Agree with your general points but would add that print media heavily influencing uneducated people allows any narrative to be justified.
Populist leaders are unlikely to fund schools properly, because it's not in their interest to do so, it's not in their interest to have an educated voting base, and on it will go.
I guess eventually, a champion will come from someewhere and help rectify the situation, but who knows how long this will take.
It would be better to acknowledge that they have real concerns, which ought to be addressed.
The post Brexit vote polling indicated that a great many people had no idea that this was a binding referendum rather than some "national poll of the feels", many were not at all clear on the actual pros and cons, they were swayed by emotive nationalistic propaganda that simplified the question down to "are you proud of your country or not" .. which was almost entirely orthogonal to the reality being voted on "do you want to be part of a free trade union or not" (simplified of course but more accurate).
It's remarkable isn't it, just how fragmented non-broadcast mass media had become at this point? Huge swathes of people in London had no real idea that an important vote was taking place, or what it meant - being busy working and distracted by social media frivolity. The fact that their chosen 'channels' simply did not 'feed' them vital information allowed millions to be hoodwinked.
We still need a postmortem on "Brexit" as a kind of nation healing. All of us, on both sides, were victims of information warfare/abuse of one kind or another.
IMHO on this the EU put ideology before pragmatism in 2004 and the British government has also massively screwed up by being the only country (ok, also Ireland) not to put any restrictions when that was possible.
Then, obviously Merkel's open door policy in 2015 did not help at all...
Note that the result of the referendum was not binding. But it did not matter: democratically and politically you cannot organise such a referendum then ignore the result because you don't like it.
Arguably the practice of conflating university degrees with education is harmful. Increasingly universities seem to focus on anything but education.
That's an interesting claim - do you have evidence to justify it?
Not disagreeing entirely that degree holders benefit from EU membership based on the type of work degrees lead to, but in reality so do people without degrees if the economy is growing. There's really no economic argument for leaving the EU; it seems like it was purely ideological.
I didn't say exactly that degree holders benefit from EU membership. Although they are more likely to want to move abroad than non-degree holders the numbers of Brits who do so are just overwhelmingly trivial. It's just not a factor in Brexit either way; freedom of movement was always more of a theoretical issue for wealthy Brits and a practical one for those in the trades due to competition from the east.
There were actually lots of economic arguments for leaving the EU, that's one of the primary themes I remember about the debates. EU being overly regulation happy, unconcerned with growth, protectionist, etc. But I noticed that this is a common pattern with the pro-EU people. They don't say, "I disagree with argument X" they aren't aware the arguments existed at all.