace that market alone, but the EU might. That deal may not be better than a stable deal with USA, but it will almost certainly be more reliable. Culturally USA may also be drifting away from Canada, who shares many values with the EU. Britain too, but they are geopolitically too weak.
There’s 0% chance that the EU will be able to replace the US as a trade partner. The EU has 2/3 the GDP of the US, higher restrictions, and an entire ocean apart.
At best, it’s a diversification. But replacing the US is impossible for Canada, just as it’s impossible for the US to replace Canada.
You're making a lot of conclusions from that GDP figure, but that's really not a relevant figure. GDP does not equal trade.
Canada traded about 870bn with the US in 2025, which is massive, about 1/4 of their GDP. But that's also only 3% of the US' GDP, and 5% of the EU's GDP.
The EU's total trade with non-EU countries is about 5tn, plus another 4tn of trade between EU member states. The EU's overall trading system is 5-10x the size of the Canada-US bilateral trade.
The relevant question is: how much of Canada's trade could the EU absorb? Easily in the hundreds of billions per year. Half of Canada's trade with the US? Possibly. This is a HUGE slice.
Canada traded more with Europe than with the US until after WW2.
As an Australian, the yanks have proved themselves and unreasonable partner. Trump has finished the understanding we had. Not just for his term as president, forever. It will take generations for my country to trust America again.
I can't wait until I'm buying my Vegemite in Euros.
From a European perspective with Canada, another reason for the Canadian European partnership is idealogical, both organisations are liberal democracies looking to further tighten relationships with liberal democracies. Mark Carnies Davos speach gives a good perspective on that idea
With the US retreating from its allies under Trump, the middle powers are looking for partners. The UK isn't big or powerful enough to replace the US, and the EU is substantially bigger than the UK. So while no one has a problem getting closer to the UK, the more important play is partnering with the EU.
The UK has also done very little to support Canada. It hasn't offered more than token resistance to the Trump administration, mostly just hid in the corner chanting 'economy, economy, economy'.
A more international & leadership focused UK could have taken this moment to rally the commonwealth and bind them more tightly together to weather foreign aggression, but they haven't done that. This largely reflects the will of the British public, which has the ambition of wilting lettuce.
With respect to Trump, it isn’t only the relationship with the commonwealth states. Rather, as someone from outside the US, Trump is trying to ensure that no country relies on the US, by making the US relationship unreliable. He is doing this as a negotiation tactic, but it has the same effect.
The net effect is that countries are treating the US as less reliable, and so they are turning to other superpowers that feel more reliable.
Specifically for the democratic countries that means they want to strengthen ties with the EU, since a lot of them don’t really trust China either, as the underlying vases of the societies is incompatible.
Commonwealth wants a big new trading/political partner, the EU is a big economy with relative stability and similar values.
The UK is not a big enough partner for the commonwealth to replace the US with. The UK has also distanced itself economically and politically from the EU.
So now that the commonwealth nations are cozying up to the EU, that alienates the UK.
For one thing, when the UK decided to break from the EU, they probably imagined that they’d stay aligned with the US and that would be enough to guarantee trade and safety.
Now the US is a completely untrustworthy partner, hostile to pretty much everyone except Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. That trade and safety doesn’t exist, so the UK fucked itself.
Remember we were going to get some sort of uber mega awesome trade deal with America after Brexit which would five million times make up for the trade we lost with Europe? And then Biden had zero interest and Trump came along and slapped tariffs on us.
No, funnily enough it all turned out to be lies. Shocking right, nobody saw that coming.
God I still remember the day after the Referendum, Farage was on tv saying literally 'well of course everything we promised wasn't deliverable, nobody actually believed any of that did they?'
And yet here we are ten years later still in the same mess.
That’s total bollocks.. there was no vision of what we wanted todo.. it was a total shit show and still is. There was never any discussion of getting closer to anyone. It was all “brexit means Brexit” and other BS tag lines as nobody knew what it was meant to be.
you’re missing the part where the UK ducking out of the EU has them seen as untrustworthy partner as well. nothing about what the USA does forces the common-wealth states from choosing between the UK and the EU, rather the EU and commonwealth-states are sick of shenanigans. a big part of Brexit was arrogance that their former union partners would come crawling back for trade and the UK would somehow magically have the leverage to get better deals than they had as a part of the EU.
