https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-...
Polls in the 2010-15 timeframe consistently showed that Britain's European relationship didn't even make the top 5 of issues amongst voters. Consistently fewer than 6% listed Europe as their most important issue: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/12/11/1544504400000/The-onl...
Today more than 50% see Europe as the most important political issue. Yet nothing of substance changed in Britain's relationship with the EU in the past decade. Support for Brexit was manufactured and is draining the oxygen from solving UK's actual problems.
Aren't most newspapers owned by the ultra-rich? Couldn't you just make the exact same arguments you leveled against your political opponents (that they were hoodwinked by "the media") against your own position? At the end of the day, people showed up and voted for something. Twice (basically). That means something.
"Voted for something and it means something" is the portrait of Brexit.
A question was posed to the public but it was never explained properly, and so nobody knows what it means. Did people want a border in Ireland? A third-party status for UK products imported to EU? A separation from European scientific collaboration?
These are just a few of the hundreds of open questions. The UK government hasn't figured it out in three years. Yet the vote definitely means "something", so "something" should happen.
The validity of the vote is simple: it means exactly what Parliament decides it means at any time. Referendums don’t become law automatically, and Britain doesn’t have a constitution that could force it (unlike some countries like Switzerland).
And pointing to fact that Brexit was a non-issue a few years before hand is also irrelevant. There are a myriad of political issues being hashed out now that weren't on anybody's radar a few years ago. This is a normal part of how media and popular culture work.
Skilled manual workers is a very specific, carefully selected sub-group of manual and low income workers, chosen just for the purposes of the narative. Why that specific sub-group? A lot of skilled manual workers are even middle class.
Middle class voters are the majority of voters, so they account for well over 59% of remain voters as well. Manual labour and low income voters made the break though, no other significant demographic was more likely to vote for Brexit.
Wealthy folks convincing the poor to vote against their own interests via propaganda has a long, storied history, too.
Do you really think all the people that voted for Brexit (and those that support Remain) have the capacity to understand all the intricacies of leaving the EU? The entire civil service working on it for the last 3 years barley have a clue. How is someone with their own life and work to manage supposed to find the time?
Brexit will fuck the poor but they are supporting it. I think that tells you all you need to know.
The referendum was won because people were swung to the leave side by the case made by the leave campaigners. A case full of immediately demonstrable lies. If at least 650000 of those people were specifically swung that way by those lies or anything from 30 years of Boris Johnson's EU fibs, then the "they didn't know what they were really voting for" argument is sound.
This isn't about a metropolitan liberal elite thinking abstractly and paternalistically about swathes of poor people in The North about whom I have only heard through Ken Loach films.
All of the halfwits I knew at school (who I still know) voted to leave (I can tell because they post "Get Brexit Done" memes next to ones about councils banning Christmas and illegal immigrants being entitled to more benefits than pensioners).
That doesn't mean that everyone who voted to leave is an idiot, but if the lies of the leave campaign attracted 650000 more of them than the remain campaign did, then the leave result was artificially bolstered by people who genuinely did not know what they were voting for.
Not inherently, but being convinced of falsehoods by a propaganda campaign should be of concern.
If you voted for McCain because you believe Republicans have better tax policies than Democrats, I'm fine with that. If you did it because you believe Obama's a secret Muslim infiltrator from Kenya, I'm not.
People being convinced by outright lies is not how democracy works. If one side can gain the advantage by telling people that the other side currently forbids them buying four bananas at a time, and be believed, even given the extremely obvious evidence against it, then the system is broken.
In utopia. But in reality, it is possible to simultaneously hold that many people vote for very stupid reasons, and that their votes should be respected anyway.
Personally I am convinced that there never has been an election anywhere where the majority of voters on all sides were properly informed by facts and not motivated by ideology or outright lies.
Some in the UK imply that the referendum should be re-run because of those lies, just like some in the US imply the 2016 election was illegitimate because of Russian interference. That way lies madness, since every side in every election lies and manipulates, and every election would have to be re-run ad infinitum.
That is partly why it's been a disaster. No one specific workable proposal has a majority of support.
(Would we have seen "they knew what they were voting for" if we'd chosen the Norway option? Somehow I doubt it)
When he was a journalist in Brussels, Boris Johnson used to turn up to news briefs and ask his fellow hacks “So what’s going on, and why is it bad for Britain”. The papers cheerfully blame Brussels for outrageous new EU rules, eating away at British sovereignty, er, sponsored by the British government. Johnson even railed against EU transport rules he campaigned for as Transport secretary.
Bashing foreigners is ever green, as a source of tabloid outrage journalism.