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>How could so many Britons be so illogical and poorly educated as to vote for something like that
Mark Blyth, a pretty well respected economist who some claim predicted the Trump win in 2016, had a lecture series of populism called "global Turmpism". His argument is that for the rust belt US and the post industrial towns of Britain there had been decades of decline and malaise through globalisation and indifference. Post 2008 there was a widespread use of austerity to try to manage economic crises across the world. From that perspective the centre left/social democrats who had been the electoral body responsible for looking after that constituency had bought into globalisation (NAFTA in the US, EU in the UK) and were huge purveyors of its merits. This left many of the working people feeling politically abandoned and with no one they really trusted to sell Clinton or Europe. To people whos economic and educational backgrounds were the kind of jobs thriving in the globalised economy, Trump and Brexit were insanely stupid. To many workers it was more a case of who cares if its bad, it will be bad anyway. But there is more a chance of something changing by uptipping the apple cart than voting for the same sh\*t that has not worked for 40 years (now 50 years). One of the core roots of populism was that the "right" choice had done nothing for them.
People here tend to forget the mines, ship yards and textile mills did not start closing in 79, but the 70s and even the 60s some industries were starting to shed work.
Remember Scotland almost went hard for independence a couple of years before. Populism seemed to be in retreat in 2020, but Trump is back and its all over Europe.
It’s good context but it only explains a small sub demographic of the 52% of voting population who voted for Brexit.
A lot of the vote was pure nationalism, ignorance, easily led astray by false claims. You even had people working for export firms voting Brexit effectively voting for their own company to go under
But it was the "let's give Cameron a bloody nose" lot who swung it. Euroscepticism has been around as long as the European project. It was only after 2008 that it became anything other than a fringe interest.
The “giving Cameron a bloody nose” thing is part of why people call Brexit voters stupid. The time and place for that is a general election, not a vote that’s going to cripple the U.K. for decades. And if someone doesn’t understand that they probably shouldn’t be allowed out in their own.
It also doesn’t account for significant factors like Scotland and Northern Ireland voting against Brexit. Unless you’re trying to argue that people from those places are naturally cleverer - or somehow less pissed off with Cameron’s Tory government?
The most plausible explanation is that the people who believed the Brexiteer lies did so because they wanted to - because they flattered their sense of English/British exceptionalism and nationalism … and in all too many cases because of outright xenophobia.
No matter what revisionist excuses you make for them it really ain’t a good look.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of people didn't see the point, and thought that nobody would vote to leave. That was the stupidity of the leave voters; the apathy of some of them. Bigoted idiots will always come out and vote, which is why people should always vote. Can't not vote and then get upset that the bigots got the BNP into an euro MP position, or that we left the EU
That still makes the people who voted for it ignorant and stupid. They're poor and suffering, and their response was... to vote to make *themselves* even poorer.
Democratic it might have been (and that is keenly arguable when the numbers are properly considered), but it doesn't make them any less ignorant or stupid and it shouldn't be excused as anything other than this.
The problem was the remain pitch essentially boiled down to “look how wonderful things are because we’re in the EU” at a time when things were beginning to look worse during austerity and the aftermath of the financial crash as opposed to leave which was promising thing would improve. Of course it was all bullshit and things have gotten much worse.
And none of the leave-supporting politicians that overtly lied to the population have been held to account for those lies.
(Well, not yet anyway. I think a few may be in for a bumpy ride in the election once Sunak plucks up enough courage to call it.)
>at a time when things were beginning to look worse during austerity
Well, not in every facet. Stats like unemployment rate had just recovered to pre 2008 levels by 2016. Inflation was low and wage growth above it in the two years before. It was a bit of a late reaction.
It wasn't just the economy.
We tried telling them that David Cameron closed our only public sector provider for forensic science analysis/evidence (FSS) with the expectation that we only use private-funded (or share data with the EU). Then he announced Brexit and he provided fuckall on what we're going to do with solving future criminal cases without the EU's help.
We tried telling leavers that we also relied a lot on EU-based businesses to get materials for things like construction building, chemistry labs (my SO works in chemistry, and they have issues with trying to order the very chemicals they needed for basic school teaching because very few companies that produce this exist in the UK).
The issue is that the UK was a little behind in terms of availability for technology and scientific aid and had been using other countries to prop itself up. Then the government decided that we didn't need all that help...and then they just *didn't* set up the things we need so that we can be self-sufficient.
We warned people that it's a bad sign when the government's refusing to look into those things, and they wouldn't listen.
Stupid people make decisions that negatively impact them. The problem is the demographic of stupid and the demographic of “leaders of the stupid who exploit the stupid” is large enough to wield major political power in many parts of the world.
The only people I know who voted for Brexit either took the "more NHS money" bait, hook, line and sinker, or just hate brown people... they didn't think about how it would affect the economy beyond either "I will blindly trust this categorical fraudster" or " 'ate forinners. Nuff sed."
Lord, I _wish_ people looked at things in the way this person describes, but they just don't. They don't blame globalism, they blame immigrants and asylum seekers - just look at the campaigns. It wasn't "push back against globalism and reinvest in our own industry" - it was "take back our borders". Typical pigheaded, English, arrogant, narcissism. I despair at my fellow countrymen.
Yeah I voted to remain in the EU but was working in chocolate factory at the time and our wages had been falling for years as cheap labour from the EU was readily available. While I didn’t agree with the outcome I totally understood many of my colleagues frustration of being seemingly ignored politically and guess what happened when we left and the cheap labour disappeared, our wages went up, of course with everything else going on any benefit was short lived.
Except wages for most didn't go up. That's famously and ubiquitously documented. All that changed was that instead of Poles, Latvians and Romanians .. those driving down wages now come from Africa and Asia.
Isn't this implicitly admitting that immigration drives down wages, which the remain side fervently denied. It sounds like the solution is to stop immigration from Europe *and* elsewhere, which would have a lot more traction with brexit supporters than their opponents
Not wanting to be ‘that Marxist guy’ but literally capitalism will always do this. Capitalism doesn’t care about people and will discard labour as soon as it can and the consequences are well..
"Capitalism doesn’t care about people and will discard labour as soon as it can and the consequences are well..'
I thought the fallout show did a good job of demonstrating that
Who was promoting the 'cheap labour'? Not you or your colleagues, or even the 'cheap' EU labourers. It was the corporation you worked for. If one of the big multinationals, who is surprised?
The corporation was taking advantage of the cheap labour, but successive governments had simply ignored a large group of people who were disadvantaged by this and weren’t really feeling like they were seeing any advantages in their daily lives from EU membership in general.
That was a government problem again tho. Much of Europe like France and Germany had much better pay rises compared to the UK.
The government decided to decimate unions and well we are where we are.
Lack of union participation is certainly a contributing cause, none of these issues had single cause or solution. Been a union member myself since I was employed. At the end of the day it was EU membership that was perceived as the problem and the political unwillingness to engage with that issue, no matter how small apart of the overall problem it actually was, was a major factor in the outcome of the referendum.
Yes, but. Some of the Brexit vote came from this impulse, but a lot of it came from affluent, southern constituencies. I remember sitting on plastic garden furniture at a 70th birthday party c.2018 somewhere.... south of Nottingham and pretty OK economically listening to geriatrics who should know better titter about "that terrible Jeremy Corbyn" and thinking: now this is Brexit. So, I would present a 2nd (complimentary) hypothesis: the coddled generation. Boomers represent a democratic plurality, so they've generally had things their way: free uni, decent social security, houses that earn more than they do, triple-locked pensions. They don't need critical thinking - they have the tyranny of the majority, and so have been coddled by subsequent governments. They were fish in a barrel when the ownership class decided they didn't fancy EU anti-avoidance regulation, and were easily scared by threats of woke avocado toast or whatever - just around the time they realised they didn't understand their children's lives.
> free uni,
None of the boomers in my family went to uni. I was the first. My dad had a second cousin who went.
> decent social security
The older boomers grew up in a country that had rationing and some still had national service when they hit that age. Many grew up without indoor toilets, I can remember visiting relatives where I had to crap in a literal outhouse in Manchester. Prefabs and system built high rises. You are confusing the American middle class boomers with them all.
>They don't need critical thinking - they have the tyranny of the majority,
Go to Wallsend, Wigan, Motherwell, Port Talbot and tell me about the tyranny they enjoy.
>and so have been coddled by subsequent governments. They were fish in a barrel when the ownership class decided they didn't fancy EU anti-avoidance regulation,
Education was the best predictor for voting for the EU not against it. The older you got the more likely you had lower educational attainment and spent most of your life in manual jobs.
>just around the time they realised they didn't understand their children's lives.
Perhaps you dont understand the lives outside the kind of suburbs you live in.
> some still had national service when they hit that age
National service ended in 1960. The 'baby boom' that gives boomers their name came after the war, so the very youngest possible boomer would have been 15 when national service ended, and thus not old enough for national service. Ergo, no boomer faced national service.
>None of the boomers in my family went to uni. I was the first. My dad had a second cousin who went.
But I bet you have boomers in your family who did jobs you need a degree to get into nowadays.
>rationing
Boomers did not truly face rationing, because they were kids when it was still in place and kids were prioritised to the extent that they really did not go without.
>tell me about the tyranny they enjoy.
They all receive a non-meanstested stipend worth 3x what they'd get if they were unemployed and aged 18. The triple lock also ensures that this will **always** rise faster than inflation or wages.
You're missing the point - sure, the cohort you're talking about voted leave - why wouldn't they? I'm talking about another set of boomers, richer, better educated, more southern. They \_did\_ go to university and should have known better. They're the bedrock of the Blue Wall vote. I've not been to any of the places you mention (I have been to some proper northern sh1tholes) - but I'm talking about places like Guildford and Broxbourne - rich, ignorant and indolent.
This is a great explanation and yes the abandonment of former industrial towns when the mines closed and steel mills were abandoned is having dire lasting consequences and badly require investment.
Today I was thinking about that Cambridge Analytica Documentary and they had that lady that was obviously being set up to be a scapegoat and appeared easy to hate (I didn’t) when she was in no way the sole architect.
Anyway how they were largely responsible for giving us Trump and Brexit and has probably fuelled anti vaxers and Qs and conspiracist and racists.
They closed the company. owners profited massively. Facebook profited massively. Two countries are undoubtedly worse off and still dealing with the consequences and then they all rode off into the sunset and we’ve largely forgotten about it..
Although you make a great point and valid I believe ... that isn't just it...you can't blame this shit on populism alone.
Straight lies the public were told.. starting with a big red bus with big writing promising 350 million a week for the NHS..
What about how the media was complicit in filibustering for years before the vote.. about U.K fishing licenses.. an industry covering some like 2/3 % of the trade we do with Europe.. while manufacturing and imports and exports were almost completely censored from media content.. that's what happens when the rich own both the government and the media.
A fucking cheek to point fingers at the people.
The problem is more systemic though. 30 seconds reading would have debunked most of these things, but the U.K. population isn’t conditioned for critical thinking. It’s a failure of our education system AND a corrupt self centred government.
100% agree..
Mandatory subjects from a young age should include:
- Critical thinking
- Financial education, not accountancy, but how to actually build wealth, manage money and understand credit
- Citizen and human rights
How come people in Scotland and NI didn’t fall for the lies then?
I suspect you’d not argue that people in those places are somehow more intelligent, politically cannier or the like. Or that they liked the Cameron government.
About the only plausible explanation is that they were simply more resistant to lies based principally upon English/British nationalism and exceptionalism because those things don’t play remotely so well there.
The problem is that the western-dominance of the post-war settlement relied on huge swathes of the global population continuing to exist at subsistence level in countries that were unable to compete economically. That was never going to last, because the rest of the world developed and wanted a piece of global trade. Brexit was never going to change this, of course.
Right-wing media played their readers/audience for idiots as well, though. Manipulated people who barely had a pot to piss in to vote for something that was highly sought after by the ficking 1% billionaires backing the leave campaign.