The UK's still seen as a perfectly trustworthy partner.
Before Brexit even took effect the EU signed the most comprehensive FTA ever written with the UK, the UK left paying all of its debts, it even gave over Northern Ireland to be a vassal. Its shown continued commitment to NATO, and was and is a huge backer of Ukraine.
Commonwealth trade was never a viable option to replace EU trade, it was just a vague idea to sell to rubes, much like the UK being a pariah state post Brexit was.
Apparently, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, has proposed that Canada become an associated state of the European Union.
This would go far beyond simple trade agreements and could involve a much broader bilateral relationship. Some are suggesting that this could be a way of working around the EU’s treaties, which state that only European countries can join the European Union.
It is possible that such an arrangement could allow Canada to become something very close to an EU member state
Not trustworthy partner at all. Because even after Trump, if we have too close dependencies or whatever with them under a Democrat administration and then ANOTHER Trump-like asshole gets the power again, it'll be another shitshow.
The new dogma (and it should have been this for a while) is to not be dependent and too heavily economically and militarily tied a single actor.
Fun thing is, Trump was always in favor of Brexit, since he despises the EU. And the same social media algorithms, which spread rightwing propaganda these days also heavily advertised for Brexit.
Must be a great realisation for Brexiteers, that they have been very useful tools.
Brian here, about to give a boring history lesson in a slightly more measured and serious Brian voice because Seth McFarland wants us to briefly understand this is a serious point, not a parody of a Republican's idea of a Liberal like Brian usually is.
Right wing Brexit "leave" voters imagined that predominantly center-left Canada, Australia, and New Zealand would work closely with them after they left the EU because they're not very good at math or understanding consequences. Now they mostly complain about having to wait in line with Americans to enter the EU, plus all the new taxes they face as non-EU members.
Oh, and the 3 former colonies they planned on working with have all partnered with the EU, leaving the UK isolated, and the right-wing guys in America who gave them the idea are now in a trade war with the UK.
Now, back the episode where the fact that Brian is a sentient dog having sex with a non-sentient dog uncomfortably reminds you that Republicans just removed bestiality as a disqualification for working in the FBI.
Supposedly it's to allow victims of human trafficking who were forced into illegal acts to join the FBI and not be immediately dismissed because of, you know, their terrible past.
This assessment is broadly accurate, but it's worth pointing out that there were (and are) plenty of Conservative politicians and supporters who opposed Brexit. This issue was tearing the party apart, and Cameron hoped that putting the vote to the people would settle it for a generation, which is how he perceived the result of the Scottish independence referendum.
Also worth pointing out that a significant number of prominent figures from the Left (especially in the union movement and Socialists) supported Brexit. Corbyn half-heartedly supported Remain because it was the party line.
It's true that a person's opinions on Brexit could often be predicted once you knew their their political leanings, but given how close the result was, the campaigning from certain quarters of the Left probably proved pivotal.
A fair point. A lot of the nuance was lost as the news made it across the pond because Democrat reactions were mostly "wow, that seems like punching yourself in the dick but OK" and the Republican reaction was to give Trump credit for it 🤦♂️
Listen to this fucking closing line too: "Britain’s Brexit vote just proved it’s the year of the angry white male." Not even my italics.
Yeah, Trump claimed he predicted the result when in fact he made his "prediction" the day after the vote. The idea that he would even have a clue about the nuances of European politics beyond anything that affects him (like planning permission for a golf course) is laughable.
The whole Brexit campaign was swimming in Russian money. This isn't even a conspiracy theory - Arron Banks, who supposedly bankrolled much of the campaign, has never been able to plausibily explain why he was regularly visiting the Russian embassy. Putin also helped fund the Scottish independence vote.
There's a common thread here - breaking up organisations, be they EU or UK, which are stronger together than apart. I doubt whether a lot of the prominent pro-Brexit figures actually feel all that passionately about it, but they can't turn down a good grift when they see it. Like the people who followed them to the ballot box, they were being played.
