Not going to sit on the fence here. It’s my blog. Basically, I’m confused as to why people couldn’t see all this coming when they voted “Leave”. It’s perhaps the most stupid, ideological decision ever.
We have a powerful economy here in the UK. That’s why it’s attracting people. That’s why we have immigration. If our economy was knackered then a lot of people wouldn’t come. We have low interest rates, low unemployment and a pretty damned good standard of living actually.
Trouble is, we were hit by a double-whammy. People outside of London didn’t trust the politicians. They felt like Parliament was only interested in Londoners, about big business, about the bankers and about the people they went to school with. People on the street, the “ordinary” people, started instead to hook onto whoever sounded different. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage. They were different. They promised upheaval. They promised a punch on the nose to the established elite.
Then, the media got involved. The Sun, The Mail – they’d published lots of stories about immigration, about the refuges, about people smuggled into the UK in trucks. They scared the British public. They stirred emotions with biased reporting to such a point that (as I saw on the local BBC News last night) even immigrants voted leave because of the amount of other immigrants coming in.
Many younger voters didn’t bother to vote and, deep down, I really don’t think the Leave campaign thought they’d win. They made promises they couldn’t fulfil. They were woolly about their future plans. They bet the house on the fact that EU would suddenly succumb to their demands for a fair free trade agreement, even though they couldn’t be sure that the EU would agree.
Now we’re in a completely shit situation. We’re in a situation where the EU absolutely, totally, utterly WILL NOT allow the UK into their EU trade agreement without free movement of people. In fact, they’re about to kick out Switzerland from a similar agreement because they’ve not agreed to free movement of people.
So we’re left with a PM washing his hands of the mess he created, firmly with his foot on the brake pedal and ready to hand over the “grenade” that is Article 50 to the new PM. That Leave-supporting person, whoever it may be, must choose whether to pull the pin, and it sounds like they’ll only do that if they get a trade deal which DOES NOT involve free movement. That, as the EU countries have all stated time and time again, WILL NOT happen.
This video about sums it up..