To tell you why I voted to leave

[readingreadingreading]

I'm not brave enough to say this IRL and that is part of the problem.

I refuse to believe that I, or 52% of the British population are either thick or racist. I also think that such a pessimistic view of our population is leading to more divisions.

I have wanted to leave the EU since the Maastricht treaty was signed (I even sent off for a copy of it). I always said I'd campaign to leave as soon as I got the chance. I didn't campaign as it would have meant aligning with groups such as Farage which I do think are racist. But I still chose to vote leave.

I think the EU are getting too big and have always been too bureaucratic. The countries aligned to it are too varied for a common purpose to be right for everyone.

I don't know if we have an immigration problem or not. If we do we need to be able to restrict the number of nationals of other European countries moving here. If we don't we should be a lot more welcoming to people from other parts of the world, people who really need asylum. The current situation has desperate people turned away at borders and highly skilled workers having to jump through hoops for a job where they are wanted and needed.

No of course I didn't believe there would be extra money for the NHS. However I think currently we give money to the EU and we get money back whereas giving the same money directly to British needs would be a better use of it. Not to mention the savings from all the extra MPs.

I'm old enough to remember life before the EU. We managed to travel to Europe, live and work in different countries, eat food and not go to war. I'm reasonably sure we can continue to do so without them.

I don't think the EU can last much longer and I thought (wrongly) that coming out now in an orderly fashion would be better that having it all crash down around us. I'm nervous of new laws being enacted that we have no veto on and drifting into closer integration.

I hate to watch the current mess and no, this isn't what I voted for. But if we can't get out there shouldn't have been a vote and I don't think everything can be blamed on the leavers.

The UK keeps saying they will be no need for a border and the technology will be in place. If the UK government are so confident that they have the plans to deal with the NI border why is the backstop an issue.

Exactly.

I don't think that it's entirely fair to blame leavers on the current situation that has transpired. Yes it was always going to be extremely unwieldy disentangling from 40 years of laws, but I don't think that anyone could have anticipated the full extent of the current shit show.

I don't think that anyone could have anticipated the full extent of the current shit show.

I really don't blame leavers. They were told it would be the easiest deal in history.

Interesting thread. I voted remain but did a lot of thinking about it, and I never thought the EU was the perfect institution.
I'm very irritated by some of the hardcore remainers in here who act as though the EU can do no wrong. It's a flawed system which, on balance, makes more sense in than out not a benign fairyland of opportunity for all.

I tell you what really fucks me off though is the number of times I have read stuff like this on here, in justification of calling all leavers racist:

By foreigners they mean Eastern Europeans. Admitedly we do have a lot of them here, but they are doing the jobs that locals didnt want to do. They are known for working really bloody hard as well, far harder than most of the local population.

Most EU migrants worked in building, care, retail and hospitality, important but low skilled and low wage jobs that british people dont want.

You will believe in Europe when the British become less lazy and less shit at learning other languages and less reluctant to embrace other cultures? Ok.

I think a lot of supposedly educated middle class people in the UK are using Brexit as a nice cover for showing what they really think of the working class. .and it's ugly.
For the record, YES British people do want jobs in retail, farming, building and hospitality! But we don't want to be exploited and we need to make enough to feed a family in the UK. We dont want to compete with workers willing to sleep 4 to a room and work for a lower wage.
Not all British workers are "lazy" and not all eastern European migrants are your favourite cliché of the smiley hardworking Polish plumber. There are problems on both sides, but it's easy to sneer at people's actual lives when you are safe in a professional career, rather than scrabbling for a wage.
And it's very fucking easy to parrot "the jobs Brits won't do" over and over when it's not YOU who has been told to do split shifts on Sunday for £7.40 an hour, or sent home after 2 hours of work because it's not busy.
Maybe if people with real concerns were ever listened to this wouldn't have all happened.
Oh, and I am from immigrants myself btw!

And yy it's the British border not the Irish border! Drives me mad!