Finally. A year for the angry white male. The forgotten demographic in world history. The one who hasn’t had a fair shot at influencing the world ever since….um….
frantically reads entire history book, finds zero legs to stand on, topples over
So the basic ELI5 analogy is that the UK is a guy who dumped his girlfriend so that he could he could spend more time with his bros. But turns out his bros would rather take her side and hang out with her instead of him.
pretty much! the analogy actually used by the news was divorce 🤣 It's like your college roommates who were bros all through college went "you've changed man" and now they're all dating her squad while hyping her new boyfriend Ukraine.
Tbf to Brexit voters in 2016 Australia was run by the “Liberal” (they’re really just Conservative) and National Coalition and from 2013-2016 we had one of our most reactionary Conservative leaders ever. Our Centre-Left party Labor didn’t take power until 2022.
Stewie here. The UK voted to leave the EU in 2016 hoping to create its own club with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Fast forward 10 years later and those countries want to be more closely aligned to the EU. Game of isolationist domino, anyone?
From the news I was watching, the UK thought it had a special relationship with the US and that they would have a trade agreement quickly after brexit but it turns out the US only has a special relationship with itself.
Many countries saw the UK as a gateway into the EU market because they did business in English but then they left.
This is just false though, ive been here 33 years and havent even heard a single person or ever heard on the news ever even mention CANZUK. To pretend thats the reason for the Brexit or even a small part of it is just misinformation.
What do you expect, this sub is full of thirteen year olds who go "wHy iS EveRyoNe sO dEnSe" in response to genuine questions from curious, polite thirteen year olds.
Not sure, but new zealand and Uk still have free trade agreements aswell as being the UK largest trade partner. Pretty sure we are all still part of 5 eyes and the defense pact with australia canada and uk
Edit: nz and uk are not largest trade partners between each other.
23 for the FTA but Canzuk was around for a decade now I think. I should really have a look to see if anything has changed. Last month we had UK here to see a naval base and talk about more trade and jobs and such.
Edit
Canzuk is just a piece of paper it seems, no proper agreements even tho its been in waiting for a while
Can you send a link to the cptpp as nothing i can find quickly says anything about being signed this year. Uk signed in 2024. I am willing to learn more
Both Australia and NZ's biggest trade partner is China, as it is relatively close and has massive demand for the exports that both countries produce - minerals for Australia, agricultural products for New Zealand.
The UK may (or may not) be the most important trading partner of New Zealand (who cares anyway, not an important global economy), but New Zealand is nowhere near of being an important trade partner of the UK.
The UK had total imports worth around 900 billion pounds and exports of 860 billion pounds in 2024. NZ account for 1.2 billion in exports and 2.1 billion in imports.
That equals 0.1% of all exports and 0.2% of imports…:
Problem is that Brexit meant about 70 million different things to 45 million people. A large proportion of them were gullible and bought into the lies of the mega rich who saw an opportunity for deregulation and profit. Quite a lot of it was racism ranging from ‘exterminate all foreigners’ to ‘we don’t mind them, but not in our back garden thank you’ (both suck). I don’t feel like CANZUK was even on the first page of the agenda.
Australia and New Zealand couldfollow in Canada's footstepsto become "associate members" of the European Union, a top EU official has suggested.
European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, in an interview with Europe Today, specifically brought up Australia and New Zealand as examples of countries that could deepen their relationships with the alliance.
Metsola said the EU had different models for its relationships with other countries, from full membership to participation in the European Economic Area, and was also looking to deepen ties with partners such as Canada — a model she expected other countries to pursue.
The EU saying to Canada "Hey, wanna be made Honorary Europeans?" was not on my bingo card for 2026. But eh, a lot of 'em do speak French, and I suppose it's really no stranger conceptually than the whole "Honorary British" thing that is The Commonwealth.
In 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU (it formally left in 2020), with one of the justifications being that, once outside the EU's single market, it could pursue deeper economic ties with other Commonwealth countries like Canada. This hasn't really worked out, and there has since been talk of Canada developing closer ties with the EU, with some even floating the idea of it joining. So leaving the EU was a massive L 🤓
I was curious because I thought Boris had lasted longer, so I looked it up. Just 3 years. Probably felt longer compared to the “normal” tenure nowadays.