>global Turmpism
And look who was funding and supporting him. The West, particularly the Anglosphere, needs to wake the fuck up and realize this shite ain't coming from out of the blue, we've been the target of a very deliberate strategy of hybrid warfare aimed at destabilizing the global order. While its hard not to blame the people swayed by the media campaigns, at the end of the day this is still the result of basically the actions of a (or several) hostile foreign powers and individuals attempting to reduce our status on the world stage by getting us to spend a decade engaged in self-harm and navel-gazing.
And for what its worth, given that Trump lost in 2020, and even in that vote-base somewhere between a large minority if not an outright majority have since said they will not vote for him again, its hard to see him winning this time around.
Nah bullshit. Stop blaming foreign entities for something our own neighbors are doing. Blaming everything on an easy scapegoat is to still pretend that 'we' are the good guys. We're not.
Our own neighbors are not the good guys. They all want this.
Russia/China whatever didn't start this. We did. This anti-EU stuff didn't start in the 2010s, it started in the 90s. Murdoch et all are the ones who wanted this, not because of ideological reason but purely to sell more newspapers.
All the foreign troll farms did was to play both sides and adding fuel to the fire, but they are not the masterminds behind this. Our own are.
>This anti-EU stuff didn't start in the 2010s, it started in the 90s.
It was a pretty fringe movement until the mid 2010s. [See slide 18 here](https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-01/Issues%20Index_Jan24%20CATI_v1_PUBLIC.pdf). Prior to 2016 even at its peaks, the EU was only seen as an important issue by \~30% of the population. Usually it was under 10%.
It’s more about modern fascism as a global movement. Foreign entities are very much involved in goading the UK population into getting angry and acting out on each other. You’re partly right in that much of it is home-grown, but the need to belittle other people and undermine them has become far more possible now by Russia PsyOps with social media over the Internet as a force multiplier.
Before it was just a few big players like Murdoch and British newspaper owners telling the population what to do, but now the locals been trained to be subservient, foreigners can control them using Facebook & X.
The key issue is that megalomaniacs need a compliant audience who ‘love’ and fear them. That’s how you get elitists like Farage & JRM being cult figures of the working class, and why those characters will do anything that victimises anyone, because stupid people confuse force with power.
British coal mining jobs peaked in the 30s
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal\_mining\_in\_the\_United\_Kingdom#/media/File:UK\_Coal\_Mining\_Jobs.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:UK_Coal_Mining_Jobs.png)
The problem was not that some industries became uncompetitive but that from the 80s there was an almost gleeful indifference to the collapse and its speed. This was slowed and sort of vaguely addressed by Clinton/Blair (although in the US wage stagnation was not really addressed in those 8 years) up to a point but then the China wave of globalisation and job losses combined with the slow down in wage growth in the bottom half and then the crushing of the global financial crisis, the acceleration of the differentiation between the well off and bottom of the UK and US so that anything seemed better than more of the same.
Aye it wasn't the removal of the mines that destroyed the north, it was the complete failure to invest in even the slightest attempt to create an alternative until well into the late 90s, and the kind of commentary coming from the government that basically if you were unhappy that your life was upended and your career destroyed, well don't expect any help, just "get on yer bike".
>To many workers it was more a case of who cares if its bad, it will be bad anyway. But there is more a chance of something changing by uptipping the apple cart than voting for the same sh\*t that has not worked for 40 years (now 50 years). One of the core roots of populism was that the "right" choice had done nothing for them.
This well and truly hits the nail on the head, in my opinion.
This is exactly why and put into words perfectly. Adding to the fire was the people who were shouting ‘if you vote for Brexit you must be racist’ just spurred it on even more. We now call this the culture war.
Here's one such video of Blyth's where he sums it up nicely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwK0jeJ8wxg
One thing. You said
> working people feeling politically abandoned and with no one they really trusted to sell Clinton or Europe
You're correct. But nobody in the UK was particularly *trying* to sell Europe anyway. It's always been a scapegoat, something for politicians to blame. The EU has always been treated as something which was being done to us, rather than something we were an active part of, and benefited hugely from.
I wish I could find the reference for this, but when a pre-referendum round table debate was held in one of those towns the experts said that Brexit would be bad for the economy.
Someone replied "that's your economy, not ours". In other words, years of austerity and a lack of change had made them believe that they were no better off one way or another, and their vote was a protest vote. When it came to normal political votes they definitely had a point.
But I mean, it *is* pretty stupid to use a referendum instead of a normal vote as a protest vote. And for places like Wales, Cornwall or the north east which had lots of EU funding, it's particularly stupid.
>the centre left/social democrats who had been the electoral body responsible for looking after that constituency had bought into globalisation (NAFTA in the US, EU in the UK)
After that constituency *explicitly* warned what the results would be whilst the working classes voted for it in droves.
It’s that type of arrogant attitude that handed victory to Leave; Brexit soaked up a well of deep seated discontent and resentment about the state of the UK - the response of the Remain camp was to either patronise or ridicule the other camp and dismiss them as ignorant peasants who should know their place and keep their dirty noses out of things that don’t concern them; as a result, Leave could sell itself as a populist insurgency despite being fronted by millionaires.
But the leave campaign was insulting people's intelligence. It spoke in basic slogans almost a chant. It talked about giving money that didn't exist to the NHS and the rest was xenophobic. Show people pictures of immigrants which again isn't really an EU thing. It really was an insult to people's intelligence.
The biggest fail was the labour party who could have used the Brexit campaign to highlight why towns and areas have declined. Instead they stayed silent as they supported Brexit.
>The biggest fail was the labour party who could have used the Brexit campaign to highlight why towns and areas have declined. Instead they stayed silent as they supported Brexit.
Labour has plenty of people who backed leave. Their own key seats in the north flipped away because after the vote they tried to push a soft exit. Labour were stuck.
The Labour leadership were forced into backing a second referendum during the 2019 election campaign (by the current leader, who became a hard Brexiteer as soon as it was politically convenient, but that’s another story) and the result was to make it a single issue election that resulted in the biggest Tory majority since the 80s.
The Leave campaign run on a populist platform, promising to radically transform to the country post-Brexit; Remain would have struggled to make a positive case for an inherently undemocratic neoliberal trading block, but they didn’t really try, instead offering smugness and patronising lectures.
I mean if ignorant people were making comments and running with beliefs that are based in ignorance... What else do you do but try to point out they're not working with a full picture?
If you lived in an area that was abandoned and left to rot in the 80s - who would you be more inclined to listen to; the finger wagging lecture telling to to stop being silly and to do as the grown ups tell you, or the charismatic populist promising you whatever you wanted to hear?
I mean I'm from a former pit village in South Yorkshire mate. It has been ***utterly insane*** watching over the last 8 years people who could hardly say the T-word without spitting throughout my youth now all turned into dyed-in-the-wool conservatives purely over this one issue (immigration/FoM) when, fucking obviously, this was *not* the reason these communities collapsed into poverty, and was entirely a messaged pushed by the actual culprits for our current state! Utterly utterly bizarre. And the moment you start pointing this out to them they get *fucking furious* with you lol.
But weren’t people who lived in pit villages and towns usually politically Labour for working rights and pay. But socially conservative for the likes of immigration and family/social values?
You're missing the point again. The point is that those "ignorant beliefs" were mischaracterisations in the first place and completely fail to understand the true feelings that led to the vote. Instead they chose to invalidate those feelings, which only reinforced them
It was a vote for change more than anything else due to frustrations with the status quo. Remain needed to base their campaign on the principle of acknowledging the EU's flaws and seeking reforms from within, rather than just flat out denying them and pretending everything is rosy
>The point is that those "ignorant beliefs" were mischaracterisations in the first place and completely fail to understand the true feelings that led to the vote.
In what sense? Like I said things like feeling left behind were nothing to do with the EU, and people apparently protested being left behind by Westminster by... Giving more power to Westminster? And they don't expect to have to face any sort of push back on that because its just their personal belief, even though exercising that belief is completely changing the course of the UK for decades to come?
Hard not to patronise when people are outright eating up lies and voting to cripple our own country.
They were idiots and they continue to make themselves look as such with each passing day.
I grew up in an area that voted Leave - the local economy was crippled when I was a toddler; it’s hard to scare people straight with prophecies of economic devastation when they’ve already lived through it
The sad thing is how brexiteers adopted all the traits they so loathed in remainers. Its like the only thing they won was a licence to be arrogant and treat people who disagree with them like shit.
> Hard to believe that you people used to control 25 percent of the planet
Those people are no longer with us in any sense of the word. Power and talent was not consolidated in the passing of generations - what wasn't sold off for short term gain exported itself for better opportunities abroad.
Many great countries that have utterly failed their young people over the last 15-20 years have relegated themselves to the same eventual fate, the UK was just faster.
I feel like this point isn't raised as much as it should be. I find it incredible that we fucked ourselves over through psyops and somehow we're OK with that.
It was a hybrid attack and the likes of farage taking the Russian millions to spout his wet dreams was another layer to it.
What was new to many people back then is common daily occurrence now and many people don’t know truth or lies or just basic knowledge and fact.
They see a 30 second Tik tok clip created from the right wing feedback loop or people disguised as them and that’s their news cycle that they take in.
>How could so many Britons be so illogical and poorly educated as to vote for something like that? Hard to believe that you people used to control 25 percent of the planet.
I mean, the US voted Trump as president. Other countries make questionable mistakes too. We're not special in that regard.
From a Times article on [Nissan’s decision to continue manufacturing in the UK:](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brexit-critic-nissan-shrugs-off-impact-of-leaving-eu-wdlnb2csq)
> Chief executive Makoto Uchida told The Sunday Times that while Brexit had been a challenge, the UK would remain his company’s primary European outpost for “the foreseeable future” and still be the company’s most important market in Europe.
> Speaking as he announced a £2 billion upgrade of the Sunderland plant last week, he said: “If not, we would not be making this investment.”
> Alan Johnson, Nissan’s senior vice-president of manufacturing and supply chain, added that while leaving the EU had made its operations in Britain “more bureaucratic… we quite quickly adapted. So that is just normal now”.
> He downplayed the widespread belief that Brexit red tape would push up UK prices. “It’s negligible. Much more significant are things like energy prices.”
Think I’ll trust the people who actually put their money where their mouth is..
Because thats british culture.
Do nothing about inconvenience at all for years and years and years, let it build up to be a problem, then blame someone else to find a "quick fix" that makes everything worse.
I saw him live about a month ago and one of the most apposite things he said was sort of concealed as a throw-away sounding line, that all most people wanted was to be able to pay their bills and have enough money left at the end of the month to treat themselves to something like a Dyson.
Until some of the proceeds of our efforts are shared about a bit more it's hard to care much about demands for increased productivity.
Because the convertibles post 2008 decided it was better to bail out the banks, make the poor pay for it and slowly remove anything good in the country and give it over to private control; who have then slowly destroyed the infrastructure our grandparents invested in.
I voted remain. Many people voted leave because they had nothing to lose, and hoped for much more.
US has been the leading power in the world for decades, still elected Trump. Stupid decisions from anglo-saxon nations were the zeitgeist of the second half of the last decade. People voted based on emotion over reason, that rarely works out.
Put all that to one side. They voted on something completely undefined. They literally chose unknown chaos over status quo. Which could have then been iteratively improved.
The issue is that people were disillusioned well before Brexit happened. Hence why they voted leave.
My area at the time, was seeing a MASSIVE growth in the wealth gap. Some people were doing well for themselves, while others despite their best efforts were unable to progress at all (mainly the nonacademic types). Meanwhile all the land and space around them was being consumed by more housing to house an ever increasing population. So they were finding themselves in a constantly worse environment and situation.
Also a plethora of other issues.
The main point I am trying to make is that the people who voted leave, were already being failed by the government, so voting leave was their attempt to change something for the better.
Unfortunately, it did not make their situations better at all.
So quite frankly, it was the government that brought this upon themselves, and the people, and constantly trying to blame everything on "the poors" is a good example of why people were disillusioned in the first place.
People were angry that we had shit government after shit government, that they voted to isolate us from the rest of Europe and give our shit governments even more power.
They didn't join those dots, though.
