What i find so strange is that people who are most likely to be adversely effected by leaving the EU are the ones that voted to leave, i don't think the phrase 'Turkey voting for Christmas' has ever been more appropriate, maybe I've got it totally wrong but it seems leave voters are *typically* older, poorer, and benefit more from EU funding, am i wrong for thinking these are the people who'll be disproportional effected from leaving the EU?Originally Posted by scaryjim
That is but one facet that obviously does diminish my point but a lot less than the existence of vast swathes of old racists vs young progressives.
You're also saying age makes you cynical? No disagreement on that point, not sure how that's a positive though
Even the AV referendum was turned into a 'tell Nick Clegg how much you hate him' because the issues themselves weren't particularly resonating with the voters.
Heh, I've seen that mentioned a lot. It's not as surprising as you think. A Leave campaign that essentially sought to blame the EU for the lack of investment in the country ("they're giving your money to the EU instead of spending it on public services") and the lack of jobs due to immigrant workers, coupled with a Remain campaign who apparently think that free trade and security are the only benefits of EU membership - understandable when they all live in affluent London that doesn't really get much ERDF funding.
Neither campaign really considered the regions at all, but that's not surprising; Westminster doesn't. If Cameron had gone to Sunderland and stood on the Roker Riviera he'd have had to say "Look at all this - the EU funded it for you, because we wouldn't 'waste' UK money rejuvenating Sunderland ... good lord no". Not a great statement from the Prime Minister.
The working class have always tended towards the right wing - it's a natural leaning for people who struggle to meet their own basic needs. That's the position of many people in those areas that voted heavily to leave - they've seen benefits cut, industry struggle, the NHS under-funded, and suddenly they were asked a simply binary question and told that this issue was what was really behind all their problems - that the EU was taking all our money, forcing us to take resource-sapping immigrants, and stopping the government from acting as it wanted. It's not surprising they lapped it up, and of course Boris, Gove and Farage won't care that in 3 months time those people will all feel - justifiably - betrayed by Westminster: after all, they felt that before the referendum, so what's changed?
Cynical? Maybe - but tell me which bit I'm wrong about...
Corky34 (28-06-2016)
One huge assumption again though scaryjim that the vote was swayed by the working class.
Either way this debate is not helping anyone and insulting people's choice (for no benefit) is not exactly being productive, which is why I'm ending my input on this thread here.
Very, but i can't.
Their kids can't get a home due to low earnings, lack of saving, lack of interest on those savings and poor returns from some investment vehicles to encourage this. They are already as close to zero whilst taking on more and more burden due to Conservative cuts. They don't earn enough, they are not bi-lingual, they are not likely to move to areas outside of their place of birth or stray too far. Maybe they were lucky enough to work in one place for most of their life, but cannot see how their children will have that kind of stability. They witness their areas are full of people 'i.e. outsiders' who come and go every few months maybe even every few weeks. Nothing is allowed to settle and develop. They hear prosperity and can see subtle changes in the landscape but feel they have no share in it. The drip feed of the last 25 years of media headlines has bashed them in. The invisible hand of language or PC as they call it is already making it hard for them to articulate from their already limited scope what they could have 2 decades ago by the suit wearing types who live in their bubble. Like someone waterboarding you psychogically. Add to these most people do not understand economics, or the numbers, and for them the question was as simple as stay in or leave. It didn't carry much more depth than that. The arguments were irrelevant, value of the pound irrelevant.
Well... Looking at the percentage map on the BBC, it does seem that areas 'where the money is' like London, Tunbridge Wells, Reading, Bath, Manchester, York, Cambridge, Oxford, etc, majority-voted to remain...
Look at the areas of the country that voted out most strongly. Then look at the distribution of socio-economic classifications. Look at the polling statistics that show ABs favouring in, C1s evenly split, and C2DEs voting almost 2/3s for leave. Or the map on this BBC story from December 2015 that shows some areas with the strongest out votes - the east Lincolnshire coast, for instance - are areas that have low levels of the higher socio-economic groupings but are surrounded by areas with high levels of those same groupings. I could go on.
It's unfortunate that neither side of the debate was willing to be honest about what those communities actually get out of the EU, which is significantly more than they get out of a Westminster government.
I'm not sure why you think my post was insulting people's choices. Far from insulting their choice, I'm trying to empathise with it - lets be honest, the only way this country will ever be able to move forward is if we can try to understand the people who disagree with us, and see if there are ways to achieve both our goals. People in those areas rightly feel failed by the establishment, and the Leave campaign claimed they'd put things right - take back control for the average Brit, fund public services, stop the population influx from overseas. Well, the Leave campaign were lying about that, but if we want to move forward as a country what we actually need to do is address their concerns. Without understanding that we can't possibly hope to get a positive result out of this mess.