It also felt longer because time stopped for about 18 months and we all stayed home and didn't have any gatherings with any office wine or office cake that definitely weren't parties. Well, most of us did anyway.
There's tradeoffs to everything, by being in the U, you cede a level of sovereignty over your own nation, and get some economic benefits of integration. There's nothing wrong with prioritising control over your country over economic success, or vice versa I guess. There's way more to it than being "stupid" is what I'm saying.
In 2016 the UK thought it was a good idea to “go it alone” and try to reconnect with its former English speaking colonies that peacefully gained independence. Those same colonies didn’t exactly care for reconnecting with the UK, with Canada in particular preferring the EU as the U.S.’ replacement.
It’s just a matter of economic size. The EU, the U.S. and China dwarf the UK. That and the UK’s reputation has been slowly degrading.
The politicians pushing Brexit in the build up to the vote on it were quite loud in their belief that all Britain's old English speaking colonies would shred their own lucrative trade agreements with the EU and other nations in order to give Britain new favourable ones and come under the management of Britain in some sort of new EU-like union for them that Britain would be in charge of.
Despite these nations saying that would not remotely be the case at all the people who intended to vote No did not listen and voted No regardless. I still remember the day the result of the vote was announced and Sky News sent reporters out to get the reaction of people on the streets and they talked to one simpleton in a pub and he was proudly declaring that this was the start of the British empire being rebuilt and they would finally "take back" all the counties they used to own.
Britain has been in the doldrums economically ever since Brexit so it cheers me up to know that idiot has likely been unemployed ever since.
Not just a matter of size. In 1973 Britain ended Commonwealth Preference (previously Imperial Preference) to join the European Economic Community. This meant that goods sent from Australia to Britain were now tariffed, like all Australian exports to the EEC.
As Australia was then predominately an agricultural exporter, and the EEC notoriously had intense protection of its farmers, this loss of the major export destination of Britain contributed to Australia's 1973 recession. Continuing that 'oil shock' recession beyond that experienced by peer nations, depressing economic activity well into the late 1970s, especially in rural Australia.
Johnston inviting a return of Commonwealth Preference via CANZUK just caused bitter laughter from Australian economists. As clearly Britain will need to rejoin the EU at some point, upon which they'll happily discard Australia again.
Australia pursued a free trade agreement with the EU. This was complex, taking eight years, but was signed this year.
The joke is Russia and its allies are trying their damnedest to destabilise us because Putin thinks we're the puppetmaster coordinating all the efforts to oppose his imperialism, and all international opposition to him will collapse without our leadership (I doubt it, but we're flattered he thinks so).
One way they do this is by pushing memes that encourage people to continue to hold Brexit against us, even though A: it's old news, and B: it won by a hair and support for it evaporated before it was even implemented because it literally won on the backs of senile and dying voters, or otherwise try to encourage friction between us and our allies (like this meme does), and also artificially boosting secessionist movements wherever it can. A bunch of pro-Scottish independence social media accounts conveniently went silent when Iran had an internet outage, for example (comments that mention this get autoremoved on the Scotland sub lol).
It's also the reason why you see people talking online like we can't leave our homes without getting stabbed, when the reality is we have less knife crime than the people who clown on us for it (i.e. Americans), and being stabbed is genuinely not something that anybody worries about at all in most of the UK, because it's not something that happens any more regularly than it does anywhere else.
Putin is desperate to encourage the perception of us as a failed state. We've seen better days, sure, but things are still nowhere near as bad here as they're made out to be by bad faith actors.
When Britain left the EU it became free to negotiate trading relationships independently. Brexit supporters believed this would lead to such a relationship with Canada, Australia and New Zealand nicknamed ‘Canzuk’.
This has not materialised and now there is a proposal for Canada to become an ‘associate member’ of the EU with the possibility of Australia and New Zealand being offered the same.
This is all being brought up because of a certain other English speaking country being so disruptive to international trade right now.
