(A German Socialist Immigrant – who led the Brexit campaign!)
There has been a large amount of anger, shouting and mockery in response to the Brexit vote. The prophecies of doom, the emotional reaction and the general assumptions are not helpful. The level of public discourse has been really disappointing – and it has been sad to see Christians joining in.Not everyone who voted Brexit did so because they are ignorant racists who are equivalent to Trump supporters in the US, or Le Pen supporters in France. I think it is incumbent on all who seek to engage in public discourse to listen to others – especially those who have a different point of view. I am keen to listen to those who are upset and think that Brexit is a disaster/evil/insane -or some lesser adjectives. So let me issue a simple challenge. Send me the best three articles you have read or seen on why people did vote or should have voted Remain. I am really interested in reading them and will post them here for others. (Also if you have other ones that you think are better than the ones I post below -pro_Brexit – then please send them as well!).
If you are one of those who have been posting the mocking/disaster/abusive posts on social media could you stop and take some time (if you have not done so already) to seriously consider why people voted the way they did? Sure there are racists, and ignorant people and ‘Little Englanders’ etc – but that is not the vast majority of people who I have read, met or spoken to who voted Leave.
The following video and articles are the best I have read explaining why I don’t regret voting Leave (by the way remember that meme that so many re-posted as ‘fact’? The one that said that many people who voted Leave were now suffering from Bregret because they had realised how stupid they had been? Apparently it turns out that 3% of those who voted Leave regretted their vote…and 4% of those who voted Remain regretted their vote – strange how people who were quick to post about the former seem to have completely ignored the latter!).
If you voted Remain and are upset at the result – please have a look at these. I post them not to persuade you but rather to help you understand the people who voted differently from you. And I repeat the offer – send me the articles that best explain your position.
- Mark Blyth – explains why Brexit is primarily a vote against the 1% rather than the EU. Fascinating…..
2. This sums up exactly my position – Brendan O’Neills article in The Australian
The Australian, 2 July 2016 –
Political quakes don’t get much more seismic than this.
Just over a week ago, Britain had a competent Prime Minister, a functioning opposition, and decent diplomatic relations with the EU and the rest of the world.
Now, after 17.5 million of us ignored the advice of virtually the entire establishment and voted to leave the EU, our PM is on his way out; the opposition has collapsed; it isn’t clear who — if anyone — is running the country; and the EU and the rest of the world thinks Britain has lost every one of its marbles.
And I love it. This is the most exciting thing that has happened to British politics in a generation. The whole Brexit fallout has been a crazy, stirring reminder of what people power really looks like.
For too long, elections in Britain, as in much of the Western world, have been formulaic affairs, where we must choose between cardboard politicians who can be told apart only by the colour of their rosettes. But with the EU referendum, our ballots had real consequences. They toppled leaders. They terrified elites. And they changed the world.
So this is what democracy feels like? It feels good.
It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of what has happened in Britain. A freaked-out political and media set, which desperately wanted us to stay in the EU, is peddling the politics of fear over Brexit. They’re telling us we’re heading towards economic catastrophe, that racism is on the rise and that Britain has become the Miss Havisham of Europe, destined to live out its remaining years in cobwebbed isolation.
Don’t believe a word of it. They’re just sore losers. In truth, Brexit opens up a whole new world of political and historic possibility. Brexit has brought politics back to life. The most striking thing it has done is expose the gaping chasm that separates the political and media elite from ordinary people.
Make no mistake: when 17.5 million of us ticked the Leave box, we weren’t only rejecting the bureaucrats of Brussels; we were rejecting our own establishment. We were defying it.
Most of the political class, the business elite, experts, academics and celebrities had spent months telling us to vote Remain. And we voted Leave. This is the bloodiest nose the British establishment has received in decades.
And the punch was delivered primarily by the poor and working class. These communities, who often don’t vote, voted Leave in vast numbers. The class divide in the referendum was extraordinary. Almost every class indicator tells us the down-at-heel were far likelier than the comfortably off to reject the EU.
So, of those parts of Britain with a high number of manufacturing jobs, 86 per cent voted Leave; of areas with low manufacturing levels, only 42 per cent voted Leave. Seventy-nine per cent of local authorities where the average house price is less than £282,000 ($503,000) voted Leave; only 28 per cent of areas where the house prices are higher than that voted Leave.
Of those boroughs that have low education levels, 83 per cent voted Leave; of boroughs with high education levels, only 46 per cent voted Leave.
This is my favourite fact: of the 50 parts of Britain that have the highest number of people from social classes D and E — semi-skilled or unskilled workers — 47 voted Leave. That is 47 very poor parts of Britain crying in unison: “No, we won’t give you what you want.”
And on it goes, stat after stat, revealing that if you do physical labour, don’t have a university degree and don’t earn much money, then you’re likelier to have voted Leave than people on the leafier side of the tracks.
