Frankiestein401
^I have family in the north west of England and their vote was as much to hit out at the south (who are seen as having shafted them for decades) as any kind of desperation.
suspect that whilst all the talk is about protecting the city and nothing about fixing the country there won't be any swing to remain.^
I'm sorry but I sadly disagree.
I have slowly, slowly come to the conclusion that nothing is going to shift those Leave voters. Nothing that people say; nothing that happens.
I say that as someone who has always, passionately, believed that politics is essentially about persuasion and change and is essentially dynamic: a process of pragmatism that is of its nature non-ideal, a mixture of the changing material real and response to that change; a process of persuading people to move from fixed ideologies in response to changed situations, a process of response between experience-based standpoints and discourses that enable people to live full lives as political beings.
And I've seen that work in my life time, with genuine positive political and social change and the evolution of political discourses both at the level of how people explain their reality and in legislature.
But this, this, is something different.
It is beyond that process of persuasion, argument and experience.
I think it is close to grooming and radicalisation. And, yes, I know that radicalisation is a kind of 'discourse of the oppressed' - but I would say that it is a kind of zero-sum discourse, and its very extremism is based on a belief that the process of interactive political discourse itself is dead. It is, in many ways, a discourse founded on the death of the political process - or at the very least, a death of the hope of political discourse.
Which is why reasoning, discussion, experience, talking has no effect.
There are no 'magic words' that can reach through that.
And, yes, I truly think that a lot of those people have been 'groomed' into that position. They have been radicalised by a discourse that has taken an experience (for example, the decline of manufacturing and traditional industries; the concentration of labour and wealth in emerging areas of the UK) and constructed a discourse of hate around that.
Hate is stronger than bread. Hate, I think, drives people on when their stomach is empty. I suspect we are going to find out if I'm right about that.
And I fundamentally disagree that there is no point in talking about the damage to the economy and the City and replacing it with some sort of fakery about 're-building the economies in a geographically fairer way'. Why? Because that would be lying. It would be ameliorative fantasy. And people have been lied to enough, surely? Some of us, for sure, have been sickened by the force-feeding of lies and half-truths. By the wilful mis-representations, and the giving of deception-soaked fantasy and half-truths. By the gentle stroking of people's most base instincts, whilst they were encouraged to believe things they, deep-down, knew to be a complete fabrication of the truth.
We're not children. We're adults. We have to accept and own our responsibility. And the truth. And the truth is that experts, yes experts, have revised the damage to the UK's GDP - from a pre-Referendum estimate of between 4% and 10%, to a whopping 12.5% - partly because no-one seriously believed the City would go.
It's pointless not telling people how important the City is. It's childish feeding people's resentment and hatred of it's dominance in the economy. It is what it is. We don't have time or room for manoeuvre to change that dominance now. Instead, we are facing a massive hit to the UK's GDP.
We need to be very grown-up in discussing that. No more cartoon-cut-out hate figures. No more appealing to limbic emotions.
As one of my friends said to me a day or so after the result: how does a first-world nation survive a hit of that magnitude to its GDP and not become a failed state?
That is the discussion we need to have.
It is, without a doubt, what others are having - and some of those people have some really, really unpleasant solutions to that problem.
The conversation about the City does talk about the dispossessed - or those with a profound feeling of dispossession. Lots of us talk about how the impact of Brexit is going to fall disproportionately on 'Leave' areas. We talk about how it will decimate the public sector: if anyone feels dispossessed right now, I would say this: 'If you have a reasonable expectation of being treated in a hospital when you are ill, of having your children actually educated in a school, have some kind of help when in hardship - you have much, much more to be dispossessed of.'
None of this makes any difference. It's not heard.
Some - many - people are far, far past the point of joining in with the conversation. They have left the conversation. Nothing is going to bring it back. That is why I say that Brexit was a kind of mass radicalisation.
It's one reason I hate the 'I hate London and Londoners' threads on MN. They popped up big time throughout the Referendum. The Chaos Merchants that appeared on MN peddled a strange muddy line that mixed up anti-semitism, anti-Bankers, anti-elitism, xenophobia, anti-cultural liberalism, fear, insecurity and economic liberalism. It was grooming. A mixture of sops to people's darkest insecurities and soporifics about the misgivings of the result of such poisonous ideological opium.
I genuinely think that very little that happens or is said over the next few years is going to shift all of that. So, the very least we can do is to try to tell the truth, not lie, not soft-peddle, not misrepresent, not feed the hunger for fantasy, not appeal to people's needs for an ego-reassuring lie, not appeal to irrational emotion over the need for truth. I honestly think that it is something we need to do as a good in itself and because anything else is hopeless.