An open letter to leavers

[LoveInTokyo]

Dear Leavers

I’m sorry that David Cameron offered us a referendum and promised to respect the outcome, whatever it was.

Unfortunately, he was fucking with you.

He promised that referendum when he didn’t think he stood a cat’s chance in hell of getting a majority, and never thought he’d actually have to deliver on it. When he got his surprise majority, he made a big show of going to Brussels and pretending to negotiate with the EU to get us a “better deal”. Unfortunately, he already knew perfectly well that the UK already had a better deal than any other country in the EU, and that they were not going to bend over backwards to get us to stay. So he made a big show of negotiating and then tried to pretend that he had done something meaningful. He then went through the motions of holding a referendum, half-heartedly campaigning to remain. He did absolutely no contingency planning, partly because he never believed that leave would actually win, and partly because he already knew that he had no intention of staying to deal with the fallout if they did. That’s why he resigned the day after the referendum and waltzed off, whistling a merry tune.

He played a high risk game of poker with our money, and lost.

I understand that many of you feel defensive about your decision and dislike being labelled “thick” by angry remainers. As a remainer myself, I feel saddened and frustrated that none of you seem able to articulate any benefits that will actually come out of Brexit. But at this stage, I would quite happily accept that there will be no benefits, and settle for damage limitation. Unfortunately none of you seem able to explain how we limit the damage either.

We cannot leave the single market and customs union without there being a hard border in Ireland, which will put people’s lives at risk. We cannot leave the single market and customs union without severely damaging most sectors of the economy, which would cause untold hardship for millions of people living in the UK. I realise that remaining in the single market and customs union would make leaving the EU pointless, but it is the only way to limit the damage.

The government has made almost no progress towards getting a workable deal in place, and time is running out. We don’t have the infrastructure in place to ensure that supply chains of essential food and medicine will not be disrupted after Brexit day. We don’t have a plan to ensure that planes will still be able to take off and land, or that satnav will still work. We do not have any trade deals lined up. We simply do not have time to do any of these things.

Dear leavers, you do not have solutions to any of these problems, and more importantly, neither do Theresa May, Boris Johnson, David Davis, Liam Fox, Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Andrea Leadsom, Daniel Hannan, Jeremy Corbyn, Kate Hoey or any of the people who claim to think Brexit is the right choice for the UK.

A no-deal Brexit is unthinkable. It is not an option.

I realise that many of you will feel betrayed if we do not get the kind of Brexit you want. But to be honest, you’re going to feel betrayed even if you do get the kind of Brexit you want, because it will be unimaginably shit. This is not "project fear", it is "project reality".

The government has a duty to act in the best interests of the country as a whole. It’s not good enough to lay the blame at David Cameron’s door and say he held the referendum so we have to respect the vote. David Cameron has been out of office for two years. It is now plainer than ever that leaving the EU is a terrible idea, and there is still time to put the brakes on and not go through with it. If the government goes through with this when they could put a stop to it, they cannot continue to blame David Cameron and claim that their hands were tied. They are not.

It is time for Theresa May to do the decent thing and say, “I’m sorry, I know it’s what the people voted for, but it simply can’t be done without causing a totally unacceptable amount of harm to the country. And I have a duty of care towards everyone, not just the 51.8% who voted leave.”

Moussemoose I totally agree with you companies should want and be properly rewarded for training a young U.K. person, just like before, and if FOM doesn’t stop in any shape or form, then that is a sad for the future of are young in or out of the EU,

jasjas1973
In are hands to stop FOM
Not giving the EU tax payers money
Free to make are own deals
Oh and we will have left the wasteful, bloated EU

PeckhamPauline

I guess the "benefits" of Brexit for me fall into three categories.

1. Benefits promised by leave campaigners which I never believed would actually materialise, have not materialised in the last two years, and show no signs of ever actually materialising.

Example 1: getting back £350m a week to spend on whatever we want. Not going to happen because we never sent £350m a week to the EU in the first place, and the overall damage to the economy will more than eclipse what little we do "save".

Example 2: the simultaneous promises of "taking back control of our borders" and "having full access to the single market". Anyone with basic knowledge of the EU knows that you can have one or the other, but not both. The way things are going at the moment, we might even be heading for a ludicrous situation where we have neither full access to the single market, nor complete control over our borders, because there is no solution to the border in Ireland issue, but the government need to be seen to have delivered on ending FOM, so they may end up doing a fudge where they actually do neither but try to pretend they've achieved both.

1. Benefits promised by leave campaigners / mentioned by Brexit supporters which may materialise in some small way but look to be offset by negative impacts, leading to an overall net loss.

