Brexit in a Nutshell

"From my experience living in both the UK and other EU countries the difference isn’t about British Arrogance or British media but is actually a part of the very make up of the British People.

British People like rules, and we follow them. When arriving in a new situation we will automatically look for the rules and if we do not find them we are quite lost. In contrast (Most of my experience is in France and Spain) people seem much more likely just to enter a new situation and start doing what they want until they are informed of the rules.

How this translates to EU is that in the UK we accept every EU rule and implement it 100%, in fact it is normally picked up by our own bureaucracy who ban anything that doesn’t follow the rules and anything that may break the rules - and anything that could be seen as breaking the rules in the future, plus a few things they just don’t like and could be in some way linked to the new rule. So we actually end up adopting the rule 110% going further than even the rule makers ever considered.

In many EU countries they look at the rule and think ‘this bit is ok, that bit doesn’t work for us’ and so adopt 50–80% of the rule. therefore there is much less change and as a result much less negativity is created. I honestly believe that if we took the same approach to EU rules as Spain we would happily still be members now as we would see the benefits but not see it as “losing” part of our identity - but as Rule Follower is our identity I guess that was never going to happen."

Adam Brown's answer on Quora. Which for me, at least, rings very true.