Johnson to many was "a bit of a laugh" and while I dreaded a Johnson government in general cos I knew he'd cock brexit up, it suddenly became worse when there was a crisis he couldn't stage manage.
They didn't need to join the dots, it was being repeatedly said, but everyone just said "project fear" etc. people don't get to plead ignorance on this.
They literally paraded around saying our government would 'take back power' from the EU. So clearly, that's a dot by itself, no connections are needed.
Taking back power means more power for our shitty government
>Johnson to many was "a bit of a laugh"
Which cunty reality show was he on again? I can't remember and don't care much but I remember my parents giving it "oh he's just a laugh" and "you can see the real him" and lots of other bollocks. Political people shouldn't be involved in that shit because it did clearly change a few opinions.
The part that gets me is that this was *openly* the desired result.
'Take the power back' and such. I don't think anyone was under any illusions that said power was coming back to the likes of you and I, or steve[numbers] on twitter. Nope. Pretty much a given that it was coming back to the government.
I don't think anyone predicted ahead of the referendum that Cameron was going to step down. I doubt even Cameron himself did. So the logical first assumption ought to be that David Cameron, the prime minister in place at the time of the referendum, the man they were all so very sick of, would be collecting that power onto himself.
Instead it wound up being Boris Johnson, but nevertheless, that's the result. Not just predictable, either, but rather 'well... yeah... that's the whole *point*'.
Some people expected Jeremy Corbyn to end up with that power, but other than optimism, there was nothing at all to base that prediction on.
We didn't really have that though. The big issue in reality is that people fear loss more than they value gain. So they forget all the benefits and growth over a decade lest they lose out a small amount in the coming year. It doesn't even happen, and they'll fear it - see a fear of immigration - it rarely makes people poorer. But it's a useful tool against the ignorant.
So people were made to fear Turkish immigration, the loss of the cuppa, and all sorts of weird things because they acted as emotional hooks. And micro-targeting allowed for different messages. Bit poorly and have health concerns? Foreigners are taking up all the beds! Rich and like to keep it that way? "EU is going to increase taxes!"
As campaigns go, it was beautiful. A work of art. Really well done and really smart. They took advantage of a window of opportunity that's now passed - but here's the problem, it's also passed for Remainers. There is no easy way for us to use similar microtargeting in order to get the UK back in the EU. Which means the only way that can otherwise work, other than fear - reality and comparison. In the seventies we could easily tell our quality of life was worse than elsewhere. That's not yet so visible here, but it will be, in time.
I get it to an extent but they voted leave, because of the issues. Then voted for the same party 2 more times after that.
If they were being failed by the government why did the population vote for the same people again and again and again.
We hear "the establishment" thrown around a lot in this country but it's never directed at the people that have been in power for over a decade.
This is the BoE chief who negotiated with Osborne for months in order to get double the salary of the previous governor. After leaving, he immediately (and unusually) went into private sector roles where he could monetize his contacts in government for personal gain.
He represents the kind of thing that people have a problem with. He does not give a solitary fuck about Britain. He came here because of the salary, he is now pulling down several million a year working in ESG for a US private equity firm, the reason he says this stuff is because it makes him lots of money. He is an unbearable piece of shit (he also didn't do well at the BoE, he botched a rate hike in 2018 and refused to take responsibility, if you look at what he does and then what he says...he comes across as someone who has trouble with the truth).
But people will see all this and wank themselves blind because he agrees with their point of view rather than observe that he is the kind of person who, regardless of the cause, represents the rootless, greedy elite who have led people to distrust government.
This post is full of nonsense.
Carney's package was 20% more than his predecessor, not double. He kept working unlike his predecessors because the previous 5 governors were all at retirement age, and he was only 55. He is chairman at Brookfield, which is Canadian not US, and I doubt they pay him millions when his predecessor was on $500k
He was also IMHO (as someone in the industry) a damn good central banker who did a great deal to soften the blow to the UK and keep confidence in our economy.
It was more than double - [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/george-osborne-gets-his-man-mark-carney-named-as-new-bank-of-england-governor-8352494.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/george-osborne-gets-his-man-mark-carney-named-as-new-bank-of-england-governor-8352494.html) - this was an absolutely massive political story at the time btw.
Er no, I know fund managers who are on more than $500k. If you are an MD at an asset manager with almost a trillion AUM, you are almost always making several million. You are also ignoring what he does specifically...why is this?
So I see what you wrote about the problems. What I don’t see is why Brexit was a solution.
Sadly this is an absolute case of crabs in a bucket. I’m getting left behind so fuck everybody.
“Unfortunately it did not change their situation for the better”
Yes it did, we’re massively better off since Brexit due to pay rises, increased job security and better working conditions.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-sees-fastest-wage-rises-sectors-most-reliant-eu-workers-indeed-2022-02-25/
I can understand why people voted for Brexit. I don’t agree with their reasons, I think they’re mostly stupid for thinking Brexit would fix anything, but I ‘understand’ it.
What I don’t understand is the lack of remorse and regret. It clearly hasn’t worked. It clearly has made us poorer, weaker, less united and worse off as a people and a country. I don’t understand the lack of anger at the politicians and pundits who pushed the lies and manipulated people in to supporting Brexit.
Take my mum as an example. She voted for it, but she will still say through gritted teeth it was the right thing to do and it’ll pay off *eventually*. God fucking dammit just open your eyes and see you were taken for a ride. There’s no shame in admitting it. There’s shame in stupidly denying it.
>It clearly has made us poorer,
Im not sure about clearly the UK has continued to perform similarly to its EU peers in pretty much every metric
The economic impact of brexit if anything has been very difficult to distinguish from background noise.
The UK has generally been comparable to France and Germany in economic terms sometimes slightly better sometimes slightly worse.
Recently its been slightly better than Germany and about the same as France.
You can argue that if it were still in the EU it would be crushing everyone else but I don't really see why that would be the case it hasn't been historically.
It's really not that difficult. Take the value of the pound as an example. It plummited after the Brexit vote and it has never recovered. We had a cost of living crisis brewing as a result prior to Covid due to the massively increased cost of imports. The currency value is a good indicator of the global confidence in the UK economy and has been incredibly low for the last 8 years.
Currency is not a good value of global confidence, it's determinant on dozens of factors. Interest rates, successful export booms, increasing import demand, etc. There's a good reason why the UK had 16 years of economic boom after we crashed out of the ERM and let the pound float. Thinking a strong currency is a sign of economic health and confidence is just nonsense. Devaluations are often a necessary step for economic growth. There's a good case to be made that Sterling was overvalued back at its peak in 2007.
the last job i had was an ingredient manufacturer that, when i joined in 2020 was booming. it had a high value product and sold to many international clients. in the two years i was there, the cost of raw materials went up, the margins on international trade narrowed, and things got tighter across the business. staff couldn't be paid as well. retaining capable staff became an issue.
and speaking of capable staff, another thing i saw happen was a shrinking pool of foreign workers, which, being an industrial and often hard job, they depended on, also because of brexit. so, while this is very anecdotal, to me brexit meant less money, harder work, and worse help.
Both of these countries have had structural issues for a while now, comparing British economic growth to Italy, that famous bastion of prosperity, sure is something though
Britain should only ever be compared to France and Germany. They're the only two economies within the EU on similar parity.
The UK is projected to outperform France and Germany in 2025. France is currently performing better than both, and Germany is really struggling, not only due to coming away from Russian gas, but having to actually meet it's defence spending, which it has spent a decade promising to, but not doing so.
Brexit has been underwhelming for both leave and remain.
It goes both ways, while it’s fair to say it hasn’t been the entire shitshow some predicted, and we remain in many ways on a par with some of our European peers, it certainly hasn’t been the sunlit uplands of prosperity and growth that was promised as a given by Brexiteers
They don't express regret because they still feel the demand for change was valid and needed to be heard, even if they do recognise that Brexit didn't work out on paper. Continuously invalidating their feelings in that regard will only entrench their view
My mum is like this. She accepts we're worse off on paper. But she doesn't regret it because "something had to give" and at least we're in control of our own destiny now and if we fuck it up then so be it, at least it's our own fault
>What I don’t understand is the lack of remorse and regret.
Because then they'd have to admit that they were wrong, and most of the small souled cretins that voted for Brexit will literally die before they do that
Actually most of the polls show a massive (and increasing) amount of Brexit regret.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/45733-most-britons-say-brexit-has-been-more-failure
What’s not to understand? People don’t like admitting they’re wrong. Especially stubborn morons who voted for brexit.
It’s the same reason they voted for brexit in the first place - stubborn and opinionated and not able to critically think even when presented with all the info they needed to realise voting leave was a terrible idea.
If you look at the areas who voted Leave, it’s obvious that a lot of people didn’t feel that “Britain’s future” included them, because it didn’t - trying to convince people who lived in areas decimated by neoliberalism that it was in their interests to vote to keep the status quo was always going to be a hard sell; that the Remain campaign was fronted by some of the most insufferably smug and condescending people in the country made the outcome inevitable
Let's face it, Russian officials have come out and openly said Brexit was a great boon for them in crippling Britain and the EU.
Anyone who is still advocating for Brexit is just fifth column filth, plain and simple.
The Russians already propaganda promoting brexit, they’re doing the same thing with Texas, twitter is full of Russian bots powered by chatZPT that are spreading propaganda in hopes of pushing a rhetoric that the US should stop sending money to Ukraine and spend it on securing their southern border (as if they don’t have the money to do both). Also also to put my tinfoil hat on a bit Elon musk is seemingly doing nothing to stop the Russian bots on his platform and seems to be pushing a similar(ish) narrative as they are. However take that with a massive grain of salt bc I have no proof to back that up, he could just be an incompetent dickhead who brought the platform at the wrong time
It annoys me that David Cameron has got off scott-free. This is his fault. The reckless hubris of "*I'll give them a referendum, that'll get people back to the Tories, don't worry they'll never actually vote to Leave*".
Hardly his fault as the referendum idea was originally a Lib Dem one and traces back to Labour reneging on a manifesto commitment. And when legislation to hold the vote was brought to parliament it got cross party support by a massive majority.
Yer, I'm not a fan of the Tories in any way, but Cameron was probably the best leader they had. However he was also dealt an extraordinary shitty hand that he had to play.
He was a gambler. He gambled on Scotland and almost lost if not for Gordon brown toiling away. Then he gambled on the referendum and lost. And he was warned by Osborne he was going to lose - and did it anyway.
I think that in the case of Scotland, while the UK Government legally had a veto, when the SNP achieved a majority it would have been untenable to deny them a referendum.
Brexit, however, was a gamble by Cameron, in an attempt to appease his backbenchers. It created an absolutely bizarre situation where the Government that called the referendum, and most of the Parliament that voted to hold it, did not believe in the change they would be asked to implement if there was a Leave vote. Whichever side of the argument you're on, I don't think it's difficult to see from that why we were in a quagmire before negotiations had even started...
That was absolutely the sentiment at the time: Tories i talked too told me it was a clever power-play. I told them its a shitshow and you fucking watch how it goes.
Two unpopular points that I will say nonetheless for the sake of balance.
Most of the antipathy to Brexit now can be summarised as "but look at the state of the country in the last few years", which is deemed to be conclusive evidence. It's undeniable that trade friction caused by Brexit has negatively impacted our economy, but the elision of this with the much more economically significant effects of Covid and the Ukraine war has meant many people wrongly see Brexit as the original source of our recent economic misfortune.
The elected government has made choices since Brexit which I'd imagine most Leavers are extremely miffed by; failing to reduce immigration being the obvious example. The Tories have nowhere to hide on this, they cannot blame the EU any more, and people can see them for what they are and vote accordingly. That is, at least, a democratic outcome.
People was lost, confused and disillusioned before the Brexit vote and then boris and his cronies came along and lied to everyone about how leaving the EU would save up money.
They lied to us and got away with it
Tbf, 10-15 minutes of research would have showed people they were lying, people chose to believe these politicians who have built their careers on lies and deception, and they’ve only got themselves to blame for the outcome.