Don't see much snootiness from Remainers on here. Not saying none but it is rare. Rarer even than racism from Leavers on here.

@HPFA

That is extraordinarily powerful.

Alan Black's interview should be watched by everyone who is trying to sweep this under the carpet.

The idea that in 2019 we are potentially condemning our own citizens to live in an environment where they fear for the lives of their children from bombs and guns is extraordinary.

I have Irish family so this was discussed before Brexit, but for the people who don't, I don't think there was anywhere near enough coverage on it for people in England, Wales and Scotland to make an informed choice. And to me, that is largely the fault of the Remain campaign.

Cameron was so arrogant and so convinced that the people would never vote to leave that this, the most serious and potentially catastrophic consequence of leaving the EU with or without a deal was barely mentioned. This should have been front and centre.

Is there any No Deal leaver on here who can watch that and still say that a no deal Brexit is in the best interests of the UK, bearing in mind that nearly 2 million of us live in NI?

Of course, you can just pretend it won't happen just like every other negative outcome from Brexit.

I'm glad that for the most part this thread is staying civil - it's good to see people actually prepared to listen to one another for once and respect that people may look at the same (partial - because none of us knows everything) set of information and reach different political conclusions.

I have a question for those who say (reasonably enough) that voting leave was like signing a blank cheque. And it's this. Why do you not feel that voting remain was also signing a blank cheque?

As I said ( a long way upthread) I actually worked in Brussels during the run up to the single market. I've watched a lot of change in the way the EU is constituted and the powers it has - Maastricht, Lisbon, various more minor tweaks in between.

This:
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/21/eu-future-post-brexit-germany-split-european-government
is quite an old article (from July 2016), but very good I think on the central tension in the EU as it now is. If I remember the content of Martin Schultz's op ed piece correctly (he, incidentally, is in favour of closer political union heading towards an eventually federal Europe), his position is "Either the Commission is a civil service, in which case they need to be less political, or they are a political body, in which case they need to be a directly elected second chamber. But the current position - political power plus lack of democratic accountability - is not tenable."

We simply do not know how this is going to pan out in future. What does worry me is what the current situation - an appointed Commission with very little oversight externally - would look like if it was appointed by a European Council in a Europe where the FN, la Lega, the AFD, Orban, the current rightwing government in Poland, etc. etc. held sway.

There's an underlying assumption that because so far the Commission has been a politically liberal body (reflecting the mainstream politicians appointing it), it will continue to be so. And a naive assumption that there are enough checks and balances in the system that nothing could go wrong.

I'm not so sure, myself. I think while the central tension between the Commission's lack of democratic accountability and its political powers remains unresolved, Remainers are signing a blank cheque just as much as Leavers are. The timescales are longer - the uncertainties of Brexit are immediate and in-your-face - but they're still there.

(And that's without even getting into the economic instability of the Eurozone, and the fact that none of us know how that's going to work out come the next global financial crisis.)

I think this thread is the perfect example of confirmation bias and people finding it very difficult to admit when they were wrong.

Voting leave was clearly a mistake, people either did so with bad (racist) intentions or good intentions but were naive/didn’t educate themselves properly.

But still Leavers are trying to convince everyone that they were completely right and it’s x’s and y’s fault that it didn’t turn out the way they expected.

This entire shit show was predicted by political commentators before the vote. I remember listening to a radio 4 series about all the consequences of Brexit if the referendum voted out. I’m not a magician, I just engaged with the news before voting.

Leavers were wrong. If you were one, accept it and reflect.

@LeaverOnBalance

I haven't heard any Remainer claiming that there is no room for EU reform. Personally, I feel that the British Parliamentary system needs more reform when a handful of unelected peers has the possibility to filibuster and subvert the will of Parliament but I agree that there are certainly areas where reform is needed.

The discussions and debates happening in Germany now are those which should have occurred in the UK as a first step before going for the nuclear option of the referendum.

