I've just read @Ibiza2015 post and I'm no raving leftie elite but it still makes no sense to blame EU membership on either a: being forgotten by labour, or b: being ignored by the elite. The elite always ignore the people, they just fool them into getting their way. A lot of anger in that post directed seemingly at people who have no power to do anything about it. Very odd.
See, now you're doing it again. This is exactly why you lost. It's just more 'Oh you're so stupid you don't know what you're doing.
I'll tell you why I voted Leave. One of the biggest things that influenced my vote was that the head of the Remain campaign publicly said that Brexit would mean that the wages paid to the lowest paid U.K. citizens would go up after Brexit but that was 'not a good thing'. Stuart Rose is the ex-chair of M&S who made his money off the back of people on minimum wage. Since 2005 and Polish ascension wages of the poorest have been stagnant, but the richest 10%'s wages have roared ahead. Because they had an endless supply of cheap labour they could pay their staff poverty wages and pocket more money themselves. Since the referendum that has reversed. The wages of the poorest are growing at their fastest rate since 2005 and the wages of the richest have stagnated. The head of the Remain campaign actually went on record and told every person on low wages in the UK that he wanted us to vote Remain so we wouldn't get a pay rise. I mean, ffs.
The second thing is that the EU's federal system is shit. It's jaw droppingly unaccountable. Large countries (which is what the EU is becoming) are notoriously difficult to manage. It's rarely successful and usually ends up as a tyranny like Russia and China or a country which accepts it's too unwieldy to meet the needs of all their citizens so doesn't even bother trying like India or China.
Only the US had had some measure of success. One of the reasons for that is that their two party system means whether you're a stockbroker on Wall Street or a red neck yokel in Iowa you vote for the same two parties and their manifestos. It gives them a real mandate and Americans can hold them accountable on achieving that. (And please don't say that Trump proves the US system is not working, his impeachment shows it is.
The EU system is singularly awful and unaccountable because MEPs are a patchwork of hundreds of parties. The parties are different in each country. There is never a single party with a majority of MEPs and a clear mandate to implement which they can be judged against. The EU parliament works on a system of horse trading and jockeying for alliances so if MEPs don't deliver against their manifestos they can shrug and say 'not my fault, this is the way it works'. All we can hope for when electing MEPs is that we can be sure they'll be vaguely something towards the left or right and that's it. Totally unaccountable.
My husband works in the construction industry. He's a migrant from an EU country but he is settled here, has been for decades. I used to work in a University when Poland ascended to the EU. At the time he had a permanent job making pre cast concrete. He had a pension and holidays, sick pay, paternity leave and reasonable wages. Within a couple of months of Poland's ascension His bosses found spurious excuses to fire all their staff and take on Poles for lower wages. Salaries in the construction industry plummeted. There are few permanent jobs left in that industry, they're all contract so he can be fired without reason or notice, he has no sick pay, no holiday (and no please don't say he has a right to holiday pay that was got around by paying the same wages but calling 50p in lieu of holiday). Conditions have deteriorated at his work. No more overtime or pay for bank holidays. Companies won't train up young people any longer because they can get a migrant fully trained at someone else's expense.
At the time this started happening all the wealthy middle class left wing people I worked with at a Uni were crowing about how marvellous it was that they could get cheap cleaners and plumbers and gardeners and nannies now these uppity working class people had been put back in their boxes. They didn't know or care that it wasn't just plumbers charging £90 and hour, it affected many people on low incomes already. These people who were crowing about it, they were unionised professionals who would go on strike if they didn't get a big enough pay rise or they wanted more perks. If they had to face the straitening of circumstances my family had over the last 14 years they'd be screaming blue murder and manning the barricades. And yes of course they're Remainers now.
And yes, not trying to ameliorate the effects of FOM on the poorest is the EUs fault because Cameron went and asked them to do just that and they refused.
Working class people have tried again and again again to talk about our concerns but we were ignored and the only thing Labour offered us was student politics from people who rarely get outside the M25 and insults. Of course that put us off voting Labour.