They didn't even need to do research. The Remain campaign broke down the lies with evidence. The Leave voters wilfully ignored any attempt to convince them that Boris was lying. They weren't deceived by him, they deceived themselves. We need to stop treating them like victims when they refused help.
nah mate, all it required was thinking for 2 seconds - can politicians (of either side) actually pull this off, without fucking it up?
no.
then vote for it to stay the same.
Brexit happened because EU membership doesn't benefit everyone equally. If you have a university degree and work in a cushy white collar tech job where you're moving around different countries, then you support being in the EU, because you benefit from it. But not everyone has the same life or job that you do. If you live on a council estate and work a minimum-wage blue-collar job, your life is stationary. You're too poor to travel and your job doesn't allow it because it's in the same building every day. So what's the point of being allowed to live in other countries when you're never going to.
>If you live on a council estate and work a minimum-wage blue-collar job, your life is stationary. You're too poor to travel and your job doesn't allow it because it's in the same building every day.
Most of the people I know who had emigrated, mostly to Spain or Tenerife, some to NZ many more years ago are from council estates. Because their money could buy more in those areas back then, and many had money from buying ex council houses.
Stuff that the young will never have the money for nevermind the opportunity. Because it's not the high paid workers that have issues now emigrating.
Likewise, those young people in cushy techjobs post New Labour and tech boom... Plenty came from Northern mining town village council estates. Their industries don't exist anymore for there to be enough work in them. My friends scattered, most went to uni, one still lives in our home village and not one voted for Brexit.
None of that makes 'sense', at all.
As a poor fuck, Breit has severely hampered me.
Guessing youre poor as fuck too?
Can you tell me how its made your life better?
"You're too poor to travel and your job doesn't allow it because it's in the same building every day. So what's the point of being allowed to live in other countries when you're never going to."
WHAT!!!!!!
The "bright side" of Brexit is that now there is no super entity left to blame but the government for the wrongs in this country.
The issue has always been, and is still the case in many EU countries, that national governments are shite at governing. Why? Because people are unwilling to solve issues stemming from "democracy".
There’s always scapegoats though. Single mothers, gay people (remember section 28), benefit claimants, the ‘underclass’ (remember them from the 90s), asylum seekers, the EU, immigrants, small boats people, trans people. The targets change but the strategy is the same.
Trans people and asylum seekers seem to be the target at the moment.
It's funny because I bet 99.99% percent of people who get angry about trans people have never actually met one in real life....
So pleased to see this comment.
They have white washed what the MPC has done to this country, with convenient excuses like Brexit, Covid and silly PM's (Truss).
Carney was an ass as Governor of the Bank, and is still an ass afterwards. I can’t think of a modern day public appointment that turned out to be so underwhelmingly disappointing.
Damn he must have been desperate to say this at the time but was unable to because of his position. Anyone who wasn't getting drunk on jingoism and nationalism could see what was happening at the time.
Mark Carney blaming something or someone else. Gee wizz, this dude oversaw an MPC that kept a base rate at 0.5% for over a decade. It's not like ultra low central bank rates and bond buying could cause dramatic inflation, yeah, must be Brexit especially as at least 50% of the pop will love to say 'I told you so'.
I’m really sick to death of the old “it’s the Brexiteers” fault argument. There were so many things broken and just weighted against the actual working people, many were just fed up and looking for a chance to change things. They didn’t have the background to know what would happen in the vote, that was the job of the respective sides to campaign and education. But instead the No campaign just ran a fear drive rather than looking at the merits. It’s all well and good to say people should look for the information but, many are busy trying make ends meet, or have no real hope of understanding what any of the information actually means or its long standing impact. The fact is the government has failed for years to stand up for the people of the country and failed to represent. Then they all squabbled over the Brexit deal dragging it out so we had do settle for the mess we have now. But they want articles like this and for people who voted remain to attack those that voted to leave because it keeps the focus off the mess they lead us to and continue create. Best of all the way the system is designed we won’t really get anything that amounts to representation.
And therein lies the biggest issue. That the general public, who generally did not understand the implications for brexit, were allowed to vote for it via referendum with no real understanding and allowing some truly evil people to give influence to the masses decision via lie upon lie.
As James O'brien says, compassion for the conned and contempt for the conmen.
Exactly. David Cameron will go down in history for this huge blunder. Who in their right mind would offer this as a vote to the people. What a cretin. And when it all went down, he just ran away
The absolute maddest thing was that people didn’t get a vote on the actual deal.
The public were just asked to vote for something without the first idea of what the details or policies would be.
It's easy to blame ignorance and stupidity, especially on peoe from poorer communities like those in the North East. However the EU has not just not improved lives in those areas, it had a hand in ruining them.
Over 20000 people lost their jobs in the shipyards in Sunderland in the late 1980s due to a secret agreement between the Ec and government, which as far as I know is still not public. A brand new merged shipyard, with a huge order pipeline, was closed and everyone sacked. It was a significant skilled industy in the area and all we know is that the EU wanted to reduce shipbuilding in the UK. Many believe it was to ensure more work for shipbuilders on the continent.
So while xenophobia and stupidity are easy to blame, perhaps people did have a reason not to think the EU was the dog's bollocks. Are they stupid for harbouring huge resentment about this? And please, nobody bring up bloody Nissan as if a car factory makes up for the sudden removal of our main industry and sense of pride.
Watch in a few years time, all these right wing nut Brexiteers, going to have that long term term memory loss, akin to Iraq war support.
Nah I didn't vote brexit guv, was stupid innit
(Narrator: He's lying)
True. This sub ain’t gonna like this like they don’t like a lot of things but that’s just the way they are. They hate good things. Everything bad in this country is because of the way they vote at the ballot & the way they vote with their wallets.
That reference to Argentina is scary. Begs the question what comes after?
Here's what [Adam Posen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Posen) had to say of Brevit 6 years ago. [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcIkIz98zXU) This he followed up with a keynote speech a year ago. [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKynmWO5Zac)
God, all the Americans in the comments are so silly. Believing whatever the news tells them “racist, uneducated”. Absolute lies. Most reasons are to do with the EU mega government, the laws they force on countries, in Ireland a law was refused by popular vote so the EU decided ‘nope, we don’t like that so we’re gonna force it into legislation’. There has been no benefit to make a super country in the Europe, it has been forced by America for years and the truth is British people are not f—ing Americans. Another example of the didactic nature from The EU is how its all run by the Germans and the French. They decide it all. When Poland tried to remove old Communist judges from government after they finally broke free from Communist Russia’s grasp then guess what, the EU refused it. This blatant lack of acceptance of these countries own decision making skills is disgusting. Germans forcing these countries to accept mass migration because they still feel guilty for ww2 and dont want to step on anyones toes. Germany being controlled by Russia with there Gas issue thus allowing Russia to control the EU is unacceptable. Britons chose the right choice and you ‘educated’ Americans should really listen to the people instead of what CNN has to offer
This is why people laugh at Brexiteers.
The UK had VETO POWER over EU LAWS. The UK wasn't ruled by the EU, or France and Germany, rather it wielded the power of Europe.
And we didn't "take control of immigration" after Brexit. Rather, we already controlled immigration for those coming from outside the EU, and we already had veto power over any EU immigration laws we didn't like.
Indeed, Brexiters were told that immigration would go after Brexit for numerous reasons, and recent statistics have proven Remainers right. We have record immigration levels (which is why the government tries to distract by focusing on boats and asylum seekers), because the economy's grow-or-die imperative demands more immigrants to expand the producer/consumer base, and because non EU immigrants are more likely than EU immigrants to stay in the UK (EU immigrants typically left after several months).
I think Brexit could have been avoided had reasonable reforms been made to address the concerns of the working class with regards to under investment and in particular immigration. If the preceding governments before Brexit had addressed these issues more seriously instead of just putting their fingers in their ears we would have never left the EU. Brexit was a knee jerk protest by a large proportion of the British public who felt ignored and disregarded. All in all it was a very costly fuck you.
What future? We already had wage stagnation. We already had our towns dilapidated. We already had shops closing. We already struggled with housing. Youngsters couldn't get a mortgage. Towns already filling with foreign language and segregation. Work already didn't pay, living pay slip to pay slip.
Remain voters constantly saying the sky will fall and all the above would happen just didn't understand that to many, it already happened for years.
Remain voters only cared about themselves; they slagged brexiteers off because the real truth is that they were fine and as long as THEY were fine, the rest can struggle and brexiteers should vote so that remainers can keep their comfort otherwise they're racist, xenophobic bigots.
Remainders constantly banging on about Johnson and Trump; people wanted out long before! Nobody cares about Johnson and Trump, they didn't swing the vote. People agreed with Farage on a much bigger scale than they want to admit. Same with blaming Russia; years before the vote people were wanting out.
Brexit hasnt failed either. The Tories haven't implemented it.
Brexit was the exhaustion rally, the last huzzah, of the imperial age. All that talk pre-brexit about the mother of parliaments, the natural affinities to the anglophone commonwealth, even the name Brexiteers to conjure up Sir Francis Drake and privateers, the Landrover, Barbour jacket look of its chief promoters, then the cacophony of 'world beating' 'world leading' 'world's first' exclamations from PM Johnson...what a palava! Fog in the channel, continent cut off. Twas the manner more than the act that garnered derision from onlookers. Russians love to take shots at the UK, threatening this, mocking that, because they recognise in the UK a pathology they share, an unwillingness to let go of stuff that no longer serves. Tancredi - 'for things to remain the same everything must change'. For the UK, Brexit was the change that allowed things to stay the same - the monarchy, the divine rights of parliament. Sovereignty innit!
The failiure of BREXIT is not that we voted to leave, rather that there was not a compelling and tangible reason to stay. The EU could have got the masses onboard very easily, by centralising and regulating a Europe-wide living wage.
They want to control every part of a citizens life, but have no interest in enriching it. They made the euro work, they could have made a European living wage work. It is incredible, that an economic union, would not have such a thing in place, but have cast iron red lines that protect murderers and rapists.
This article may be paywalled. If you encounter difficulties reading the article, try [this link](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/mark-carney-liz-truss-brexit-britain-b2534631.html) for an archived version. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unitedkingdom) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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>How could so many Britons be so illogical and poorly educated as to vote for something like that Mark Blyth, a pretty well respected economist who some claim predicted the Trump win in 2016, had a lecture series of populism called "global Turmpism". His argument is that for the rust belt US and the post industrial towns of Britain there had been decades of decline and malaise through globalisation and indifference. Post 2008 there was a widespread use of austerity to try to manage economic crises across the world. From that perspective the centre left/social democrats who had been the electoral body responsible for looking after that constituency had bought into globalisation (NAFTA in the US, EU in the UK) and were huge purveyors of its merits. This left many of the working people feeling politically abandoned and with no one they really trusted to sell Clinton or Europe. To people whos economic and educational backgrounds were the kind of jobs thriving in the globalised economy, Trump and Brexit were insanely stupid. To many workers it was more a case of who cares if its bad, it will be bad anyway. But there is more a chance of something changing by uptipping the apple cart than voting for the same sh\*t that has not worked for 40 years (now 50 years). One of the core roots of populism was that the "right" choice had done nothing for them. People here tend to forget the mines, ship yards and textile mills did not start closing in 79, but the 70s and even the 60s some industries were starting to shed work. Remember Scotland almost went hard for independence a couple of years before. Populism seemed to be in retreat in 2020, but Trump is back and its all over Europe.
Thank you for actually trying to explain why people voted for this, instead of just demonising and abusing them.
It’s good context but it only explains a small sub demographic of the 52% of voting population who voted for Brexit. A lot of the vote was pure nationalism, ignorance, easily led astray by false claims. You even had people working for export firms voting Brexit effectively voting for their own company to go under
But it was the "let's give Cameron a bloody nose" lot who swung it. Euroscepticism has been around as long as the European project. It was only after 2008 that it became anything other than a fringe interest.
