The Brexit Thread

[Duncan Gardner]

He came from Donaghadee
He wasnt SDP

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Where is Donaghadee? I know it's six miles from Bangor, but I don't know where that is either.

[Duncan Gardner]

Where is Donaghadee? I know it's six miles from Bangor, but I don't know where that is either

Well, there's this big island in the Atlantic Ocean, a wee spot in Europe...

(Bangor is the 9th largest town in Ireland, ahead of Waterford- source 2011 census)

ps a very pleasant Shona Nollaig* to all at Berba towers and the wider Cahir-in-the Community (which didn't make the list, although Clonmel managed a respectable 40th place). OK, I'll count you in: 1-2-3,1-2-3, In the county Tyrone, near the town of Dungannon, who crossed the wide Prairie with her lover Ike

pps * as the Shinner Mayor of Giant's Causeway District Council said on her card to residents. Not all were pleased

[Gert from the Well]

I’ll pose the question again and I’m not expecting a realistic answer from anyone on this planet, even though I would dearly love one.

How do you tell 52% of Leave voters that they were wrong and then ignore them? And how do you do that from a position of being in Opposition, facing a hostile media and still expect to win power?

This is in my opinion the elephant-in-the-room for the whole Brexit debate. Or more importantly why did so many people vote for, and in many cases still support, a position that will condemn them to even greater levels of poverty. To frame the answer in terms of xenophobia or of being misled is not enough. We need to look at the support for Brexit as a symptom not a cause.
My take on this is that a major factor for voting to leave was a response to a perception of being left behind. The correlation between the areas of greater economic poverty and the leave votes would seem to support this. Large parts of the country has been left in a cycle of decline since the paradigm shift of 79/80 (UK & US elections). The right has traditionally ignored them as they do not represent their core support, whilst the centre-left (accent on the centre) has taken their votes for granted. Sure we have seem some cosmetic changes such as the minimum wage but these are salves for the symptoms of decline and poverty, not the root cause of economic misery. Coupled with the major societal changes such as immigration, the change in gender relationships (for the better, I hasten to add) and the decline of the traditional support networks from trade unions to pubs means that many are feeling hopeless and there families condemned to sees things never improve, The collapse of social mobility for all but the top of society is a further example of the creation of a permanent under class. To return to a previous post, the BNP's limited but shocking success was to play on the idea that they were being ignored by New Labour - 'just like the Labour party your granddad voted for" was a slogan used by the BNP.
Therefore any opposition to Brexit has to address the real concerns of many of the 52%, not EU migration and quaint calls for some kind of home rule but to provide concrete plans to not only take people back out of poverty but to provide then with a future. This I feel is absent from much of the arguments against Brexit. It's no use telling people they will be worse off, many will ask how can it get any worse, but tell them how life can get better. This does not mean adopting anti-immigration policies, but instead the long-term encouragement of all.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

That's a very well argued post and worthy of much debate.

I live in a very middle class village in Lancashire however and can absolutely assure you that the only reason the great majority of them voted leave is, indeed, that they are out-and-out racists. They seem to believe that after March 2019 "it'll stop the Pakis taking over Preston".

[Moonlight Shadow]

Yeah, the 'left behind' were only a marginal element of Leave winning. The referendum was won because they were a lot more arrogant, obnoxious, xenophobic knobheads that we complacently assume they were and very few of them were part of the victims of austerity.

The 'squeezed middle' won it, people who saw their financial confort compromised by 2008 but not reduced to penury after 2010. Never understimate how angry someone with a sense of entitlement can get...

[Lang Spoon]

The referendum was won in the Home counties not the Left Behind of oop North. It was the Tory core wot won it. But Harris and other poverty tourists never interview comfortable suburban racists when looking for their narrative.

[Gert from the Well]

The argument is not universal and I admit fails to adequately cover your example Rogin. Maybe the fear of change is the answer, a lot of our certainties are disappearing (our children will be better of than us, job security etc) and there is a need to articulate this somehow. Appeals to racism may be one such way - if you can equate immigration with decline, which is economically unprovable, you can persuade the middle classes. After all the biggest fear of the middle class is to sinking back into the unwashed masses! The images of slums and lawlessness this influx suggests is the antithesis of all the middle-class hold dear.
Furthermore, defining Muslims as the 'other', the embodiment of a threat to all we hold dear, is a traditional tactic of the right - imagine if we discovered that in many ways we all the same?

[Fussbudget]

Yeah, I don't disagree with the idea that opposing Brexit needs to go hand in hand with fighting austerity, and that many post-industrial areas are rightfully resentful at having been battered by the Tories and taken for granted by Labour for decades, but I think the image of Leave voters in those areas as some kind of forgotten underclass is a bit off. From what I can see around here, most of them are not the poorest of the poor that they're being portrayed as (who by and large don't vote at all), but lower middle class people with an axe to grind about various things (immigration, red tape, London etc.)

[Fussbudget]

(I don't mean "lower middle class" to sound sneery, by the way. I just felt it needed qualifying because "middle class" isn't really the same thing in Middlesbrough as in Tunbridge Wells)

[Moonlight Shadow]

I prefer 'upper working class' meself Fussbudget and yes, they are very, very angry about almost everything...

[Gert from the Well]

Leave won by a small majority of those who bothered to vote, those who perceived themselves as being left-behind who were not restricted to the North and may have been enough to tip the scales. In Cambridgeshire, the affluent City voted for remain, the poorer districts of the Fens voted leave. How much of Trump's success was due to capturing the vote of a small segment of dis-satisfied blue colour voters who were enough to resolve the partisan deadlock? Does this ring true for the South?