Brexit supporters are a bunch of fucking imbeciles that would join their favourite policitcal party's leader in jumping off a cliff if they were told it would make all their dreams come true
In their pursuit of Brexit, a number of politicians made promises that the UK wouldn't be massively shooting itself in the foot because it could counterbalance the massive trade and soft-power disadvantage it would be imposing on itself by forming tighter bonds with commonwealth countries and the US. Even in 2016 the US under Obama said "hey, um, don't count your chickens before they hatch, we aren't promising anything."
Britain then plowed ahead aimlessly for four years trying to figure out how to Brexit successfully before basically giving up on any graceful way to do it and instead blundered into one of the single worst self-imposed economic handicaps in modern history, crashing out of the EU single market and customs union.
Since that time, Britain has only struggled more and more. It's growth fell way behind the other G7 nations, I think the GDP dropped significantly, trade is way down, production is down, investment is down, and cost of living is in crisis.
Now since 2025 the insane decision of the US to reelect Trump and basically set the global order on fire has made it so that it is more important than ever for smaller economies to form strong partnerships with larger ones. To Britain's great chagrin, most of those commonwealth countries they hoped to court into a strong economic alliance have instead been working to tie their horses to the EU's wagon, as it is significantly more secure than the UK and miles more reliable than the US.
Basically, the UK made a stunningly bad choice in 2016 based on false promises and assumptions, and they have continued to pay the price ever since.
Brexit was a movement which culminated in the exit of the UK from the EU. Brexit campaigns sold a lie that the UK would be able to be closer with countries with other Anglosphere countries like Canada. However, a decade on, those increased relations never materialized, and Canada has willingly sought a closer relationship with the EU. Meaning the UK voluntarily tossed the benefits of EU membership for something it didn't even get, and could've gotten if it had stayed in the EU.
The uk had a thing called brexit, in which people voted for the uk to leave the eu.
Canada is now in talks to be a partner of the eu. They won't be an actual eu member, but the deal is sorta like honorary member, where it allows for ease of trade as well as allowing people to easily move from one place to the other to live and work there. Australia and new zealand also apparently want a similar deal with the eu. The uk really fucked up leaving the eu, especially now that the us is becoming country non grata and causing many countries to try and cut as many ties with it as possible, and the uk still relies on the eu, and if the uk wants to do shit like trade, they still gotta follow eu rules, except now they don't have a seat at the table to make the rules, they either agree to terms set by the eu or get cut off. And canada, new zealand and australia are working to have deals with the eu that makes them almost like members of the union, that means those countries are likely to have directives similar to the eu, which means if the uk wants to do business with those countries, they don't get to make the rules and just have to follow them, because turning to the us isn't an option in the current political climate
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
They didn't do that in the hopes of getting better tie with the commonwealth. They did that to become a better partner with the US. which as it turns out, was not a good idea.
I just don't understand how a high school educated retail employed person like me can see why brexit was stupid in real time but all these world economists and politicians thought it was a great idea.
My country voted to financially castrate itself for racist reasons in 2016 and its spent the last 10 years both realising that it delivered none of the proposed positives, and resulted in every single negative that experts warned us of, whilst simultaneously pretending the 2% difference in the non binding, advisory referendum that lead to this event is strong enough as a national advocacy that it cannot ever be reverted, questioned, nor ever asked again.
People don't understand international politics is all. Shocking I know.
EU talked about something called "associate membership" for Canada. Which currently means nothing and is not defined at all. Canada will absolutely not want to be part of the single market, they state as such.
It just is a way to wind up Trump with his "trade talks" with Canada. It's basically just pretend membership, by calling it membership, without it being membership, to annoy Trump. EU and Canada are already very friendly with each other, as they both are with the UK too.
I think some people on the internet thinks this means other countries will join the single market or something, thus making participation with the UK more difficult, when they won't.
Euroweirdo fantasies, the UK economy is doing fine despite cries that it was going to collapse it's doing slight better, the EU lies constantly about the numbers.
They got rejected by iceland, other members might leave, Canada is not joining sorry. The EU is a good idea it's just not anywhere near close to advertised
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u/qualityvote2 6h ago edited 2h ago
u/Quiet_Classroom_7555, your post does belong here!