Just watched the Panorama programme on why people voted leave

[ssd]

and am livid

so many people who had zero fucking clue what will now happen to this country, so many wanting to have England back to how it was years ago, well guess what it wont fucking happen, time doesnt go backwards and the immigration wont get any better, it wont stop and it wont go away, all thats happened is this country will now be less competitive and the economy will tank, and when the economy tanks they have to get the money from somewhere and it'll come from the poor as the services they rely on will be cut, massively

and this was meant to be a protest vote!!

why dont so many leave voters actually realise what the are protesting about, lack of schools, housing, the nhs queues, has happened because the tory government have followed an austerity agenda we didnt even need and thats why there is a chronic shortage of housing/school places, as none of these services are being built and if you think voting leave and having a more right wing tory government in place will help these services out by christ you've got another thing coming

its fucking maddening

Willow My point exactly. The media will not try to find the well-reasoned, educated Brexiters because it does not fit with their agenda, in just the same way as they never try to find the benefits claimants who would make us all realise that most of them just need a bit of help.

Whipping up this uncertainty and worry is destabilising and doing the country more harm than anything. I wonder just what the agenda is

In this instance it's clearly to paint those who voted to leave as people who are not only racist but thick to boot.

Anyone who has spent any time on here at all will be aware there were intelligent and well reasoned arguments for both leave and stay - so to froth and curse and spit at the 'thick' brexiters who should never have had a vote anyway says more about the intelligence of you, doesn't it :)

I don't think you should question intelligence.

But when you see all the "one in the eye for the establishment" rhetoric on here, or people in areas with low immigration voting out because of immigration, you do wonder.

I'm going to have to pull you up on this point which is totally incorrect...

" has happened because the tory government have followed an austerity agenda we didnt even need and thats why there is a chronic shortage of housing/school places, "

Anyone with an ounce of sense knows you can spend what you earn, and if you borrow it must be paid back. This goes for countries as well as people.

The LABOUR government massively overspent, borrowed money and that needs repaying. Gordon Brown took the country from zero deficit to £170 Billion defecit. This needs repaying

And unfortunately we are STILL overspending, even under the Tories and even with current austerity measures and STILL in deficit. This needs repaying and must be paid back.

With existing measures we should have been out of defect by 2020 BUT WE STILL NEED TO PAY BACK ALL THE BORROWING.....austerity will be here for many many years.

*defecit

I thought it was rather like one of those benefits programmes that was set up to make you think what they wanted you to think.

I thought it was really poor journalism all round.

Agree Kummer, you only have to look on MN to see that there are many different reasons that people voted to leave, and many different 'types' of leave voter.

Many, many educated, articulate, intelligent, reasoned & informed leave voters abound - where were they?

"This goes for countries as well as people"

The treating national finances as the same as household finances is a fallacy. Look it up.

"The LABOUR government massively overspent, borrowed money and that needs repaying. Gordon Brown took the country from zero deficit to £170 Billion defecit. This needs repaying"

When the Labour government inherited the economy in 1997 they were in deficit, in 2007 the deficit was the same % of GDP as it had been in 1997 but we had far improved health services, schools and national infrastructure."

Austerity is not a necessity, it is a ideological choice, if it was necessary taxes wouldn't be cut for the rich, we have cut corporation tax, we wouldn't find money for HS2 and Trident.

But buy into the "Labour wrecked the economy" stuff all you like, it isn't correct.

Nobody would deny that some leavers voted for ridiculous reasons, just as some remainers did the same, but it's worth remembering that programmes like this usually have a very definite agenda

This one clearly had a "look at these stupid leavers" brief, so went looking for folk who would prove their point. But they could just as easily have "proved" exactly the opposite ...

seriously there was a guy with 6 kids who was complaining he couldnt feed his family as the immigrants came here and took his job, and he couldnt live on the money the gov gave him and he had a fucking horse in his back garden!!!

The 'guy' was an ex-soldier and former steelworker.

The programme was about a specific WC class community in the Black Country.

The Poor are not, of course, a homogeneous mass.

Being Poor does not always equate to Not Being Intelligent. Look at our esteemed op, who is poor, but clever - very clever. Why, she could see beyond the lies of the Leave campaign.

However, there is no doubt that if you are poor you probably don't own a home (so a house crash won't personally affect you) don't work in London city (or if you do, it's not in trade or world banking) and you probably don't have a degree, and the idea of your children studying in Berlin or Madrid or Athens is perhaps a tad unrealistic.