As for the Tory shires, was voting leave seen as a way to protect themselves from change? Did people vote on altruistic virtues or for selfish reasons of self-preservation and greed. Maybe the promise of greater prosperity and a fear of decline from migration was enough to swing votes. Also the South is not a simplistic bloc, from declining fishing towns (Lowestoft) to rural areas it is not a unity of wealth and prosperity.

My argument does not claim to be universal its an attempt to explain why a significant number of people voted against there economic self-interest. If the pro-remain argument can resolve this paradox then there may be a way out of this mess?

[Gert from the Well]

I mean 'Left-behind' in a relative way, in many cases this is first-world poverty. But with social mobility becoming restricted for many, the gaps between those who seem to benefit form the economic status quo and those who do not may seem unbridgeable. The rise of food banks is one indicator of a growing number of people sinking into poverty. One of the reasons that Edward Loius' book 'The End of Eddie' was deemed so shocking in France was the matter-of-fact depiction of rural poverty.

[Gert from the Well]

My greatest fear is the tendency in the pre-remain group to demonise those who voted leave as stupid and/or racist. We've all seen example of where remains supporters seem to take glee in those forecasts predicting the devastating impact of leave on its supporters. Such attitudes further entrench opinions and may well serve to reinforce the leave side. Instead, I strongly believe we need to understand the deep reasons for leave and then resolve them. Modern day racism is often the result of deep-set insecurities, not necessarily a sense of threat. It is the right who make this point, we on the left need to look at the cause not the symptom.

[San Bernardhinault]

To be fair, a big chunk of Brexiters are at least one of racist and stupid. You need to be careful of assuming that stupid and racist means working class Northern England, rather than - say - Boris Johnson.

[Nefertiti2]

Yeah, the 'left behind' were only a marginal element of Leave winning. The referendum was won because they were a lot more arrogant, obnoxious, xenophobic knobheads that we complacently assume they were and very few of them were part of the victims of austerity.

The 'squeezed middle' won it, people who saw their financial confort compromised by 2008 but not reduced to penury after 2010. Never understimate how angry someone with a sense of entitlement can get...

When a referendum is won by such a small margin then every marginal group is crucial.


I’d guess the number of people ” left behind “ is not much smaller than the “squeezed middle. Excellent post by Gert, I wish the People’s Vote lot were to think more about what a second referendum might actually involve, -and how to win it especially given there are some who vote remain who will consider a second referendum an affront to democracy.

[Gert from the Well]

To be fair, a big chunk of Brexiters are at least one of racist and stupid. You need to be careful of assuming that stupid and racist means working class Northern England, rather than - say - Boris Johnson.

I do not, but there is a tendency in the remain camp to treat them as such. Stupidity and a coded racist appeal to a pre-immigration English utopia are central to many of the politicians on the leave side. Careful use of propaganda and lies can lead people to take a side which leaves then open to accusations of racism and stupidity which is not a fair reflection of them. We all know how the right exploit the image if the other for their own ends.

[Tubby Isaacs]

As Gert said, there are odd variations in the South, even within safe Tory seats. Kent and Essex seemed much more Brexitty than Hertfordshire, Berkshire and Surrey.

I don't think Labour are gaining Epsom and Ewell anytime soon, despite it voting Remain and having a Hard Brexit MP. But Hard Brexit has the capacity to cause the Tories problems, for sure. And yet it doesn't get anything like as much attention as Labour's "heartlands" problem.

[Gert from the Well]

Central to the leave campaign was the selfish motive of the few who led it. They sought, like Republicans, to remove the red-tape that impinged on capital accumulation. Labour and ecological restraints have to go if one is to carry on getting richer (see Mogg et al). Others, see the EU free movement as a threat to their idiotic middle-class and rural view of England (May et al). There is a class element at play, its protecting the status quo for the benefit of those who gain from it. Its also the decline of the white male as with Trump and his supporters. white men such as myself are at last becoming less powerful, I can welcome this long overdue redressing of age-old wrongs, other cannot.

[Tubby Isaacs]

General election latest. And they say a referendum is risky.

https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1076875186409033728

[anton pulisov]

52-48, in referendum terms, is a fairly big margin.

[Nefertiti2]

No it isn’t.

[sw2borshch]

Just to echo, it's my strong feeling as someone who works across the North East that Leavers here are in the largest part working class Tories and ex-working class Tories who are now lower & middle middle class. There's definitely some who have done it out of social democratic leanings (money for the NHS) but it's not the main driver as far as I can tell.
I would say that I have picked up a bigger racist vibe about it on Wearside than I have on Teesside too.

[Tubby Isaacs]

52-48, in referendum terms, is a fairly big margin.

1975's EU referendum was 67-33. Of all the referendums held in the UK, only 2 (Scotland devolution 1979 and Wales Devolution 1997) have been closer, to my knowledge. Lots of the others were not close at all.

[Sean of the Shed]

The vibe I get from my work colleagues is they don't want the forriners taking over and the people who understand them best are the likes of Boris and Nigel. The bulk of these are middle aged doing the more menial minimum wage jobs and aren't that smart. I get the feeling that a succession of regimes have done nothing for them and accept the Ukip type narrative that our country's woes are all down to immigration and political correctness. I also get the feeling that they are not that interested in the economic fall out of Brexit, probably because when you are already scraping by on minimum wage how can it get any worse.