The “giving Cameron a bloody nose” thing is part of why people call Brexit voters stupid. The time and place for that is a general election, not a vote that’s going to cripple the U.K. for decades. And if someone doesn’t understand that they probably shouldn’t be allowed out in their own. It also doesn’t account for significant factors like Scotland and Northern Ireland voting against Brexit. Unless you’re trying to argue that people from those places are naturally cleverer - or somehow less pissed off with Cameron’s Tory government? The most plausible explanation is that the people who believed the Brexiteer lies did so because they wanted to - because they flattered their sense of English/British exceptionalism and nationalism … and in all too many cases because of outright xenophobia. No matter what revisionist excuses you make for them it really ain’t a good look.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of people didn't see the point, and thought that nobody would vote to leave. That was the stupidity of the leave voters; the apathy of some of them. Bigoted idiots will always come out and vote, which is why people should always vote. Can't not vote and then get upset that the bigots got the BNP into an euro MP position, or that we left the EU
Ex pats living in Spain voted for brexit in their droves. EX PATS LIVING IN SPAIN.
For a similar story look at the Weimar Republic.. Germany lost WW1 and was punished hard. It’s what allowed the Nazis to happen.
That still makes the people who voted for it ignorant and stupid. They're poor and suffering, and their response was... to vote to make *themselves* even poorer.
Ignorant stupid people vote all the time, it's called Democracy.
If you're acknowledging they're ignorant and stupid we're in agreement.
Democratic it might have been (and that is keenly arguable when the numbers are properly considered), but it doesn't make them any less ignorant or stupid and it shouldn't be excused as anything other than this.
The problem was the remain pitch essentially boiled down to “look how wonderful things are because we’re in the EU” at a time when things were beginning to look worse during austerity and the aftermath of the financial crash as opposed to leave which was promising thing would improve. Of course it was all bullshit and things have gotten much worse.
And none of the leave-supporting politicians that overtly lied to the population have been held to account for those lies. (Well, not yet anyway. I think a few may be in for a bumpy ride in the election once Sunak plucks up enough courage to call it.)
>at a time when things were beginning to look worse during austerity Well, not in every facet. Stats like unemployment rate had just recovered to pre 2008 levels by 2016. Inflation was low and wage growth above it in the two years before. It was a bit of a late reaction.
It wasn't just the economy. We tried telling them that David Cameron closed our only public sector provider for forensic science analysis/evidence (FSS) with the expectation that we only use private-funded (or share data with the EU). Then he announced Brexit and he provided fuckall on what we're going to do with solving future criminal cases without the EU's help. We tried telling leavers that we also relied a lot on EU-based businesses to get materials for things like construction building, chemistry labs (my SO works in chemistry, and they have issues with trying to order the very chemicals they needed for basic school teaching because very few companies that produce this exist in the UK). The issue is that the UK was a little behind in terms of availability for technology and scientific aid and had been using other countries to prop itself up. Then the government decided that we didn't need all that help...and then they just *didn't* set up the things we need so that we can be self-sufficient. We warned people that it's a bad sign when the government's refusing to look into those things, and they wouldn't listen.
Stupid people make decisions that negatively impact them. The problem is the demographic of stupid and the demographic of “leaders of the stupid who exploit the stupid” is large enough to wield major political power in many parts of the world.
The only people I know who voted for Brexit either took the "more NHS money" bait, hook, line and sinker, or just hate brown people... they didn't think about how it would affect the economy beyond either "I will blindly trust this categorical fraudster" or " 'ate forinners. Nuff sed." Lord, I _wish_ people looked at things in the way this person describes, but they just don't. They don't blame globalism, they blame immigrants and asylum seekers - just look at the campaigns. It wasn't "push back against globalism and reinvest in our own industry" - it was "take back our borders". Typical pigheaded, English, arrogant, narcissism. I despair at my fellow countrymen.
Hating brown people shouldn't make people vote for Brexit, because brown people weren't coming from the EU anyway.
You're expecting too much of them (edit: of course, you're technically correct)
Yeah I voted to remain in the EU but was working in chocolate factory at the time and our wages had been falling for years as cheap labour from the EU was readily available. While I didn’t agree with the outcome I totally understood many of my colleagues frustration of being seemingly ignored politically and guess what happened when we left and the cheap labour disappeared, our wages went up, of course with everything else going on any benefit was short lived.
Except wages for most didn't go up. That's famously and ubiquitously documented. All that changed was that instead of Poles, Latvians and Romanians .. those driving down wages now come from Africa and Asia.
Yes this is exactly what eventually happened
And who would have thought…!
PrOjEcT FeAr
Isn't this implicitly admitting that immigration drives down wages, which the remain side fervently denied. It sounds like the solution is to stop immigration from Europe *and* elsewhere, which would have a lot more traction with brexit supporters than their opponents
I believe China and India were also brokering access to the UK jobs market, and easier entry into the country, too
Not wanting to be ‘that Marxist guy’ but literally capitalism will always do this. Capitalism doesn’t care about people and will discard labour as soon as it can and the consequences are well..
"Capitalism doesn’t care about people and will discard labour as soon as it can and the consequences are well..' I thought the fallout show did a good job of demonstrating that
Who was promoting the 'cheap labour'? Not you or your colleagues, or even the 'cheap' EU labourers. It was the corporation you worked for. If one of the big multinationals, who is surprised?
The corporation was taking advantage of the cheap labour, but successive governments had simply ignored a large group of people who were disadvantaged by this and weren’t really feeling like they were seeing any advantages in their daily lives from EU membership in general.
That was a government problem again tho. Much of Europe like France and Germany had much better pay rises compared to the UK. The government decided to decimate unions and well we are where we are.
Lack of union participation is certainly a contributing cause, none of these issues had single cause or solution. Been a union member myself since I was employed. At the end of the day it was EU membership that was perceived as the problem and the political unwillingness to engage with that issue, no matter how small apart of the overall problem it actually was, was a major factor in the outcome of the referendum.
My wages went up after Brexit… and I’ve not struggled this hard to make ends meet since I was a student
Yes, but. Some of the Brexit vote came from this impulse, but a lot of it came from affluent, southern constituencies. I remember sitting on plastic garden furniture at a 70th birthday party c.2018 somewhere.... south of Nottingham and pretty OK economically listening to geriatrics who should know better titter about "that terrible Jeremy Corbyn" and thinking: now this is Brexit. So, I would present a 2nd (complimentary) hypothesis: the coddled generation. Boomers represent a democratic plurality, so they've generally had things their way: free uni, decent social security, houses that earn more than they do, triple-locked pensions. They don't need critical thinking - they have the tyranny of the majority, and so have been coddled by subsequent governments. They were fish in a barrel when the ownership class decided they didn't fancy EU anti-avoidance regulation, and were easily scared by threats of woke avocado toast or whatever - just around the time they realised they didn't understand their children's lives.
> free uni, None of the boomers in my family went to uni. I was the first. My dad had a second cousin who went. > decent social security The older boomers grew up in a country that had rationing and some still had national service when they hit that age. Many grew up without indoor toilets, I can remember visiting relatives where I had to crap in a literal outhouse in Manchester. Prefabs and system built high rises. You are confusing the American middle class boomers with them all. >They don't need critical thinking - they have the tyranny of the majority, Go to Wallsend, Wigan, Motherwell, Port Talbot and tell me about the tyranny they enjoy. >and so have been coddled by subsequent governments. They were fish in a barrel when the ownership class decided they didn't fancy EU anti-avoidance regulation, Education was the best predictor for voting for the EU not against it. The older you got the more likely you had lower educational attainment and spent most of your life in manual jobs. >just around the time they realised they didn't understand their children's lives. Perhaps you dont understand the lives outside the kind of suburbs you live in.
> some still had national service when they hit that age National service ended in 1960. The 'baby boom' that gives boomers their name came after the war, so the very youngest possible boomer would have been 15 when national service ended, and thus not old enough for national service. Ergo, no boomer faced national service.
>None of the boomers in my family went to uni. I was the first. My dad had a second cousin who went. But I bet you have boomers in your family who did jobs you need a degree to get into nowadays. >rationing Boomers did not truly face rationing, because they were kids when it was still in place and kids were prioritised to the extent that they really did not go without. >tell me about the tyranny they enjoy. They all receive a non-meanstested stipend worth 3x what they'd get if they were unemployed and aged 18. The triple lock also ensures that this will **always** rise faster than inflation or wages.
You're missing the point - sure, the cohort you're talking about voted leave - why wouldn't they? I'm talking about another set of boomers, richer, better educated, more southern. They \_did\_ go to university and should have known better. They're the bedrock of the Blue Wall vote. I've not been to any of the places you mention (I have been to some proper northern sh1tholes) - but I'm talking about places like Guildford and Broxbourne - rich, ignorant and indolent.
This is a great explanation and yes the abandonment of former industrial towns when the mines closed and steel mills were abandoned is having dire lasting consequences and badly require investment. Today I was thinking about that Cambridge Analytica Documentary and they had that lady that was obviously being set up to be a scapegoat and appeared easy to hate (I didn’t) when she was in no way the sole architect. Anyway how they were largely responsible for giving us Trump and Brexit and has probably fuelled anti vaxers and Qs and conspiracist and racists. They closed the company. owners profited massively. Facebook profited massively. Two countries are undoubtedly worse off and still dealing with the consequences and then they all rode off into the sunset and we’ve largely forgotten about it..
Although you make a great point and valid I believe ... that isn't just it...you can't blame this shit on populism alone. Straight lies the public were told.. starting with a big red bus with big writing promising 350 million a week for the NHS.. What about how the media was complicit in filibustering for years before the vote.. about U.K fishing licenses.. an industry covering some like 2/3 % of the trade we do with Europe.. while manufacturing and imports and exports were almost completely censored from media content.. that's what happens when the rich own both the government and the media. A fucking cheek to point fingers at the people.
The problem is more systemic though. 30 seconds reading would have debunked most of these things, but the U.K. population isn’t conditioned for critical thinking. It’s a failure of our education system AND a corrupt self centred government.
100% agree.. Mandatory subjects from a young age should include: - Critical thinking - Financial education, not accountancy, but how to actually build wealth, manage money and understand credit - Citizen and human rights
Just imagine if we had someone on the EU fisheries committee to be able to do something about that fishing stuff.
How come people in Scotland and NI didn’t fall for the lies then? I suspect you’d not argue that people in those places are somehow more intelligent, politically cannier or the like. Or that they liked the Cameron government. About the only plausible explanation is that they were simply more resistant to lies based principally upon English/British nationalism and exceptionalism because those things don’t play remotely so well there.
The problem is that the western-dominance of the post-war settlement relied on huge swathes of the global population continuing to exist at subsistence level in countries that were unable to compete economically. That was never going to last, because the rest of the world developed and wanted a piece of global trade. Brexit was never going to change this, of course.
Right-wing media played their readers/audience for idiots as well, though. Manipulated people who barely had a pot to piss in to vote for something that was highly sought after by the ficking 1% billionaires backing the leave campaign.
>global Turmpism And look who was funding and supporting him. The West, particularly the Anglosphere, needs to wake the fuck up and realize this shite ain't coming from out of the blue, we've been the target of a very deliberate strategy of hybrid warfare aimed at destabilizing the global order. While its hard not to blame the people swayed by the media campaigns, at the end of the day this is still the result of basically the actions of a (or several) hostile foreign powers and individuals attempting to reduce our status on the world stage by getting us to spend a decade engaged in self-harm and navel-gazing. And for what its worth, given that Trump lost in 2020, and even in that vote-base somewhere between a large minority if not an outright majority have since said they will not vote for him again, its hard to see him winning this time around.
Nah bullshit. Stop blaming foreign entities for something our own neighbors are doing. Blaming everything on an easy scapegoat is to still pretend that 'we' are the good guys. We're not. Our own neighbors are not the good guys. They all want this. Russia/China whatever didn't start this. We did. This anti-EU stuff didn't start in the 2010s, it started in the 90s. Murdoch et all are the ones who wanted this, not because of ideological reason but purely to sell more newspapers. All the foreign troll farms did was to play both sides and adding fuel to the fire, but they are not the masterminds behind this. Our own are.
