| Topic: | Re:Re:The real purpose of the referendum | |
| Posted by: | T P Howell | |
| Date/Time: | 13/03/19 12:49:00 |
| Cameron's promise of a referendum was his Faustian pact with the right wing of his party to get elected as leader. I understand (but have not seen) a recent television programme which alleges that he offered the referendum in the expectation that after the election he would still be in coalition with the Lib Dems who would block it, but he unexpectedly won a majority. My view of why people voted to leave are (to varying degrees, creating a complicated Venn diagram); 1 They were lied to, and conned. I know many people who feel that they were "had", and nobody likes to be had. 2 A protest vote against the consequences of 10 years of austerity, deflected by the age old "blame the foreigners" ruse. 3 Good old fashioned dislike of foreigners generally (supported by posters of images of long queues of Arab looking men, Gove's lie that Turkey had secretly been admitted as a member, etc). 4 Some people's mindset is just to be "against" things, and those people are hardly ever positively "for" anything (the stereotypical UKIP mindset); 5 A widespread misunderstanding as to what the EU is, how it works, and its foundation in democratic principles and structures (illustrated even on this forum). This is a sub set of point 1 above. 6 A legitimate (in my opinion fanciful) view that the UK should ring fence its sovereignty, as a small, independent nation state on the margins of Europe standing like King Cnut against the tide of globalisation, and that it was "alright in the 70s" (or 60s, 50s, 40s - take your pick). The riches of the UK's kleptic colonial era have more or less been spent. It gave us a head start during the Industrial Revolution and for a couple of centuries afterwards. But that era of privilege and entitlement has now passed. |