CAT-THE-FIFTH (28-06-2016),Corky34 (28-06-2016)
You say cynic, I say realist based on real life experience
If Wisdom is the coordination of "knowledge and experience" and its deliberate use to improve well being then how come "Ignorance is bliss"
Working class has become a fairly difficult term to pin down these days, but I'd say that what we still consider working class - blue-collar type jobs, growing up in less affluent areas, state school education - were a huge, defining factor in this referendum.
Working class have typically been left wing with the exception of remoter areas like Cornwall, where the electorate is less centralised and focussed so there was less need (or incentive, depending on how cynical you are) for the left to campaign and rally workers round their causes.
I am quite surprised, I suppose, by the lack of appearance by big names in regional cities, but I think the xenophobic media (Sun, Daily Mail) did a wonderful job filling in for them and are utterly complicit in the current treatment of anyone looking or sounding like they didn't grow up in England.
What makes you think that, as a Londoner, I regard free trade and security as the only benefits of EU membership?
Apologies, not my intended meaning; I'm sure plenty of Londoners understand the full benefits of EU membership. But the Remain campaign seemed to be ignorant of any other benefits, particular for those of us in the provinces, and I know there's a groundswell of feeling that most politicians struggle to see anything outside the M25. There are huge swathes of the country that feel forgotten by mainstream politics. I suspect that did little to hep the connection between the average voter and the Remain campaign (headed as it was by the incumbent PM). But perhaps that's a politician thing, rather than a London thing.
Incidentally, having been a non-conforming individual in a working class community, I can attest to the right wing leaning of the British working classes...
+1
I grew up on a 'lovely' estate, with more than its fair share of racists, homophobes, sexists, drunk drivers, thieves, drug dealers, families with 3 generations on the same street and all on benefits (despite working cash in hand), large number of the local girls pregnant at 16 and popping out their 2nd or 3rd child by the time I went off to uni - and for some reason I never came back.
Still, I'd be amazed if even a quarter of them actually got off their arses and went out to vote so I'd like to think that while those people are out there they don't represent anything like a majority of so-called working class people, and I'd love to know what constitutes working class these days anyway given that there appear to be very few blue-collar jobs vs white-collar jobs and the average wage is circa 27k p.a.
That's kind of the problem. What happened to 'ask not what we can do for you, but what you can do for us'? It's endemic of a rather modern problem of entitlement. If the white working class majority in this country feel disenfranchised and irrelevant and disempowered, well, awfully sorry, but that's what most of everyone else feels all the time anyway, it's just not new. What is it about London that you think is so different? It's just got tonnes and tonnes of people in it. You think.... we get listened to more? Politicians knock on our doors and listen to our concerns? We think when a politician starts talking or a politicians' wife waxes lyrical in a newspaper, 'oh they're talking to us and it doesn't apply up north'? Sometimes the actions of politicians affects us directly, such as, 30 years of neoliberal hypercapitalism leading to luxury property development going through the roof, combining with a lack of affordable housing development leading to skyrocketing house prices and the feeling no-one's ever going to get onto the housing ladder unless you get lucky. I don't know what rose-tinted views you northerners have of life in london; I'm not going to accuse you of having a chip on your shoulder, but I don't think you have an accurate view either. Perhaps it's partly down to the fact that whenever you visit London, you see the nice bits, as there's never a reason as a tourist to go elsewhere, but this is no walk in the park.
Regarding the right wing leaning of the british working classes, I'm sure you can attest to a small pocket of proto-nationalism, but that doesn't mean that historically the working classes haven't tended towards socialism.
It wasn't nationalism. it was pervasive - well, right wing might not be the right word*; let's say - regressive attitudes about pretty much everything. And it wasn't one pocket. It was in several different areas of the country; it was across an entire constituency; it was pretty much everyone on one side of my family growing up. It's probably not universal, but it's prevalent.
* exactly what makes politics right wing or left wing is a) debatable, and b) dependant to an extent on context. If we go with Wikipedia's high level definition ("Right-wing politics hold that some forms of social stratification or social inequality are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable") you'll find that most working class communities implicitly meet that definition: there's a prevailing sense that you should "be true" to your working class roots, that being "working class" is your place. And of course, as Eddie Izzard used to point out, political bias is more of a circuit than a linear spectrum - the attitudes of the extreme right and left wings join up somewhere round the back.
OK, but it's some form of 'pride' in your community. Whether that community is 'england' or 'uk' or 'white people' or 'lads from the estate' or 'the family mcguigans' or 'us lot who sell dope' or whatever. Tribalism, we're better than you for whatever reason, us and them. Regressive is right. My point about pockets was that you can't point to one or several or even lots of pockets of feeling and say 'this is representative of the country', you've got to take a birds' eye view.
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