to be glad that the Guardian is making enormous losses

[longfingernails]

www.pressgazette.co.uk/guardian-losses-reported-to-have-escalated-by-a-further-10m-to-68-7m-for-the-last-financial-year/

Great stuff. Their chatterati condescension, Islington moral vacuum and politically correct echo chamber has been a malignant blot upon our society for decades.

Let it wither upon the Viner.

"Ardent remain campaigners, particularly those who are London based just ignore these sorts of issues and accuse people who raise them as liars and then wonder why people vote based on what they experience not what people tell them they should be experiencing"

No we'd point to the fact that these services should have been increased, but due to austerity they haven't been. The primary school problem was known about in 2010, and no or few attempts have been made to increase the population.

It has also been proved that a 10% increase in immigration into an area causes lower waiting times because of the healthy migrant effect. Your GP may need longer for the few immigrants who need translation but this won't be all.

No one ever said that worrying about immigration was wrong, what we did say is that it is taking the blame for things that it shouldn't.

Londoners, are more likely to have seen the impact of immigration and it was also very interesting to hear people in areas of low EU migration state that these service problems were the reason they were voting out, but hadn't experienced it themselves.

"It is impossible to "prove" that Eastern European immigrants cause British nationals to be unemployed because employers will blame other factors."

It is, sorry , or do you think the BOE or LSE just made up their research. More post truthism from leavers.

You've all got me thinking about "post truth" politics, and why people didn't care when Leave claims were debunked. It kind of jibes with the Trump phenomenon in the USA.

I think it boils down to this, people didn't care if the claims were true or false because they actually didn't care about the agenda as it was set out by politicians and journalists anyway. So claims and counter-claims were irrelevant background noise.

What were they voting for? I'm not sure. They were definitely voting on "gut feel" and emotion. Maybe they were embarrassed about their real reasons, so those reasons never got an airing or any real debate. I suspect people were voting for culture and identity and a feeling that the world was moving too fast and sort of getting away from them.

I think post truth was very cleverly adopted by the brexit campaign from the Trump one.

This basically allowed the leave campaign to be utterly dishonest and yet shape a campaign that would appeal to the largest amount of people, through playing on fears and making promises that wouldn't be kept. This is almost an exact copy of the Trump campaign.

The whole people didn't care about the truth line is true, people prefer to have their prejudices pandered to rather than challenged, and because the leave campaign did this very skillfully it garnered the most votes.

Essentially leave banded together a disparate groups of different interests and said that all would be better off outside of Europe.

Or the other way? Voting for unspecified "change" because their current lot is so unpleasant?

I certainly saw a couple of people saying they were voting Leave because it could hardly make their lives worse.

With 1 in 4 GP practices in Scotland having a GP vacancy how can a 10% increase in immigration in to an area bring down waiting times? The UK and particularly Scotland have a shortage of GPs. The number of GPs has not been able to keep up with the increase in population from immigration. The Scottish population was fairly static and even declining for a few years. The increase in population has put a large strain on primary care as practice list sizes have increased and practices don't have room for more GPs and there are no GPs applying for vacancies. Health boards aren't opening up new GP surgeries in areas of high immigration as they don't have the money or the GPs.
Your statistic is nonsense and sounds as though it comes from someone who doesn't actually work in primary care and is just theorising.

I think what I am trying to say, is that Renain was very good at controlling the agenda and the terms of the debate. So, within the Renain parameters they were winning the argument. Problem was, the Remain terms of reference and agenda wasn't shared with the majority of the voting public. So there was a whole other set of issues "under the water line" that were driving the vote that Remain never saw or dealt with.

Remain thought they were "picking the battle field" but instead they weren't in the right place at all and they list the war, so to speak.

Remain were crippled by not being able to admit that many of the UK's problems have been caused by the current and previous governments, not by the EU.

As pointed out above, children starting school this year were born in 2011/2012. The numbers of children needing school places this year who moved to the UK since 2011 is not a big percentage of the total number. So any shortage of school places this year is primarily because of lack of investment in the right places, not allowing LEAs to open new schools etc etc. Meanwhile the government has invested rather large amounts of money in the academisation programme which does little to help with school places in over-stretched areas.

Similarly there are lots of reasons underlying GP shortages: we haven't been training enough, lots of GPs are mothers who work part-time, GPs are being forced to run their own practices as businesses which many doctors don't like, there is little to no money for new facilities etc etc.

And then there's housing: during the Cameron government the annual rate of house building was the lowest it has been since the war. Social housing is being sold off and not replaced (policy of successive governments). Governments have encouraged the fast growth of house prices as it makes existing home owners feel good. Etc etc.

Elly, I don't agree with everything in your first post. In particular

"What were they voting for? I'm not sure. They were definitely voting on "gut feel" and emotion".

I don't think leave voters voted on gut feel and emotion any more than remain voters did and I think what leave voters voted for is to leave the EU.

