Brexit- still gutted by result

[TheEmojiFormerlyKnownAsPrince]

Now on holiday in France. Handing over our EU passports was bad😰

Driving through France. Lots of the French Tricolour flag being flown alongside EU flag. That made me feel gutted too.

I just don't seem to be able to rally about it😟. I feel very keenly that we have lost that sense of unity and support.

Snivelling in a French gite atm☹️

The remain campaign did make those points, lexiters get less repect from than tories.

There is only one party to blame for the situation we are in now though.

Labour haven't been split over Europe really since the late 80s, there was small pockets of eurosceptisim in the party early 90s. All policy has been pro EU since Kinnock.

The eurosceptics in the tories on the other hand elected IDS over the far more credible Ken Clark, nearly took down their own PM in the 90s and were so frightened about losing voters they forced this referendum.

But then again - which politician took us into the EEC - a Tory
Which politician signed the treaty creating the EU - a Tory
So it really is/was a cross party issue.

Heath was never popular though. Major suffered by not being Thatcher, but IMO history will be kinder to him. Cameron - I hope his reputation is never rehabilitated. I wonder if the Remain campaign would have been more positive if we had a PM in the same mould as Major, or say if TM had then been in charge?

From the stats I've seen the majority of labour votes voted to remain. Most Tory voters to leave.

Yeah. Because if one thing duns Corbyn up it's "pro Europe since the 1990s"

And we should have expelled fucking Gisella Stewart.

We seem to be forgetting about the role of UKIP. Even before they had any UK MP's the press gave them stacks of airtime and publicity. This sent the anti EU agenda into overdrive.

I'm in massively safe Labour seat that voted Leave. I am hardly alone. If the referendum were to have been along party lines, that wouldn't have happened. Old white labour voters voted out. There are a hell of a lot of them. I bet a lot of them voted Labour (ie, Leave) in '83. FFS I voted Labour in '83.

I think too much blame is allocated to the remain camp.

They pointed out the benefits and then the leave camp said "Oh but we'll keep all that".

Seriously, I was part of the campaign, the mendacious way the leave campaign behaved was ridiculous. They would say anything to get us out,

Oh come on you can't say Corbyn represents the Labour party at all. He may be leader but his personal stance doesn't match the stance of the party since Kinnock does it?

The unions were pretty ambiguous, as well. There was hardly a solid labour campaign. And Alan Johnson? Was he the best we had?

The labour leadership should have done better, Alan Johnson is very well respected though. However, I think in the end the people who called the referendum need to take the blame for this situation.

Oh and the unions firmly backed the remain campaign, apart from maybe the RMT who quite frankly have lost the plot.

Like a lot of labour people, Johnson is popular amongst people who agree with him already and utterly unable to convince anyone else. Being respected by your base is not the same as being an effective campaigner.

Yes, referendums are always shit, always give the wrong answer to the wrong question and should always be avoided. Unfortunately they are popular with demagogues and with weak politicians. We are paying the price.

The unions were torn between backing remain and booking their new friend Jez, who is perfectly happy about Leave winning, as he now has an outcome both he and his hero Tony have consistently campaigned for for more than thirty Years.

If we had to have a referendum at least they should have put some checks in, like a certain percentage being for change or otherwise the status quo stood. Or not said that it was 'advisory' and now deciding that it's not after all. If the vote had been much more strongly Leave, I suspect there would not have been so much annoyance about the result.

And then the Leave voters crying foul all the time and leaving threads because we Remainers are being nasty to them (they say). If it's so good, there should be a long list of benefits - the only benefits so far are that if you are paid in some other currency or have savings in other currencies you have done well because the £ has collapsed.

The unions largely backed remain. Frances O'Grady participated in the televised debate - backed remain. Corbyn backed remain participated in a live debate on Sky news a few days before the referendum.

None of this is of course is a match for the Murdoch press.

And unfortunately, for all your attempts to shift the blame here, it has to go to on to the Prime Minister who called the referendum and led the remain campaign.