Example 1: Being able to do our own trade deals. Yes, sure, we might be able to do this, but it will take a long time, during which our economy will suffer from having lost access to all the trade deals we currently have, and there is no guarantee that the new trade deals we eventually get will be better than the ones we have now. In fact, there is a strong likelihood that at least some of them will be worse. I know that some people voted leave partly because they were concerned about TTIP. Now TTIP is not happening but any trade deal we sign up to with the US will probably make TTIP look like the teddy bear's picnic.

Example 2: No longer being part of the Common Agricultural Policy. Sounds great in theory, except the farmers can't survive without their subsidies, and there isn't going to be a huge amount of money going spare to continue to maintain those subsidies at their current level out of domestic funds. Not to mention that if we agree to trade deals with larger countries covering agriculture, there is a very real risk of there being a flood of cheap imported food which will put British farmers out of business. If we are suffering from spiraling prices as a result of Brexit and the weak pound, there will be extreme political pressure to secure access to cheaper food, so unfortunately it will be "bye bye, farmers".

Example 3: Not having to pay money to support EU civil servants pushing paper around in Brussels. Yep, sounds great. Except that they are performing civil service functions in respect of various policy areas which have been devolved to the EU for the last 40 years and which we will now have to manage ourselves. That means spending a lot of money to train and hire a lot more bureaucrats here (who don't currently have the skills and experience we need) to perform the same functions. This will be much less efficient.

I could go on, but this is what I mean. Perhaps leavers can come up with some benefits of Brexit, but most of them don't really stand up to any serious scrutiny.

And none - literally none - of the solutions which have been proposed so far in relation to the Irish border issue will actually work. That is a major issue.

As it happens, I did a lot of research prior to casting my vote. (And I have a master's degree in this subject and used to work in a related field.)

www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cx250jmk4e7t/pound-sterling-gbp

In are hands to stop FOM
Not giving the EU tax payers money
Free to make are own deals
Oh and we will have left the wasteful, bloated EU

What is wrong with freedom of movement?
Are you happy to lose all the UK investment funded by the EU?
Why would anybody want to prioritise trading with us when they have the EU to trade with? China and the US have made their priorities clear there.
What exactly is it about the EU that you feel is wasteful and bloated?

And the word you are looking for is our. Yep, shoot me for pointing out a spelling error, but it's difficult to take you seriously when such fundamentals are lacking.

@Rosstac
Those are all valid points, but they have little to do with the EU. Globalisation has resulted in many of these jobs being shifted to Asia and the companies who stayed had to still complete. If anything with it's barriers the EU has stopped the worst effects of this.

The other side of course is that we are able to sell far more to these Asian countries, but they have been in jobs which are highly skilled, but I don't for one minute forget that some have lost out.

But the Brexiteers seem to want to reduce workers rights, reduce trade barriers with these ultra low cost countries and while some will benefit I suspect far more will loose out even more.

@jayfee just wanted to say great post. A friend of mine who works in peace process stuff around the world (think post Rwanda etc) said soon after such a marginal referendum that the best thing we could have done as a country would have been to put all big decisions on ice and worked on some kind of national reconciliation and dialogue to try and address bith the result (for eveyone) and all.the associated issues that were brought up.
Instead we have become more and more polarized into "them and us" and that's generally not a situation that ends well.

I agree with Mishappening that the Brexit vote wasn't about Brexit, it was primarily a protest about the huge inequalities in our society and the self serving elite.

Rosstac
They are not tangible benefits, just a few random statements, with zero thought to the price or consequences.
We have extreme shortages of labour, across all sectors, so FOM as recognised by TM, will continue, just under a different name.
Our economy will shrink, at least for 10 years (Farage, BOE, or 50 years JRM) costing us far more than we send to EU, plus we are going to sending them 40 billion, more if the £ keeps falling!
What FTA ? with whom? when? will they off-set lose of EU trade? NO.

Had you said "We can lower employment protection from maternity to working hours so employers can make more money" or "We set our own VAT rates on sanitary products" or "We can reduce environmental standards to lower water bills"

Then yes they are all valid benefits & reasons to leave the EU that even JRM could get behind.

Supporters of Brexit identify key issues in the country, lack of training, gig jobs, a feeling of dislocation, concern about an elite and then they blame all this on the EU.

These are valid sources of concern, Brexit is not only not the answer it will make all this worse.

