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Exceptionalism Can Be Lonely -- Ask Britain
There is nothing about "exceptionalism" in the headline or the article - Britain of "Rule, Britannia!" has not been "exceptional" for centuries.
Article is "exceptionally" anti-Brexit biased - not surprisingly, reflecting NYT point of view - but, also not surprisingly, plays fast and lose with economic data.
Brexit was supposed to let Britain return to a time when it still counted as a global power.
BS, UK is world's fifth largest economy and on course of overtaking Japan in near future; Brexit was about independence from politics and taxes of "Brussels" and independence of their economy and currency (GBP) from EURo... just like Canada not wanting to be "51st state" of the USA.
Brexit still holds majority of mindshare in Britain: "There is now a mountain of evidence that support for rejoining the EU crumbles when the costs and conditions are revealed. We Brits still value our sovereignty and do not want to hand control back to Brussels."
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/2216906/rejoin-eu-campaign-faces-nightmare - Rejoin EU campaign faces nightmare - 2026-10-13
Mr. Starmer was the sixth occupant of the office during the past decade. In the previous two decades, there had been just three prime ministers.
Again, sleight of hand comparison - Britain's current social problems wouldn't be any easier had they stayed in EU - EU had and still has their share of turnovers / "flipping" of failed "conservative" and "liberal/progressive" governments and deep divisions in the last decade (see Italy, Greece, France, Germany, Belgium etc.) - this actually coincides more with the issue of "immigrants" and arrival of destabilizing Trump on the political scene than anything to do with Britain or Brexit specifically.
For example, relatively more stable 4-year USA system had 3 two-term presidents (changes of party in power) in 24 years since 1993, and 3 one-term changes during the past 10 years.
Starmer/Labour, in particular, won last election with the lowest number of delegates in the history of UK.
Now, to the real economics of Brexit:
UK's predicted "economic collapse" due to Brexit didn't happen; in fact, their average growth rate since is higher than many in EU, Canada and Japan:
Real per capita compound annual GDP growth rate change - (2016-2025) delta (2007-2016) in USD (data from https://data-explorer.oecd.org/?lc=en):
............... PPP ... nominal
Germany : -5.9% ... -5.4%
Japan :.. +3.2% ... -0.8%
France :. +6.4% ... +4.5%
Canada :. +0.9% ... +7.2%
UK :.... +3.2% ... +9.0%
USA :... +12.1% ... +11.0%
In 2015 UK exports to EU members were only 42.3% of total exports, least of any other EU countries;
Second largest importer of UK exports was the USA, and since 2011, US GDP grew by 40.0%, almost 2x of EU's 20.5% growth rate, increasing nominal value of UK exports.
Sure, UK has problems, their taxes and costs are higher and regulations have not eased, "green energy" policies are hurting their economy, NHS is a wreck... but none of that would be remedied had they stayed in EU.
Brexit (and keeping the GBP) was not the economic disaster many predicted, rejoining is not the solution to internal problems.
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1. Musk in 2025: AI Will Take All Jobs - complete BS, as usual...
So far, there has been little, if any ROI on enterprise AI rollouts, and companies found they are blowing their budgets by token-maxxing, and that was even before deploying agentic AI, when they don't know how many tokens the model's agents will burn doing requested tasks, and then get surprised with the bill:
fortune.com - "'The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employee': Nvidia executive says right now AI is more expensive than paying human workers" - 2026-06-14
* 18% of organizations now orchestrating multiple agents across workflows, up from 9% in the previous period
* A $0.04 chat can become a $1.20 orchestration when it requires tool retrieval, planning and subagents
* AI coding costs are expected to surpass average developer salaries by 2028
* Despite enterprises spending an average of $11.5 million on AI in 2026, most struggle to demonstrate any clear return on investment.
* Recent tests have shown Chinese models to be much cheaper "per task" (not necessarily per token) and do almost as good a job as best US models, like Mythos, that run on more advanced hardware.
2. ... But Standard of Living Won't Fall
True, but it's more of Musk selling "Utopian" future (remember "Occupy Mars!" or Hyperloop or "Saving the Earth with EVs and solar panels") if only everyone buys into his "vision" and his "X-tools" - recently merged with SpaceX, xAI has just been rebranded as SpaceXAI (makes it easier to hide financial losses from xAI / Grok / eX-Twitter etc):
fortune.com - Can Elon Musk really save the world? - 2023-09-23
The real reason that "standard of living" won't fall is not because of bogus "AI will take all jobs... but you will like it" and Musk's upselling non-workable dystopian "UBI" into Utopian "UHI" - typically, "standard of living" and employment has risen with new, revolutionary or evolutionary technology, while often displacing some occupations and jobs. "AI" is not that much different - more technologically advanced, better educated societies replace brawn with brains:
www.forbes.com - Ford Hiring 350 Engineers After AI Failed Shows Human Value In AI Era - 2026-06-30
geekspin.co - Unions are furious after GM replaces 1,000 workers with 50 cobots - 2026-06-23
3. Tesla CEO says work will soon be optional... - more BS, never worked, even when "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" was fashionable - this is how it ends up:
en.wikipedia.org(The_Twilight_Zone) - To Serve Man (The Twilight Zone) (1962)
4. ... as AI takes over all labour. - as in the "Horseshoe theory" it's a fine line just where and how this Musk's dystopian vision turns into Musk's Utopian vision; see point 1.
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