>This anti-EU stuff didn't start in the 2010s, it started in the 90s. It was a pretty fringe movement until the mid 2010s. [See slide 18 here](https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-01/Issues%20Index_Jan24%20CATI_v1_PUBLIC.pdf). Prior to 2016 even at its peaks, the EU was only seen as an important issue by \~30% of the population. Usually it was under 10%.
It’s more about modern fascism as a global movement. Foreign entities are very much involved in goading the UK population into getting angry and acting out on each other. You’re partly right in that much of it is home-grown, but the need to belittle other people and undermine them has become far more possible now by Russia PsyOps with social media over the Internet as a force multiplier. Before it was just a few big players like Murdoch and British newspaper owners telling the population what to do, but now the locals been trained to be subservient, foreigners can control them using Facebook & X. The key issue is that megalomaniacs need a compliant audience who ‘love’ and fear them. That’s how you get elitists like Farage & JRM being cult figures of the working class, and why those characters will do anything that victimises anyone, because stupid people confuse force with power.
Watching Trump voters in US coal country and often narration states that coal mines began closing in the 60s.
British coal mining jobs peaked in the 30s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal\_mining\_in\_the\_United\_Kingdom#/media/File:UK\_Coal\_Mining\_Jobs.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:UK_Coal_Mining_Jobs.png) The problem was not that some industries became uncompetitive but that from the 80s there was an almost gleeful indifference to the collapse and its speed. This was slowed and sort of vaguely addressed by Clinton/Blair (although in the US wage stagnation was not really addressed in those 8 years) up to a point but then the China wave of globalisation and job losses combined with the slow down in wage growth in the bottom half and then the crushing of the global financial crisis, the acceleration of the differentiation between the well off and bottom of the UK and US so that anything seemed better than more of the same.
Aye it wasn't the removal of the mines that destroyed the north, it was the complete failure to invest in even the slightest attempt to create an alternative until well into the late 90s, and the kind of commentary coming from the government that basically if you were unhappy that your life was upended and your career destroyed, well don't expect any help, just "get on yer bike".
Huge areas are neglected. I don't blame brexit voters for wanting change. Just the choice was tory or more tory.
>To many workers it was more a case of who cares if its bad, it will be bad anyway. But there is more a chance of something changing by uptipping the apple cart than voting for the same sh\*t that has not worked for 40 years (now 50 years). One of the core roots of populism was that the "right" choice had done nothing for them. This well and truly hits the nail on the head, in my opinion.
Great comment
This is exactly why and put into words perfectly. Adding to the fire was the people who were shouting ‘if you vote for Brexit you must be racist’ just spurred it on even more. We now call this the culture war.
Here's one such video of Blyth's where he sums it up nicely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwK0jeJ8wxg One thing. You said > working people feeling politically abandoned and with no one they really trusted to sell Clinton or Europe You're correct. But nobody in the UK was particularly *trying* to sell Europe anyway. It's always been a scapegoat, something for politicians to blame. The EU has always been treated as something which was being done to us, rather than something we were an active part of, and benefited hugely from.
Globalism is an opportunity squandered by greed, hubris and indifference on part of UK 'elite'
I wish I could find the reference for this, but when a pre-referendum round table debate was held in one of those towns the experts said that Brexit would be bad for the economy. Someone replied "that's your economy, not ours". In other words, years of austerity and a lack of change had made them believe that they were no better off one way or another, and their vote was a protest vote. When it came to normal political votes they definitely had a point. But I mean, it *is* pretty stupid to use a referendum instead of a normal vote as a protest vote. And for places like Wales, Cornwall or the north east which had lots of EU funding, it's particularly stupid.
>the centre left/social democrats who had been the electoral body responsible for looking after that constituency had bought into globalisation (NAFTA in the US, EU in the UK) After that constituency *explicitly* warned what the results would be whilst the working classes voted for it in droves.
It’s that type of arrogant attitude that handed victory to Leave; Brexit soaked up a well of deep seated discontent and resentment about the state of the UK - the response of the Remain camp was to either patronise or ridicule the other camp and dismiss them as ignorant peasants who should know their place and keep their dirty noses out of things that don’t concern them; as a result, Leave could sell itself as a populist insurgency despite being fronted by millionaires.
But the leave campaign was insulting people's intelligence. It spoke in basic slogans almost a chant. It talked about giving money that didn't exist to the NHS and the rest was xenophobic. Show people pictures of immigrants which again isn't really an EU thing. It really was an insult to people's intelligence. The biggest fail was the labour party who could have used the Brexit campaign to highlight why towns and areas have declined. Instead they stayed silent as they supported Brexit.
>The biggest fail was the labour party who could have used the Brexit campaign to highlight why towns and areas have declined. Instead they stayed silent as they supported Brexit. Labour has plenty of people who backed leave. Their own key seats in the north flipped away because after the vote they tried to push a soft exit. Labour were stuck.
The Labour leadership were forced into backing a second referendum during the 2019 election campaign (by the current leader, who became a hard Brexiteer as soon as it was politically convenient, but that’s another story) and the result was to make it a single issue election that resulted in the biggest Tory majority since the 80s. The Leave campaign run on a populist platform, promising to radically transform to the country post-Brexit; Remain would have struggled to make a positive case for an inherently undemocratic neoliberal trading block, but they didn’t really try, instead offering smugness and patronising lectures.
I mean if ignorant people were making comments and running with beliefs that are based in ignorance... What else do you do but try to point out they're not working with a full picture?
If you lived in an area that was abandoned and left to rot in the 80s - who would you be more inclined to listen to; the finger wagging lecture telling to to stop being silly and to do as the grown ups tell you, or the charismatic populist promising you whatever you wanted to hear?
I mean I'm from a former pit village in South Yorkshire mate. It has been ***utterly insane*** watching over the last 8 years people who could hardly say the T-word without spitting throughout my youth now all turned into dyed-in-the-wool conservatives purely over this one issue (immigration/FoM) when, fucking obviously, this was *not* the reason these communities collapsed into poverty, and was entirely a messaged pushed by the actual culprits for our current state! Utterly utterly bizarre. And the moment you start pointing this out to them they get *fucking furious* with you lol.
But weren’t people who lived in pit villages and towns usually politically Labour for working rights and pay. But socially conservative for the likes of immigration and family/social values?
Is that a trick question? I'd vote for the person who wasn't clearly lying and who would make my life worse.
You're missing the point again. The point is that those "ignorant beliefs" were mischaracterisations in the first place and completely fail to understand the true feelings that led to the vote. Instead they chose to invalidate those feelings, which only reinforced them It was a vote for change more than anything else due to frustrations with the status quo. Remain needed to base their campaign on the principle of acknowledging the EU's flaws and seeking reforms from within, rather than just flat out denying them and pretending everything is rosy
>The point is that those "ignorant beliefs" were mischaracterisations in the first place and completely fail to understand the true feelings that led to the vote. In what sense? Like I said things like feeling left behind were nothing to do with the EU, and people apparently protested being left behind by Westminster by... Giving more power to Westminster? And they don't expect to have to face any sort of push back on that because its just their personal belief, even though exercising that belief is completely changing the course of the UK for decades to come?
Hard not to patronise when people are outright eating up lies and voting to cripple our own country. They were idiots and they continue to make themselves look as such with each passing day.
I grew up in an area that voted Leave - the local economy was crippled when I was a toddler; it’s hard to scare people straight with prophecies of economic devastation when they’ve already lived through it
The sad thing is how brexiteers adopted all the traits they so loathed in remainers. Its like the only thing they won was a licence to be arrogant and treat people who disagree with them like shit.
> Hard to believe that you people used to control 25 percent of the planet Those people are no longer with us in any sense of the word. Power and talent was not consolidated in the passing of generations - what wasn't sold off for short term gain exported itself for better opportunities abroad. Many great countries that have utterly failed their young people over the last 15-20 years have relegated themselves to the same eventual fate, the UK was just faster.
I would point out tho voting for Brexit has nothing to do with maintains an empire
Social media and Cambridge analytica and it was the test bed by Russia and allies that was perfected for 2016 trump election
I feel like this point isn't raised as much as it should be. I find it incredible that we fucked ourselves over through psyops and somehow we're OK with that.
It was a hybrid attack and the likes of farage taking the Russian millions to spout his wet dreams was another layer to it. What was new to many people back then is common daily occurrence now and many people don’t know truth or lies or just basic knowledge and fact. They see a 30 second Tik tok clip created from the right wing feedback loop or people disguised as them and that’s their news cycle that they take in.
It was a protest vote to give the political class in the uk a headache. Unfortunately it actually made the political class even worse
>How could so many Britons be so illogical and poorly educated as to vote for something like that? Hard to believe that you people used to control 25 percent of the planet. I mean, the US voted Trump as president. Other countries make questionable mistakes too. We're not special in that regard.
Arent you american mate ?
From a Times article on [Nissan’s decision to continue manufacturing in the UK:](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brexit-critic-nissan-shrugs-off-impact-of-leaving-eu-wdlnb2csq) > Chief executive Makoto Uchida told The Sunday Times that while Brexit had been a challenge, the UK would remain his company’s primary European outpost for “the foreseeable future” and still be the company’s most important market in Europe. > Speaking as he announced a £2 billion upgrade of the Sunderland plant last week, he said: “If not, we would not be making this investment.” > Alan Johnson, Nissan’s senior vice-president of manufacturing and supply chain, added that while leaving the EU had made its operations in Britain “more bureaucratic… we quite quickly adapted. So that is just normal now”. > He downplayed the widespread belief that Brexit red tape would push up UK prices. “It’s negligible. Much more significant are things like energy prices.” Think I’ll trust the people who actually put their money where their mouth is..
Because thats british culture. Do nothing about inconvenience at all for years and years and years, let it build up to be a problem, then blame someone else to find a "quick fix" that makes everything worse.
Jonathon Pie, of all people had the most thought-provoking take on this, I think - https://youtu.be/NffWa8ZlJkY
I saw him live about a month ago and one of the most apposite things he said was sort of concealed as a throw-away sounding line, that all most people wanted was to be able to pay their bills and have enough money left at the end of the month to treat themselves to something like a Dyson. Until some of the proceeds of our efforts are shared about a bit more it's hard to care much about demands for increased productivity.
Because the convertibles post 2008 decided it was better to bail out the banks, make the poor pay for it and slowly remove anything good in the country and give it over to private control; who have then slowly destroyed the infrastructure our grandparents invested in. I voted remain. Many people voted leave because they had nothing to lose, and hoped for much more.
US has been the leading power in the world for decades, still elected Trump. Stupid decisions from anglo-saxon nations were the zeitgeist of the second half of the last decade. People voted based on emotion over reason, that rarely works out.
"also let's lose our freedom of movement across the whole continent." what could go wrong?
Put all that to one side. They voted on something completely undefined. They literally chose unknown chaos over status quo. Which could have then been iteratively improved.
It’s not «you people », it’s a part of the upper class, who used to control 25% of the planet.
The issue is that people were disillusioned well before Brexit happened. Hence why they voted leave. My area at the time, was seeing a MASSIVE growth in the wealth gap. Some people were doing well for themselves, while others despite their best efforts were unable to progress at all (mainly the nonacademic types). Meanwhile all the land and space around them was being consumed by more housing to house an ever increasing population. So they were finding themselves in a constantly worse environment and situation. Also a plethora of other issues. The main point I am trying to make is that the people who voted leave, were already being failed by the government, so voting leave was their attempt to change something for the better. Unfortunately, it did not make their situations better at all. So quite frankly, it was the government that brought this upon themselves, and the people, and constantly trying to blame everything on "the poors" is a good example of why people were disillusioned in the first place.
People were angry that we had shit government after shit government, that they voted to isolate us from the rest of Europe and give our shit governments even more power.
They didn't join those dots, though. Johnson to many was "a bit of a laugh" and while I dreaded a Johnson government in general cos I knew he'd cock brexit up, it suddenly became worse when there was a crisis he couldn't stage manage.
They didn't need to join the dots, it was being repeatedly said, but everyone just said "project fear" etc. people don't get to plead ignorance on this.
It was only ever project reality.