But I think this

"So, within the Remain parameters they were winning the argument. Problem was, the Remain terms of reference and agenda wasn't shared with the majority of the voting public. So there was a whole other set of issues "under the water line" that were driving the vote that Remain never saw or dealt with."

is very, very true and explains a lot of what has happened since the referendum in terms of the number of remainers who seem to think that insulting leavers' intelligence, morals, class etc is really going to help anyone. I think politicians (and journalists) really need to start talking down to people a bit less and listening and thinking a bit more.

Indeed, Haybott.

This is a teacher friend's LEA:

A defunct secondary school which closed due to falling numbers could be resurrected as early as 2019. Education chiefs have disclosed that the Chaucer Technology site in Canterbury is their preferred option for a new secondary serving the city as the population swells.

Chaucer pupils left classes for the final time in June last year following Kent County Council’s decision to shut the school as it was “no longer viable”. The closure is already putting strain on other secondaries in the district to absorb additional pupils.

KCC now says it favours two new free schools – a form of academy funded by government but free from local authority control – one in Canterbury, one in Thanet. (Kent Online, 1 Aug 1916)

So there isn't capacity for the existing students after this closure, and central government prevents the LEA from just opening a new school: it has to wait for someone else to do so.

And friend left the last primary she taught at in the same area also under threat of closure, also for falling rolls.

Now this is an area with about 12% population growth since the 2001 census, so the situation is only going to get worse. I don't know how much of the growth is from foreign immigration (possibly not much), but for anyone so inclined, it makes an attractive and simple story to say immigrants are responsible for lack of school places. It just isn't actually true.

In friend's area, immigration hasn't caused the problem. Stopping immigration can't fix it. But blaming immigration is a nice diversion from the idealogical political decisions that are the real cause.

BTW, I agree completely with those saying that, in areas where population has changed for any reason, it is essential to acknowledge that change and cater for it.

Friend's area above is a case in point: it has three universities, which have been expanding and putting pressure on, for example, accommodation in Canterbury. She can still get a same-day GP appointment, but her GP complains of issues specific to a large number of students living away from home for the first time. Meanwhile the maternity ward where her children were born has been closed, leaving the city with no maternity provision.

So they have issues from population change that they need to deal with.

"Your statistic is nonsense and sounds as though it comes from someone who doesn't actually work in primary care and is just theorising."

Its from a study that looked at data provided by NHS and by patitents in the years from 2000 to 2012.

What it found that as immigrants were less likely to go to the Doctor ( being young and healthy) and because with any type of migration (internal or external) there is a movement of older residents out of an area. This leads to the waiting times falling, at A and E it falls 19% and similar for elective treatment.The people moving out of an area don't cause a significant impact in other areas because they are evenly dispersed.

So yes I do know what I'm talking about.

I also don't think remain ever thought they were winning the argument, it was clear from our campaign that many people were going to vote out.

As I've said your whole set of issues "under the water line" are those that have been previously blamed on immigration or those that people percieve to be because of immigration but are actually in fact not. Alwe have to do is go to look at the studies that show that people's perceptions are in fact incorrect look it up its called "perception is not reality". People percieve that immigration is actually twice as high as it is for example.

And I'm going to run with this further, this leads to the fact that although the remain camp in reality, the leave side were able to misinform the vast majority of those that voted in favour of them. The 350 million, the size of the impact of immigration on service provision, denying that immigrants are net contributors, the list can go on and on. The leave camp were also guilty of moral hazzard as none of them had anything to risk in a leave vote, all of the risk is placed upon those who actually voted to leave. This is why they were able to make all of the promises that they did, they weren't accountable for these, and they wouldn't have to oversee the mess that they were creating.

I think the leave side would love to think that everyone voted leave because of the reasons that are not questionable, the fact is that the majority of the vote did so for reasons of nationalism, xenophobia, or because they misinformed.

She can still get a same-day GP appointment, but her GP complains of issues specific to a large number of students living away from home for the first time.

And according to Theresa May, when she was home secretary, these problems are also due to "immigration" i.e. foreign students. That's one of the reasons why she made it much harder for foreign students to come here.

Out of the 1.9 million students (a number which has rapidly increased over the last decades) only a few hundred thousand are foreign students. Non-EU undergraduates pay annually 15k in fees, spend around 10k in living expenses, pay for visas and NHS surcharges, typically go home for medical treatment if needed, but apparently it is them which are the drain on our economy. (Although without them many courses, particularly Masters, would not be viable and would have to shut.)

It's so much easier to blame the foreign students than to acknowledge that the rapid expansion of home students has not been matched by corresponding investment in services in the right places. Also there has been pressure on accommodation in some university towns, with a time delay in enough university housing being built to accommodate the increased student numbers.

But smallfox, no one's in a position to give the motivation of the majority of either Leave or Remain voters.

We can only say that some (or even many) voters described particular motivations.

Which is serious enough in itself, without needing to know whether they were a majority or just a large number.

