Johnny, if there was one biggest single influence for me that made me decide to vote Leave, it was this article by Brendan O'Neill.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/eu-may-well-survive-todays-vote-left-wont/
At the risk of sounding boring because I have mentioned it a few times already, I would really like to know what Remain voters think of his article, written on June 23rd last year. If you or anyone else that reads the above link, voted Remain, and are still happy with your decision after you have read his thoughts and opinions, I would be interested to know why, because when I read it, I can't think for the life of me why a working class person would ever want to stay in the EU ?
I keep going on about it because I haven't heard back from a Remain voter yet, who has read it, with their feedback. So, can you be my Guinea Pig and indulge me please and hopefully where you lead, others will follow. I'm still waiting for Deutsch Wolf to get back to me too.
happy to comment, though more generally that rather than in respect of brexit.
as a starting point i don't think i recognise the world the guy is living in. admittedly, i don't think in terms of "left" and "right", i think in terms of choices and consequences, and hopefully on the basis of fairness where possible. i think a lot of people/politicians try to oversimplify and limit what the actual choices are, as well as their rationale and when bad consequences arise they then try to blame someone else for their bad choices. generally i find references to "left" and "right" lazy and stereotypical - just a way to group people together on a particular issue with the intention of then slagging them off. and the writer does precisely that. is there actually some enclave where people actually go around dressed as citizen smith calling each other comrade?
but to indulge the piece, he claims "the left is effectively dead". as far as i'm aware there hasn't been what could be described as a left leaning government in the UK in my voting lifetime. that's not because his concept of "left" has changed - it's because it never got the votes. i don't think it's a case of his "left" deserting the people, its that the "majority" of people either don't believe, or have been convinced not to believe in the concept, assuming of course they even bother to understand it. it sounds like he imagines a utopian concept of socialist britain was just around the corner only to be fatally stabbed at the last minute by brexit. in that respect he's missing the point that the world has moved on.
he also talks about the EU not being democratic, but it seems to me the issue is closer to home. in our version of "democracy" you can get a majority with only 36% of the votes. it's often described by some that this then means the ruling party has a mandate from the people to deliver its manifesto when technically 64% of the people might disagree with that manifesto on every issue. it's an illusory concept at virtually any level. so far it's delivered record wealth inequality in the country, so at least it's working for someone. who's fault is that?
on Greece he holds a typically stereotypical view that it's all the fault of the EU whilst offering zero analysis of causes or of any alternative solutions. just a few questions - who's responsible for running the Greek economy? who created the system that paid out pensions to 45 year olds and which failed to collect taxes? who hired a US wall street bank to help Greece hide its liabilities so that it could carrying on borrowing? who voted consistently for the governments that did this? in short, who fucked their economy? again, bad choices but he's good at concluding that the consequences must be somebody else's fault. on his same basis, you could just as easily argue it was "democracy" that caused their problems, since in the absence of this Greece wouldn't be in the EU. then, presumably, the writer could have a mind wank imagining a socialist republic of Greece with institutions queuing up to lend their money in the knowledge that its a safe investment, because in the absence of any EU influence, money of course grows on trees.
is that enough
i don't actually have a huge problem with the brexit vote. i just dislike lies and crappy arguments with little or no substance. i don't think brexit solves very much and i expect the country will be worse off than we would have been had we stayed, the extent to which depends on negotiations, policy, world events and luck. there may be wider repercussions if Europe starts to break up - that could be very problematic. but you know, thems the consequences.