It also has to go to the party that didn't back their leader in big numbers, 141 of them voted for Brexit and campaigned for it, far fewer Labour voters did.

In the end the campaign to leave had the best catch phrase, and a lot of reasons for leaving that people bought. It also had the protest vote.

Corny opposed Maastricht and Lisbon and advocated a referendum in 2011.

www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/03/14/corb-m14.html?view=article_mobile

Nice non-Murdoch source.

"The unions were pretty ambiguous, as well."

That's not actually true. There was a great deal of internal debate within the major unions to understand the issues - and a lot of material was provided to explain those issues to members. And remember that all this was being done against the backdrop of massive resources having to be deployed to fight the Trade Union Act, and in particular (until the Tories dropped it) the threat to abolish check off in the public sector with just three months' notice, necessitating a single minded focus by the big public services unions on switching members to direct debit, instead of on the referendum.

Huge efforts were made to campaign for a Remain vote - but in the end, immigration fears carried the day for a lot of people.

There was also a minority who believed an intellectual left argument that the EU should be rejected for ideological reasons - in particular because of the EU dismantling of collective bargaining structures in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy etc.

In the end, however, only three relatively small national unions - RMT, ASLEF and the Bakers and Allied Workers Union - campaigned to leave the EU.

Frances O Grady did a good job IMHO, although it was a shame that we didn't get to hear more from other strong moderate voices such as Dave Prentis of Unison.

The real problem, in my view, was that the campaign was fatally flawed through being led by Cameron. Having called the referendum, he should have stepped back. His credibility was shot to pieces by calling a referendum and then arguing that voting in favour of one side rather than the other would have catastrophic consequences. Either he was incompetent or mendacious - or possibly both.

I'm aware the Corbyn is/was eurosceptic, but you can't shift the blame here.

The Labour areas that have voted out have mainly done so because of immigration, my original home in country Durham certainly did, where my Gran lives in Hartlepool did. Everyone you talk to, or the researchers who are searching for the reasons talk to comes back to that.

Immigration and the EU have been easy to blame by the right wing media for decades.

and add to the fact that alot of areas that voted out didn't even have many migrant workers, Sunderland for example.

I guess its easier to blame johnny foreigner than more complex issues such as globalisation and capitalism.

Either he was incompetent or mendacious - or possibly both.
Yes to that. As a matter of interest, who do people think would have been good to lead the Remain Campaign?

I also think that only the official Leave campaign should have been allowed prominence. Non of this rubbish with Farage, who was then immediately able to say that it wasn't his group which promised the £350 million for the NHS.

The Labour areas that have voted out have mainly done so because of immigration

Indeed. About which Labour's position, in office, was that it wouldn't happen, then that it hadn't happened, then that even if it had happened, it was great for everyone.

Immigration is great for London: more skills at the top end, more cheap labour at the bottom. It is also good for the country. It is, however, bad for low paid, low skill workers in areas of deprivation, and we should have done something about that in office (for example, building schools, or ensuring sufficient GPs) rather than claiming it caused no problems at all. This is hardly a radical position: even Yvette Cooper now says this. We allowed immigration to metastasise as an issue, instead of confronting it head on ("good for the country, causes some local issues, here are our policy proposals to deal with those temporary tactical problems"). Instead we went deep into denial, and the "there will be very few A8 immigrants" debacle just made us look unhinged.

Ann Black nailed it in her last NEC report: On the referendum campaign I believed that this had been lost over decades. For the last three Euro-elections, under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, the NEC was told not to mention Europe because it turned voters off. In 2005 Tony Blair said that thirty-four per cent of strawberries were picked by Poles, and migrant workers helped to prevent inflation by keeping wage rises down. More recently we were assured, despite protestations, that UKIP would take votes only from the Tories and not from Labour. My view remains that no leader could have made up more than a million votes in a few short months.

I also think that only the official Leave campaign should have been allowed prominence

"Allowed" by whom? The Ministry of Truth?

The right wing press love Farage because he is a divisive figure (divide and conquer). He is the most famous eurosceptic in the UK. Good luck keeping him quiet.