For example what will be the cumulative impact over the next 100 years of having the people in the UK making the decisions, directly accountable to voters again.

Most of the tory leaders are ambivalent or even pro immigration - it helps drag down working class wages and push up rents after all.

Their apparent lack of willingness to do anything about it was what led to so many voter defections to UKIP/Brexit parties.

Their core voting bloc - being led by the nose via the likes of the telegraph and the mail are the ones who really want it stopped.

Then there is the difficulty of getting a visa. The expense, the time, the effort, the weird rules.

I looked at getting a German visa as I worked there on and off. But I can't because my German is meh. That was no problem for my employers, coworkers or people I knew there. But it is now.

That's what I stopping us...

The UK overplayed their hand to the point where for the EU, Brexit was the better of bad choices, but it is wrong to think that we do not need the UK. Losing one of the largest economies in the world with one of the best militaries is certainly a major blow to the amount of power the EU can project abroad, and the new trade barriers have also negatively affected both our economic projections. Looking at percentage of world GDP, the EU's share (well, today's members) has been steadily declining since the early 90s, while the US stayed constant at around 25% of global GDP and developing countries, mostly China, has a much larger piece of the pie.

Long-term, the UK's idea of more closely alligning with its former colonies might actually not be so bad, as there were always strong limits on how much the UK could do within the EU, and how much it would be willing to take. Demographics and stagnant politics aren't really pointing towards a rosy future of most countries in the EU. On the other hand, with the UK gone, the EU has the chance to go ahead with a couple of projects, including federalization, that before would have had a strong vote against from the UK.

Overall, we are all worse off, and currently being in a long-distance relationship UK-Germany, I'm just really saddened and frustrated by the things happening.

As far as I know both the UK and the EU, this is not going to happen. Not just out of pride; the UK and the Franco-German axis of the EU were never a good political match and after this divorce, they will drift even more apart, because they do not need to hammer out compromises anymore.

IMHO the UK was smart to avoid entering the Eurozone. The monetary union without fiscal union is a wobbly construction, papered over by extremely low interest rates and sovereign debt buying programs such as PEPP.

One of the important features of earlier EEC was convergence of the periphery with the center; it still works to some degree in Central and Eastern Europe, but it stopped working in the Mediterranean.

Trouble is the EU laws were agreements between 28 countries and can't easily be changed to suit one odd case. That was always the situation and the "we'll negotiate a good deal" thing was mostly lies for political purposes.

It's not as though the UK will be holding out a begging bowl because the EU decides to be difficult. It will, however, have to develop new markets, which will take some time and cause some issues, including the cheese issue in this story. There will be ups and downs as the situation finds a new balance.

Given that fishermen weren't exactly ever migrating in droves to Berlin to become language teachers, that decision seems to be pretty much the epitome of rationality. The fact that you picked it as your best example of why people should live in a dictatorship in which they aren't even aware the rules are being made, let alone able to object, speaks volumes about the nature of EU ideology and why the UK was right to leave.

I was willing to listen to your argument up to this point. Throwing the "everyone who I disagree with is a bigot" around is very old hat at this point.

The last deal I saw negotiated in secret and then leaked (TPP) ended up being a corporate wishlist that benefitted nobody except large companies.

The most absurd part was that it was more about extending copyright and setting up extra-judicial courts than dropping tarriffs yet they still called it a "free trade deal".

Fortunate that it was leaked otherwise this abortion of a deal would have passed.