By all means, let's discuss the EU, what it does for us and how we want our MEPs and government to represent us and make it better but it's too late for that now.

In terms of the Eurozone, it is impossible to know how countries such as Greece and Ireland would have fared if they had faced the last financial crisis without being in the EZ.

I find it extraordinary that in an era of Trump’s Presidency in the US and the situation in Hong Kong showing China’s feelings on democracy, not to mention Putin’s Russia, that the EU is the powerful bogeyman state the Brexiteers view as a threat...

that the EU is the powerful bogeyman state the Brexiteers view as a threat

I know right? I absolutely cannot fathom this.

Somebody made a good point about 'confirmation bias'. To the people in the Mumsnet bubble:

'For a long time, now, the British centre-Left has claimed the moral monopoly on all things. It is clearly visible — one need only look at how its perspective on issues like climate change, multiculturalism or gender-based causes are pushed, incessantly, on the airwaves, in classrooms and in print, as gospel truth. Any deviation from it is viciously attacked, with accusations of fascism, bigotry and chauvinism more frequent than suggestions those who question this orthodoxy may be simply mistaken. Proponents claim that their views are “common sense” or based on rationality. The inference, then, is that those who disagree are more than just incorrect: They are morally contemptible and incapable of rationality.

The thing is, though, most of the public does not obey the line on this. Their voting patterns certainly don’t suggest they do. And, if Brexit is anything to go by, they are tired of being told they are backwards and wicked for not sharing the same views as a Guardian editorial.

You can tell why there was so much anger at the suggestion the Tories were asking members of the public for their thoughts on cultural issues — for many on the left, it is heresy to question their values, and dangerous to ask ordinary people who, unenlightened provincials that they are, cannot be trusted to think the right way. ' - Benedict Spence

@sunnybeachtime "Voting leave was clearly a mistake, people either did so with bad (racist) intentions or good intentions but were naive/didn’t educate themselves properly."

pay attention!

@MaximusHeadroom I totally agree about Britain's constitutional system needing sorting out too. The House of Lords does need to be replaced with a directly elected second chamber. And the whole parliamentary clusterfuck we've witnessed in the fallout from Brexit has shown the gaps in our "unwritten" (i.e. case law and precedent based, rather than codified-in-a-single-document) constitution. The fact that we now have a situation of near complete paralysis in parliament (and have had for many months now - the latest round is just the latest incarnation of the paralysis) is not a good state.

Incidentally, I wholeheartedly agreed with Gina Miller's court case. The matter had to be put to parliament. And yes, I get that MPs are representatives not delegates. Nonetheless, there's something a bit off about two main parties standing on election platforms of "we will implement Brexit", then significant numbers of MPs in those parties setting out to deliberately thwart any sort of Brexit. It could be said that in some constituencies, at any rate, voters were misled as to what the actual views of their would-be representative were at the time of election.

As for EU reform - yes, all for it. But again, I'm an old hand at this job, and have watched the EU from the inside, sitting in committee meetings in Brussels. It's not like Martin Schultz and other major German players suddenly woke up in summer 2016 and said "Eek, Brexit, we must fix the inner workings of the EU." Attempts at reform, and curtailing the powers of the Commission/ increasing scrutiny and checks and balances have been going on for years. They've all failed, not because the Commission is some sort of evil cabal (the "you Leavers think the EU is some kind of bogeyman" rhetoric) but because like all institutions it takes on a life and direction of its own, and a terrific inertia in the face of attempts to reform it.

I think Yanis Varoufakis' book "Adults in the Room" (if you can get past the rather insistent authorial voice) is extremely good on this.

For those that voted leave

We've had published how much each area will get to replace what the EU gave and many Welsh, Northern cities etc are going to get a small fraction of what they used to.
I'm in Liverpool. We were hardest hit by the cuts. We've lost many employers and are losing more, directly because of Brexit. We are a city that struggles for jobs. We have a housing crisis for the first time ever, thanks to Tory policies.