OK, then a large number was on these factors.

small

You are completely missing the point again. People perceived immigration to be high. So what? If people weren't linking immigration to some currently negative life condition, then it wouldn't matter. What matters is that people felt (correctly) that life chances were crumbling and the UK was a mess. The Remain campaign couldn't address this because it was actually the fault of the Tory govt.

So the Remain camp essentially were not addressing the real argument. Which is: who is really to blame? Labour didn't come out against the Tories strongly because Jeremy Corbyn actually wanted to leave as well.

"What matters is that people felt (correctly) that life chances were crumbling and the UK was a mess. The Remain campaign couldn't address this because it was actually the fault of the Tory govt. "

No, the remain campaign addressed this repeatedly, pointing out the fact that immigrants are net contributors, pointing out the fact that economic growth has been low because of austerity and the fact that 2008 has taken a long time to recover from.

They also repeated all the time that staying in the EU was beneficial to the UK in terms of the economy, and it was important to protect jobs etc. They also pointed out the immigration doesn't cause unemployment.

If people still perceive/believe the opposite despite being told the truth, then you have to consider why they voted the way that they did.

I'm interested in what everybody has to say but would like someone to tell me how immigration has not caused unemployment. My son works in a factory in an area of high unemployment. Most of the workforce on the shop floor are from Eastern Europe, who live in crowded rental properties. How is this not an illustration of immigration causing unemployment? The foreign workers are prepared to live in worse conditions, get low pay and long hours, than UK workers.

There is also the issue of how many people we want on our island. It makes countries prosperous to have lots of young workers but you have to have more roads and houses and concrete over more land and have more runways and more noise and light pollution to accommodate that.
I'd rather have less money and more green spaces and fewer runways.
I voted remain because I didn't trust the tories with brexit but would have voted brexit with a left wing government in power.
There's more to life than money.

The foreign workers are prepared to live in worse conditions, get low pay and long hours, than UK workers.

But to do a fair analysis of benefits/costs you also need to take into account that around 2/3 of workers from Europe are degree educated, skilled workers. Many are highly paid and employ other people. Many are net contributors to the tax system. One can't judge whether immigration has caused unemployment based on anecdotal experiences: detailed studies are needed, and one such study was quoted above.

BTW in the early 1990s long before EU8 workers started moving to the UK agricultural work in the area where I was lived was done by seasonal EU8 workers. I suspect that they will still do this (legally or illegally) even if we close the borders.

I'd rather have less money and more green spaces and fewer runways.

But most people are not going to be willing to pay the extra 5% or 10% tax which will be required to pay for pensions/healthcare for our ageing population, with no immigration of younger workers. (Even with immigration we'd have to pay more tax, but we'd have more workers to share the pension and healthcare bill.)

Most people are also not going to be happy to pay the taxes required to fill the gaps left once we lose a chunk of our finance etc etc to elsewhere in the EU.

On that rationale we have to keep having our population growing forever. We have to change to a system where each generation provides for its own pension or healthcare and where we are not dependent on an increasing number of young people to fund the elderly.

Fox: "I think the leave side would love to think that everyone voted leave because of the reasons that are not questionable, the fact is that the majority of the vote did so for reasons of nationalism, xenophobia, or because they misinformed."

And there we are back round to "all leaver voters are either racist (nationalistic or xenophobic) or stupid (misinformed and too stupid to see this whilst all those clever, clever remain voters have brains in their heads to see through lies). "

I can see why the Guardian would suit someone with those views and I will just leave you to it.

Before I go, can I just reccomend that anyone genuinely interested in who voted how have a read of Lord Ashcroft poll. The info in that along with just a smidgin of understanding of statistics (correlation does not equal cause; a correlation with voting pattern and education doesn't mean all uneducated people voted leave and all educated remain etc etc.) Accoeding to Ashcroft 43% of ABs voted to leave. Amazing how many stupid doctors, solicitors, managers, engineers and others who have managed to get themselves well paid jobs there are isn't it? Or perhaps they just disagree with you.

Okay you did say most not all leave voters but you get my drift.

Accoeding to Ashcroft 43% of ABs voted to leave. Amazing how many stupid doctors, solicitors, managers, engineers and others who have managed to get themselves well paid jobs there are isn't it?

Not stupid at all if leaving the EU means that they can remove workers' rights and pay them less. This was my relatives' main motivation for voting Leave: UKIP promised that they'd be able to stop paying maternity pay to workers in their small businesses.

And not stupid at all if leaving the EU means that the Tories can privatise everything in sight and you can afford to buy it up at bargain prices.

I don't believe that as many as 43% of doctors voted Leave either, given the likely effects on the NHS. The AB category is not homogeneous, with some ABs (such as scientists, academics, medics) massively pro-Remain which presumably means that other ABs were much more pro-Leave.

BTW if we're quoting Ashcroft: 70% of those who voted Leave think that Feminism and the Internet are forces for ill. 80% of Leave voters think Multiculturism is a force for ill too.