Indeed there will be short term problems after Brexit. But, although the referendum was not meant to be a protest vote from those at the bottom of the pile, it was an opportunity for them to give the elites a bloody nose and for some was impossible to resist - their voices had gone unheard for too long, as they, not the politicians or the bankers, bore the brunt of the unnecessary austerity policies.

And there are groups in society for whom the influx of immigrants impacts adversely, whose vote is understandable and rational.

It is too easy to brand those who voted leave as idiots - we need to unpick the reasons for their vote, and use that information to improve equality in society.

Now I am waiting for someone to chip in and say these same people are likely to be worse off after brexit, but whatever resources there are we need to share them more fairly. May's hollow promise to help the "just managing" is just that: hollow. But it does not have to be, with or without brexit. It is a matter of priorities.

Indeed there will be short term problems after Brexit.

Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks those "short term problems" will last for 50 years.

Now I am waiting for someone to chip in and say these same people are likely to be worse off after brexit, but whatever resources there are we need to share them more fairly.

Yes, we do. But with the Tories in charge there will be no political will to share those resources more fairly, and with Brexit there will be fewer resources to go round for everybody.

The one silver lining I am holding out for is that Brexit destroys the Tories.

LoveInTokyo Who do you think will do better in government? Nobody seems fit for purpose

'Sharing fairly' is a middle to left of centre policy statement the majority of votes go to middle and left of centre parties yet we have had a policy of right wing austerity.

Our electoral system forces parties to focus on key constituencies so policies are directed at Basingstoke not Sunderland.

These are important issues but they are not Brexit issues.

Who do you think will do better in government? Nobody seems fit for purpose

I completely agree with that statement, Rosstac.

It's difficult to say because it comes back to the whole "wishing ill on your country" thing, but part of me hopes that Brexit is absolutely terrible and that the next general election is an absolute bloodbath. There are so few people in parliament who seem to be there for the right reasons or to have people's best interests at heart. Most of them seem completely rotten to the core.

And maybe the leavers have a point, in that if we had voted to remain, nothing would change. But I don't believe the biggest changes need to happen at EU level (although obviously there is room for improvement). I think they need to happen at UK level.

People voted to reject the status quo. I hope that after Brexit people will eventually realise that the parts of the status quo they don't like are down to our own politicians in the UK.

I think our electoral system is absolutely shit and leads to most people feeling like their votes don't count at all and MPs feeling like they don't need to listen to their constituents because their jobs are safe. Neither the Tories nor Labour have any incentive to change the first past the post system, which I think is the root of the problem.

And I can't see how we're going to secure meaningful electoral reform without a complete and utter meltdown of our political system.

But the damage that will have to be done to get to that point doesn't really bear thinking about.

Moussemoose But unfortunately they are, lots of the public are fed up with politics in this country, hence we end up with the statement if a donkey wore a blue, red , it would win, how can we change that and the other saying it doesn’t matter who’s in power they are all the same

jasjas1973 I don’t get this about a skills shortage, in my husbands line of work there are to many people after the same work, hence wages are the same as ten years ago, if there is it’s due to the lack of training and investment for many years,
Instead of FOM let’s have job based visa system and companies should be paid to train people and penalised for just using foreign labour, could do it by the tax system, there has got to be away to put are citizens esp the young first

Wouldn’t it be better train youngsters in professions that are or will be short in the future, rather than letting them run up vast debt in a profession that has more people than jobs

Rosstac it's a fault of our electoral system, First Past the Post leads to these issues. It's a boring, nerdy issue that people like me love dissecting but the general public won't engage with.

We had a referendum on AV with low turn out and a vote against.

People are disengaged and won't address the structural issues the Lib Dem's have been banging on about it for years and no one listens.

Now the long term impact of an electoral system that doesn't work and austerity is being felt and people want change. They want a nice simple solution but there isn't one. Brexit is not the change they need.

The changes needed are boring constitutional issues and don't make snappy headlines. People want something but won't put the work in to educate themselves about what is actually needed.

I think @LoveInTokyo sounds quite good for PM

Hah!

OMG I love this post! Thank you!

Exactly what I've always thought. Politics should be boring. When it's not, it's bad news!

jasjas1973 I do know where this shortage of labour is, there are still 1.4 million unemployed in the U.K., let’s look to get them employed

LoveinTokyo

As it happens, I did a lot of research prior to casting my vote. (And I have a master's degree in this subject and used to work in a related field.)

You are very much in the minority among Remainers. One of my friends voted remain because of "free health care" (?!?), another because she likes going on holiday in Spain and doesn't want to have to get a visa, one because he doesn't like Boris Johnson, and quite a few just because of some vague notion that it was the "right" thing to do.