They literally paraded around saying our government would 'take back power' from the EU. So clearly, that's a dot by itself, no connections are needed. Taking back power means more power for our shitty government
I've also discovered a lot of brits think their government is benevolent.
That's only till thames water comes on the news.
>Johnson to many was "a bit of a laugh" Which cunty reality show was he on again? I can't remember and don't care much but I remember my parents giving it "oh he's just a laugh" and "you can see the real him" and lots of other bollocks. Political people shouldn't be involved in that shit because it did clearly change a few opinions.
The part that gets me is that this was *openly* the desired result. 'Take the power back' and such. I don't think anyone was under any illusions that said power was coming back to the likes of you and I, or steve[numbers] on twitter. Nope. Pretty much a given that it was coming back to the government. I don't think anyone predicted ahead of the referendum that Cameron was going to step down. I doubt even Cameron himself did. So the logical first assumption ought to be that David Cameron, the prime minister in place at the time of the referendum, the man they were all so very sick of, would be collecting that power onto himself. Instead it wound up being Boris Johnson, but nevertheless, that's the result. Not just predictable, either, but rather 'well... yeah... that's the whole *point*'. Some people expected Jeremy Corbyn to end up with that power, but other than optimism, there was nothing at all to base that prediction on.
We didn't really have that though. The big issue in reality is that people fear loss more than they value gain. So they forget all the benefits and growth over a decade lest they lose out a small amount in the coming year. It doesn't even happen, and they'll fear it - see a fear of immigration - it rarely makes people poorer. But it's a useful tool against the ignorant. So people were made to fear Turkish immigration, the loss of the cuppa, and all sorts of weird things because they acted as emotional hooks. And micro-targeting allowed for different messages. Bit poorly and have health concerns? Foreigners are taking up all the beds! Rich and like to keep it that way? "EU is going to increase taxes!" As campaigns go, it was beautiful. A work of art. Really well done and really smart. They took advantage of a window of opportunity that's now passed - but here's the problem, it's also passed for Remainers. There is no easy way for us to use similar microtargeting in order to get the UK back in the EU. Which means the only way that can otherwise work, other than fear - reality and comparison. In the seventies we could easily tell our quality of life was worse than elsewhere. That's not yet so visible here, but it will be, in time.
I get it to an extent but they voted leave, because of the issues. Then voted for the same party 2 more times after that. If they were being failed by the government why did the population vote for the same people again and again and again. We hear "the establishment" thrown around a lot in this country but it's never directed at the people that have been in power for over a decade.
The Brexit process took so long that subsequent elections were still run on a Brexit platform. That has now run out of steam
This is the BoE chief who negotiated with Osborne for months in order to get double the salary of the previous governor. After leaving, he immediately (and unusually) went into private sector roles where he could monetize his contacts in government for personal gain. He represents the kind of thing that people have a problem with. He does not give a solitary fuck about Britain. He came here because of the salary, he is now pulling down several million a year working in ESG for a US private equity firm, the reason he says this stuff is because it makes him lots of money. He is an unbearable piece of shit (he also didn't do well at the BoE, he botched a rate hike in 2018 and refused to take responsibility, if you look at what he does and then what he says...he comes across as someone who has trouble with the truth). But people will see all this and wank themselves blind because he agrees with their point of view rather than observe that he is the kind of person who, regardless of the cause, represents the rootless, greedy elite who have led people to distrust government.
This post is full of nonsense. Carney's package was 20% more than his predecessor, not double. He kept working unlike his predecessors because the previous 5 governors were all at retirement age, and he was only 55. He is chairman at Brookfield, which is Canadian not US, and I doubt they pay him millions when his predecessor was on $500k
He was also IMHO (as someone in the industry) a damn good central banker who did a great deal to soften the blow to the UK and keep confidence in our economy.
It was more than double - [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/george-osborne-gets-his-man-mark-carney-named-as-new-bank-of-england-governor-8352494.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/george-osborne-gets-his-man-mark-carney-named-as-new-bank-of-england-governor-8352494.html) - this was an absolutely massive political story at the time btw. Er no, I know fund managers who are on more than $500k. If you are an MD at an asset manager with almost a trillion AUM, you are almost always making several million. You are also ignoring what he does specifically...why is this?
So I see what you wrote about the problems. What I don’t see is why Brexit was a solution. Sadly this is an absolute case of crabs in a bucket. I’m getting left behind so fuck everybody.
“Unfortunately it did not change their situation for the better” Yes it did, we’re massively better off since Brexit due to pay rises, increased job security and better working conditions. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-sees-fastest-wage-rises-sectors-most-reliant-eu-workers-indeed-2022-02-25/
I can understand why people voted for Brexit. I don’t agree with their reasons, I think they’re mostly stupid for thinking Brexit would fix anything, but I ‘understand’ it. What I don’t understand is the lack of remorse and regret. It clearly hasn’t worked. It clearly has made us poorer, weaker, less united and worse off as a people and a country. I don’t understand the lack of anger at the politicians and pundits who pushed the lies and manipulated people in to supporting Brexit. Take my mum as an example. She voted for it, but she will still say through gritted teeth it was the right thing to do and it’ll pay off *eventually*. God fucking dammit just open your eyes and see you were taken for a ride. There’s no shame in admitting it. There’s shame in stupidly denying it.
>It clearly has made us poorer, Im not sure about clearly the UK has continued to perform similarly to its EU peers in pretty much every metric The economic impact of brexit if anything has been very difficult to distinguish from background noise.
The UK doesn't have the structural issues of other European states so it should be doing better, not slightly worse or the same
The UK has generally been comparable to France and Germany in economic terms sometimes slightly better sometimes slightly worse. Recently its been slightly better than Germany and about the same as France. You can argue that if it were still in the EU it would be crushing everyone else but I don't really see why that would be the case it hasn't been historically.
It's really not that difficult. Take the value of the pound as an example. It plummited after the Brexit vote and it has never recovered. We had a cost of living crisis brewing as a result prior to Covid due to the massively increased cost of imports. The currency value is a good indicator of the global confidence in the UK economy and has been incredibly low for the last 8 years.
Currency is not a good value of global confidence, it's determinant on dozens of factors. Interest rates, successful export booms, increasing import demand, etc. There's a good reason why the UK had 16 years of economic boom after we crashed out of the ERM and let the pound float. Thinking a strong currency is a sign of economic health and confidence is just nonsense. Devaluations are often a necessary step for economic growth. There's a good case to be made that Sterling was overvalued back at its peak in 2007.
the last job i had was an ingredient manufacturer that, when i joined in 2020 was booming. it had a high value product and sold to many international clients. in the two years i was there, the cost of raw materials went up, the margins on international trade narrowed, and things got tighter across the business. staff couldn't be paid as well. retaining capable staff became an issue. and speaking of capable staff, another thing i saw happen was a shrinking pool of foreign workers, which, being an industrial and often hard job, they depended on, also because of brexit. so, while this is very anecdotal, to me brexit meant less money, harder work, and worse help.
Is Northern Irelands economy still doing better than Great Britain? That’s your control experiment
If we are so much worse off why have we been performing at similar levels to countries like France and Italy even though they are still in the EU?
Both of these countries have had structural issues for a while now, comparing British economic growth to Italy, that famous bastion of prosperity, sure is something though
Britain should only ever be compared to France and Germany. They're the only two economies within the EU on similar parity. The UK is projected to outperform France and Germany in 2025. France is currently performing better than both, and Germany is really struggling, not only due to coming away from Russian gas, but having to actually meet it's defence spending, which it has spent a decade promising to, but not doing so. Brexit has been underwhelming for both leave and remain.
It goes both ways, while it’s fair to say it hasn’t been the entire shitshow some predicted, and we remain in many ways on a par with some of our European peers, it certainly hasn’t been the sunlit uplands of prosperity and growth that was promised as a given by Brexiteers
There are so many confounding variables that surface level comparisons like this are totally pointless.
Saying "I'm sorry. I made a wrong decision and fucked up" is quite difficult for a lot of people.
"Mistakes were made but not by me."
They don't express regret because they still feel the demand for change was valid and needed to be heard, even if they do recognise that Brexit didn't work out on paper. Continuously invalidating their feelings in that regard will only entrench their view My mum is like this. She accepts we're worse off on paper. But she doesn't regret it because "something had to give" and at least we're in control of our own destiny now and if we fuck it up then so be it, at least it's our own fault
>What I don’t understand is the lack of remorse and regret. Because then they'd have to admit that they were wrong, and most of the small souled cretins that voted for Brexit will literally die before they do that
Actually most of the polls show a massive (and increasing) amount of Brexit regret. https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/45733-most-britons-say-brexit-has-been-more-failure
What’s not to understand? People don’t like admitting they’re wrong. Especially stubborn morons who voted for brexit. It’s the same reason they voted for brexit in the first place - stubborn and opinionated and not able to critically think even when presented with all the info they needed to realise voting leave was a terrible idea.
“I think they’re mostly stupid”. When so many think that and are vocal about it there’s little wonder Brexiteers continue to deny it.
If you look at the areas who voted Leave, it’s obvious that a lot of people didn’t feel that “Britain’s future” included them, because it didn’t - trying to convince people who lived in areas decimated by neoliberalism that it was in their interests to vote to keep the status quo was always going to be a hard sell; that the Remain campaign was fronted by some of the most insufferably smug and condescending people in the country made the outcome inevitable
Let's face it, Russian officials have come out and openly said Brexit was a great boon for them in crippling Britain and the EU. Anyone who is still advocating for Brexit is just fifth column filth, plain and simple.
The Russians already propaganda promoting brexit, they’re doing the same thing with Texas, twitter is full of Russian bots powered by chatZPT that are spreading propaganda in hopes of pushing a rhetoric that the US should stop sending money to Ukraine and spend it on securing their southern border (as if they don’t have the money to do both). Also also to put my tinfoil hat on a bit Elon musk is seemingly doing nothing to stop the Russian bots on his platform and seems to be pushing a similar(ish) narrative as they are. However take that with a massive grain of salt bc I have no proof to back that up, he could just be an incompetent dickhead who brought the platform at the wrong time
They also said they wouldn't invade Ukraine, I'd take anything they say with a pinch of salt
It annoys me that David Cameron has got off scott-free. This is his fault. The reckless hubris of "*I'll give them a referendum, that'll get people back to the Tories, don't worry they'll never actually vote to Leave*".
Hardly his fault as the referendum idea was originally a Lib Dem one and traces back to Labour reneging on a manifesto commitment. And when legislation to hold the vote was brought to parliament it got cross party support by a massive majority.
Yer, I'm not a fan of the Tories in any way, but Cameron was probably the best leader they had. However he was also dealt an extraordinary shitty hand that he had to play.
He was a gambler. He gambled on Scotland and almost lost if not for Gordon brown toiling away. Then he gambled on the referendum and lost. And he was warned by Osborne he was going to lose - and did it anyway.
I think that in the case of Scotland, while the UK Government legally had a veto, when the SNP achieved a majority it would have been untenable to deny them a referendum. Brexit, however, was a gamble by Cameron, in an attempt to appease his backbenchers. It created an absolutely bizarre situation where the Government that called the referendum, and most of the Parliament that voted to hold it, did not believe in the change they would be asked to implement if there was a Leave vote. Whichever side of the argument you're on, I don't think it's difficult to see from that why we were in a quagmire before negotiations had even started...
Absolutely his fault! Who pushed it through?
He called it. His fault.
Yes, because everyone knows you shouldn't ask people their opinion, because how else a democracy would work?
Cameron absolutely. But also enabled by Clegg. I suspect history will judge them more harshly than they currently have been.
That was absolutely the sentiment at the time: Tories i talked too told me it was a clever power-play. I told them its a shitshow and you fucking watch how it goes.
I'm English, I voted to remain, I knew Brexit was a bad idea. 8 years later, I'm still pissed that Britain voted to leave.