Obviously, for this, you should be punished by having your vote withdrawn.

Agreed? It's the only fair way. Can't have thick people giving their opinion.

Labour spent that money on bailing out the banks. As did every developed country. It was a global financial crisis, totally unrelated to domestic spending.

Austerity is like trying to cut your overdraft by paying yourself less.

Agree Kummer, you only have to look on MN to see that there are many different reasons that people voted to leave, and many different 'types' of leave voter

I think people forget/don't realise that MN exists in some kind of bubble.

Less educated/eloquent posters are quickly shouted down and head off to nethuns.

I live in an OUT region, one of the highest in the country. The vast majority of people in my town are like the people on Panaroma (minus the horse in the garden - for the most part)

You can call me patronising all you want, but I have not spoken to a single leave voter who actually understood what they were voting for, bar one who just wants to watch the country burn .

From what I can see, at least in my town, the people with least understanding of what would come are the masses.

Agree Puzzledandpissedoff. Biased reporting, playing into the hands of a few hardcore fanatics who simply refuse to accept the result.

It's actually getting boring now.

I'm an EU national living in London, so you can guess my opinion about their loss of community, Johnny's aunt's hairdresser's daughter not getting a school place etc.)

Why hummus? Why shouldn't a Londoner be sympathetic to small town concerns? Why would a migrant not think community is important? Or an EU national not understand that school capacity is a grassroots problem?

You make it sound automatic that people will be unsympathetic to each other

I did watch it; my god, they people they picked to interview… Has someone issued them all with the same Brief Guide to Metaphors? They all produce exactly the same mixed up, muddled up vocabulary when trying to talk about immigration without sounding like racists (but inevitable do).

This often repeated complaint, "comin' over here, takin' our jobs, undercuttin' our wages" (I haven't regained my full use of 'g' since Remain's inspirational 'in' campaign). Does it not occur to anyone to get angry at the people hiring workers for lower wages? The employers who actually hold the power. They aren't compelled to pay the lowest wages possible, but they don't seem to receive any ire for supposedly choosing cheaper immigrant labour over the wage requirements existing population.

This is not a left vs right argument btw. Even the IMF has changed its position based on the evidence: Neoliberalism: Oversold?

"Austerity policies not only generate substantial welfare costs due to supply-side channels, they also hurt demand—and thus worsen employment and unemployment. The notion that fiscal consolidations can be expansionary (that is, raise output and employment), in part by raising private sector confidence and investment, has been championed by, among others, Harvard economist Alberto Alesina in the academic world and by former European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet in the policy arena. However, in practice, episodes of fiscal consolidation have been followed, on average, by drops rather than by expansions in output. On average, a consolidation of 1 percent of GDP increases the long-term unemployment rate by 0.6 percentage point and raises by 1.5 percent within five years the Gini measure of income inequality (Ball and others, 2013).­" ~IMF Finance & Development, June 2016, Vol. 53, No. 2

Dacre I think community can be made almost anywhere - one of the blokes on the programme himself moved from A to B 30 years before and was saying that he had felt accepted in B (where he now mourned the loss of community).

In the circumstances, it sounds like a euphemism. "Loss of community" is some vague ephemeral thing that is more palatable than "I'm uncomfortable hearing Polish spoken on the street." What have they done to strengthen their community, if it's of such importance?

I am pretty unsympathetic to the bunch that was interviewed, but it's clear they were selected to portray Leavers in a certain way - it's a version of the Channel 5 documentary about benefit claimants, really.

So you're okay with people in tough circumstances identifying oversupply of cheap labour as a contributing factor to their problems brag?

It's just that you want them to be more articulate about it and make futile representations to employers rather than meaningful representations to politicians?

people just look for the facts that confirm bias already, rather than challenge the way they think

So basically what you are doing with this programme and it's obvious agenda then, smallfox.

I couldn't bear to watch it.

The remain campaign should have been more united, made the message simpler & more effective. For me, the referendum has been far more divisive than traditional blue:red party lines

Dacre I think community can be made almost anywhere - one of the blokes on the programme himself moved from A to B 30 years before and was saying that he had felt accepted in B (where he now mourned the loss of community).

Personally, living in a small town with umpteen relations and everyone I went to school with plus everyone I ever kissed is my idea of hell. But a lot of people love living that. Non graduates are less likely to leave their home towns (lacking the impetus of uni ) anyway. Sneering at that and assuming that it is in itself a euphemistic sentiment is a bit off.