So our infrastructure is going to collapse.

Will you get involved in campaigns about this? Will you take to the streets?

Do you care that the quality of life for many is going to get poorer and poorer?

Or do you think it's just collateral damage?

I love that quote, @ScreamingLadySutch.

It’s something I’ve been saying for a long time, and that I alluded to earlier in the thread: the belief (bolstered by the circularity and self-reinforcing influence of social media) that only your own set of beliefs and actions are valid and anyone who thinks differently, acts differently, or votes differently is evil and stupid.

(And I say this as a Centre-Left Remain voter, not an ‘indefensible Tory Brexiteer’ )

And hear we have the EU Commission confirming that after a No Deal Brexit UK parts will not count as EU parts and that therefore EU compainies need to "rethink" their suppliers if they are UK based

twitter.com/mattholehouse/status/1169247051093282816

You would think that this was blindingly obvious - that a part made in the UK would not be an EU part when we are not in the EU.

Yet we have someone in the replies claiming that somehow UK parts will still be counted as being from the EU after Brexit. He appears to think we can compel the EU to accept them.

I still don’t get why people think there will be a war in Ireland!

No one thinks there will be war in Ireland. There will be war in Northern Ireland. The UK. Ireland will suffer economically, but will not be at war.

People really need to get that into their heads - supporting No Deal or any deal that jeopardises the GFA is advocating for civil war in their own country. Who on earth does that?!

I love the idea that our government would be fully transparent and accountable post Brexit with Boris Johnson the blatant liar and obfuscator in charge and the least electable Labour leader since Michael Foot in opposition.

@LeaverOnBalance "like all institutions it takes on a life and direction of its own, and a terrific inertia in the face of attempts to reform it."

WELL SAID!

This (increasing bureaucracy, increasing centralisation, increasing taxation) is what brought down the Roman Empire, it is bringing down the NHS and it will bring down the EU.

The economist Charles Murray made the same point: that bureaucracies despite their best intentions keep expanding. They evolve into protecting their own interests and acting in their own interests.

Fair play to the OP for putting her views across calmly. However, it shows why a referendum was such a bad idea. The OP’s position is entirely based on feelings without any real grasp of the facts. If I’m honest, many of my reasons for remaining in the EU were based on feelings, but I at least I took the time to listen to and read the experts rather than thinking I knew better

Remainers: Fact, Fact'Fact, Irish border, rules of origins, customs checks, fact, fact, fact

Leavers: EU Empire.

Too lazy to type again - I posted this on the Irish backstop thread ( here, worth a read) about why reintroducing the border will mean a return to the Troubles.

...

It's not like there's a specific threat in place for Day 1, that will see X killed in NI and Y killed in GB (although, fuck knows, maybe there is).

Introducing a hard border will have a massively negative impact on people's lives. They won't be able to do things they did before, businesses will suffer, jobs will be lost. The first people hit by this will be those with no buffer - as ever, economic strife comes first for the poor, not the rich.

As people see every facet of their lives changed, they will get desperate. This is becomes a rich recruiting ground for paramilitaries. As attacks on border posts ramp up, so do retaliatory attacks on nationalist communities.

People begin to distrust the people around them, especially those from the other community.

Then, that's it. That's the Troubles again. Instead of rubbing along happily enough together, the old divide becomes apparent. Security is stepped up, and then the security is attacked. Old wounds reopen.

At the minute, there are still paramilitaries but they don't have support within their communities. People have seen peace and they like it. But trust me when I say, massive disruption to day-to-day life and huge economic penalties will whip us back to the bad old times quicker than we'd like to imagine.

The House of Lords does need to be replaced with a directly elected second chamber.

Hmmnnnn... interestingly, we had a referendum in 2013 about abolishing our second house. I was a bit shocked that it didn't pass, but there you are, the voters still wanted it to exist even though we don't directly elect the senators.