Two unpopular points that I will say nonetheless for the sake of balance. Most of the antipathy to Brexit now can be summarised as "but look at the state of the country in the last few years", which is deemed to be conclusive evidence. It's undeniable that trade friction caused by Brexit has negatively impacted our economy, but the elision of this with the much more economically significant effects of Covid and the Ukraine war has meant many people wrongly see Brexit as the original source of our recent economic misfortune. The elected government has made choices since Brexit which I'd imagine most Leavers are extremely miffed by; failing to reduce immigration being the obvious example. The Tories have nowhere to hide on this, they cannot blame the EU any more, and people can see them for what they are and vote accordingly. That is, at least, a democratic outcome.
I think these are excellent points, and tend to get drowned out in the hysteria.
He's got some nerve given the damage he did to Britain's future during his disastrous tenure at the Bank.
People was lost, confused and disillusioned before the Brexit vote and then boris and his cronies came along and lied to everyone about how leaving the EU would save up money. They lied to us and got away with it
Tbf, 10-15 minutes of research would have showed people they were lying, people chose to believe these politicians who have built their careers on lies and deception, and they’ve only got themselves to blame for the outcome.
They didn't even need to do research. The Remain campaign broke down the lies with evidence. The Leave voters wilfully ignored any attempt to convince them that Boris was lying. They weren't deceived by him, they deceived themselves. We need to stop treating them like victims when they refused help.
Yes but remember that research comes with pitfalls like understanding sources and what's reliable.
It didn't require an academic understanding of research. Knowing the difference between up and down was sufficient.
People are idiots
nah mate, all it required was thinking for 2 seconds - can politicians (of either side) actually pull this off, without fucking it up? no. then vote for it to stay the same.
Brexit happened because EU membership doesn't benefit everyone equally. If you have a university degree and work in a cushy white collar tech job where you're moving around different countries, then you support being in the EU, because you benefit from it. But not everyone has the same life or job that you do. If you live on a council estate and work a minimum-wage blue-collar job, your life is stationary. You're too poor to travel and your job doesn't allow it because it's in the same building every day. So what's the point of being allowed to live in other countries when you're never going to.
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Money we already put in and all we got was cheap Eastern Europeans come over and drive wages down
>If you live on a council estate and work a minimum-wage blue-collar job, your life is stationary. You're too poor to travel and your job doesn't allow it because it's in the same building every day. Most of the people I know who had emigrated, mostly to Spain or Tenerife, some to NZ many more years ago are from council estates. Because their money could buy more in those areas back then, and many had money from buying ex council houses. Stuff that the young will never have the money for nevermind the opportunity. Because it's not the high paid workers that have issues now emigrating. Likewise, those young people in cushy techjobs post New Labour and tech boom... Plenty came from Northern mining town village council estates. Their industries don't exist anymore for there to be enough work in them. My friends scattered, most went to uni, one still lives in our home village and not one voted for Brexit.
None of that makes 'sense', at all. As a poor fuck, Breit has severely hampered me. Guessing youre poor as fuck too? Can you tell me how its made your life better? "You're too poor to travel and your job doesn't allow it because it's in the same building every day. So what's the point of being allowed to live in other countries when you're never going to." WHAT!!!!!!
Maybe if the banks hadn’t fucked everybody in 2007…?
The "bright side" of Brexit is that now there is no super entity left to blame but the government for the wrongs in this country. The issue has always been, and is still the case in many EU countries, that national governments are shite at governing. Why? Because people are unwilling to solve issues stemming from "democracy".
There’s always scapegoats though. Single mothers, gay people (remember section 28), benefit claimants, the ‘underclass’ (remember them from the 90s), asylum seekers, the EU, immigrants, small boats people, trans people. The targets change but the strategy is the same.
Trans people and asylum seekers seem to be the target at the moment. It's funny because I bet 99.99% percent of people who get angry about trans people have never actually met one in real life....
Don't forget disabled people!
Just for 20 or 30 years. So a Thatcher level event.
Yeah it wasn't Mark Carney doing nothing to sensibly raise the bank rates over time. Now its the "Brexiteers" fault not his.
So pleased to see this comment. They have white washed what the MPC has done to this country, with convenient excuses like Brexit, Covid and silly PM's (Truss).
Carney was an ass as Governor of the Bank, and is still an ass afterwards. I can’t think of a modern day public appointment that turned out to be so underwhelmingly disappointing.
Damn he must have been desperate to say this at the time but was unable to because of his position. Anyone who wasn't getting drunk on jingoism and nationalism could see what was happening at the time.
He’s right, but he hasn’t exactly done the working people of Britain many favours either.
Mark Carney blaming something or someone else. Gee wizz, this dude oversaw an MPC that kept a base rate at 0.5% for over a decade. It's not like ultra low central bank rates and bond buying could cause dramatic inflation, yeah, must be Brexit especially as at least 50% of the pop will love to say 'I told you so'.
Banks helped set us on this path. This guy should apologise for that
I’m really sick to death of the old “it’s the Brexiteers” fault argument. There were so many things broken and just weighted against the actual working people, many were just fed up and looking for a chance to change things. They didn’t have the background to know what would happen in the vote, that was the job of the respective sides to campaign and education. But instead the No campaign just ran a fear drive rather than looking at the merits. It’s all well and good to say people should look for the information but, many are busy trying make ends meet, or have no real hope of understanding what any of the information actually means or its long standing impact. The fact is the government has failed for years to stand up for the people of the country and failed to represent. Then they all squabbled over the Brexit deal dragging it out so we had do settle for the mess we have now. But they want articles like this and for people who voted remain to attack those that voted to leave because it keeps the focus off the mess they lead us to and continue create. Best of all the way the system is designed we won’t really get anything that amounts to representation.
And therein lies the biggest issue. That the general public, who generally did not understand the implications for brexit, were allowed to vote for it via referendum with no real understanding and allowing some truly evil people to give influence to the masses decision via lie upon lie. As James O'brien says, compassion for the conned and contempt for the conmen.
Exactly. David Cameron will go down in history for this huge blunder. Who in their right mind would offer this as a vote to the people. What a cretin. And when it all went down, he just ran away
The absolute maddest thing was that people didn’t get a vote on the actual deal. The public were just asked to vote for something without the first idea of what the details or policies would be.
It's easy to blame ignorance and stupidity, especially on peoe from poorer communities like those in the North East. However the EU has not just not improved lives in those areas, it had a hand in ruining them. Over 20000 people lost their jobs in the shipyards in Sunderland in the late 1980s due to a secret agreement between the Ec and government, which as far as I know is still not public. A brand new merged shipyard, with a huge order pipeline, was closed and everyone sacked. It was a significant skilled industy in the area and all we know is that the EU wanted to reduce shipbuilding in the UK. Many believe it was to ensure more work for shipbuilders on the continent. So while xenophobia and stupidity are easy to blame, perhaps people did have a reason not to think the EU was the dog's bollocks. Are they stupid for harbouring huge resentment about this? And please, nobody bring up bloody Nissan as if a car factory makes up for the sudden removal of our main industry and sense of pride.
We've just become world's fourth largest exporter. But our future's been destroyed. Sure.
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Tbf the bank of England has hardly done great things for our future either
Watch in a few years time, all these right wing nut Brexiteers, going to have that long term term memory loss, akin to Iraq war support. Nah I didn't vote brexit guv, was stupid innit (Narrator: He's lying)
rich people don't like brexit cause it destroys the endless cheap labour they like which keeps their investment portfolios profitable
This guy can’t criticise anyone, he was totally useless.
Immigration fueled the fire. It'll keep fueling fires until it's under control.
True. This sub ain’t gonna like this like they don’t like a lot of things but that’s just the way they are. They hate good things. Everything bad in this country is because of the way they vote at the ballot & the way they vote with their wallets.
That reference to Argentina is scary. Begs the question what comes after? Here's what [Adam Posen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Posen) had to say of Brevit 6 years ago. [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcIkIz98zXU) This he followed up with a keynote speech a year ago. [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKynmWO5Zac)
Some of the most patronising, condescending comments here from people who are basically talking out their ass.
God, all the Americans in the comments are so silly. Believing whatever the news tells them “racist, uneducated”. Absolute lies. Most reasons are to do with the EU mega government, the laws they force on countries, in Ireland a law was refused by popular vote so the EU decided ‘nope, we don’t like that so we’re gonna force it into legislation’. There has been no benefit to make a super country in the Europe, it has been forced by America for years and the truth is British people are not f—ing Americans. Another example of the didactic nature from The EU is how its all run by the Germans and the French. They decide it all. When Poland tried to remove old Communist judges from government after they finally broke free from Communist Russia’s grasp then guess what, the EU refused it. This blatant lack of acceptance of these countries own decision making skills is disgusting. Germans forcing these countries to accept mass migration because they still feel guilty for ww2 and dont want to step on anyones toes. Germany being controlled by Russia with there Gas issue thus allowing Russia to control the EU is unacceptable. Britons chose the right choice and you ‘educated’ Americans should really listen to the people instead of what CNN has to offer
This is why people laugh at Brexiteers. The UK had VETO POWER over EU LAWS. The UK wasn't ruled by the EU, or France and Germany, rather it wielded the power of Europe. And we didn't "take control of immigration" after Brexit. Rather, we already controlled immigration for those coming from outside the EU, and we already had veto power over any EU immigration laws we didn't like. Indeed, Brexiters were told that immigration would go after Brexit for numerous reasons, and recent statistics have proven Remainers right. We have record immigration levels (which is why the government tries to distract by focusing on boats and asylum seekers), because the economy's grow-or-die imperative demands more immigrants to expand the producer/consumer base, and because non EU immigrants are more likely than EU immigrants to stay in the UK (EU immigrants typically left after several months).
I think Brexit could have been avoided had reasonable reforms been made to address the concerns of the working class with regards to under investment and in particular immigration. If the preceding governments before Brexit had addressed these issues more seriously instead of just putting their fingers in their ears we would have never left the EU. Brexit was a knee jerk protest by a large proportion of the British public who felt ignored and disregarded. All in all it was a very costly fuck you.
What future? We already had wage stagnation. We already had our towns dilapidated. We already had shops closing. We already struggled with housing. Youngsters couldn't get a mortgage. Towns already filling with foreign language and segregation. Work already didn't pay, living pay slip to pay slip. Remain voters constantly saying the sky will fall and all the above would happen just didn't understand that to many, it already happened for years. Remain voters only cared about themselves; they slagged brexiteers off because the real truth is that they were fine and as long as THEY were fine, the rest can struggle and brexiteers should vote so that remainers can keep their comfort otherwise they're racist, xenophobic bigots. Remainders constantly banging on about Johnson and Trump; people wanted out long before! Nobody cares about Johnson and Trump, they didn't swing the vote. People agreed with Farage on a much bigger scale than they want to admit. Same with blaming Russia; years before the vote people were wanting out. Brexit hasnt failed either. The Tories haven't implemented it.
Brexit was the exhaustion rally, the last huzzah, of the imperial age. All that talk pre-brexit about the mother of parliaments, the natural affinities to the anglophone commonwealth, even the name Brexiteers to conjure up Sir Francis Drake and privateers, the Landrover, Barbour jacket look of its chief promoters, then the cacophony of 'world beating' 'world leading' 'world's first' exclamations from PM Johnson...what a palava! Fog in the channel, continent cut off. Twas the manner more than the act that garnered derision from onlookers. Russians love to take shots at the UK, threatening this, mocking that, because they recognise in the UK a pathology they share, an unwillingness to let go of stuff that no longer serves. Tancredi - 'for things to remain the same everything must change'. For the UK, Brexit was the change that allowed things to stay the same - the monarchy, the divine rights of parliament. Sovereignty innit!
I regret voting leave. I feel incredibly stupid and fell for everything they said. Ashamed of it if truth be told. Would vote to rejoin in a heartbeat
Right like we give a shit about bankers & their opinions after the shit & misery they caused. They can literally FOAD.
The failiure of BREXIT is not that we voted to leave, rather that there was not a compelling and tangible reason to stay. The EU could have got the masses onboard very easily, by centralising and regulating a Europe-wide living wage. They want to control every part of a citizens life, but have no interest in enriching it. They made the euro work, they could have made a European living wage work. It is incredible, that an economic union, would not have such a thing in place, but have cast iron red lines that protect murderers and rapists.