Surveys suggest 60 per cent of working-class people are hostile to the EU, while a staggering 95 per cent of business leaders favour it. Readers of The Guardian and The Times are likelier than readers of The Sun to be pro-EU. We have bosses, the well-educated and the broadsheet set on one side, and toilers and tabloid readers on the other. Make no bones about it: this was a revolt of the lower orders. This is what I like most about Brexit: it was a puncturing, a conscious puncturing, of an aloof, smug establishment that thinks its worldview is superior to the little people’s.
Ordinary people, sick of being patronised and nanny-stated, sick of being told they’re bad parents and too fat, that they shouldn’t smoke, shouldn’t drink, shouldn’t be so un-PC or uncouth, seized this opportunity to take the elites down a peg or two.
They could see that the political class had invested an extraordinary amount of energy and resources into the Remain side. They knew how much this meant to the elite.
And they decided to deprive the elite of the thing it craved. The demos struck back.
The reaction from the chattering classes has been vicious. They have spent the past week branding Leave voters as “low-information”, ignorant, racist.
One Labour MP says the result must be overturned. It’s “madness”, he says, to let ordinary people’s “resentment and prejudice” determine the future of the nation.
There have been public protests by angry, Guardian-reading campaigners demanding that the referendum result be thrown out because there is “mass confusion” across the country. That is, the plebs don’t know what they’re doing. Observers have sniffed about hoi polloi being manipulated by demagogues, hoodwinked by misinformation, overcome with racist hatred against eastern Europeans.
These elitist libels, these nasty slurs, are easily disproved. In a post-referendum survey, only 34 per cent of Leave voters gave immigration as their main concern (and concern with immigration isn’t necessarily racist). Most gave democracy as their key reason for voting Leave. They think political decisions should be taken in London, not Brussels. That isn’t reactionary; it’s progressive.
The post-referendum defamation of certain sections of the public sums up why such vast numbers voted Leave in the first place. Because they’re sick of this. They’re sick of being treated as stupid and maybe even subhuman. And now they’ve asserted themselves, they’ve given the political class a reminder of their power; and in the process they’ve caused glorious upset to the global order.
They’ve injected clarity back into politics. They’ve revealed the fissures between an oligarchical elite and working people. They have exposed how cut off that elite is, so much so that it looks on a chunk of its electorate as unfeeling, unintelligent beasts. Best of all, they’ve put back on the agenda the voice of the ignored, of those who for too long have been treated by the nannying, nudging elite as unhealthy creatures to be morally improved. They’ve made David Cameron resign and pushed Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to the edge and rattled the entire establishment.
They have unfrozen politics. They have unfrozen history itself. The EU is really an attempt to suspend politics, to replace the difficult, tense business of political thought and action with managerialism and technocracy. It is a post-politics institution, allowing the leaders of European nations to govern without having to have too many awkward debates or to engage all the time with the throng.
The EU is a lid on European history. It suppresses, without resolving, tensions within Europe. It’s no accident that the EU as we know it was set up in 1992, soon after the reunification of Germany. For it was ultimately about keeping in check old hostilities, nagging rivalries, unresolved questions of power. It is about burying politics in favour of letting apolitical experts run things.
Now the British people, including our poor and uneducated, have blown it all apart. Their democratic assault on the EU has unsuspended politics, already, both in Britain, where the political and cultural divide has been thrown into sharp relief, and in Europe, where the EU is now in a state of panic, concerned that past political questions that were never satisfyingly answered may return if the suppressant that is the EU is weakened any further.
This is democracy in all its glory. British voters have pummelled their own political class, upset the European order and made it clear they don’t think the EU’s technocracy is the only game in town. They’ve said, “There must be another way of doing things. There must be an alternative.” They’ve taken a risk, a beautiful, defiant risk, and and in the process they’ve breathed life back into politics and awakened history from its enforced slumber. They’re being libelled now, but posterity shall judge them kindly.
3. And this article from another one of those immigrants! How dare they come over here and take over our politics!
Just over a week ago, more than 33 million people, having reflected on our 43-year membership of what started as the Common Market and became the European Union, cast their vote in a UK-wide referendum.
52% voted to leave, 48% thought we should remain. Politicians, having put the responsibility to make such a significant and far-reaching decision to the people, now have a duty to implement that decision.
Let us, just for a moment, imagine if the outcome had been reversed and 52% had voted to remain. If there had been an online petition to ignore the vote, calls for MPs to overturn the result, a demand for a second referendum, what would have been the response? Vote Leave people such as me would have been laughed at, branded bad losers and told to just go away and get on with it, that the people had spoken. But this is just what is happening. I have heard it said that old people shouldn’t have been allowed to vote. That this was a referendum about the future and that the under-40s have been disenfranchised. There is talk of deception or that this was all too complicated. In essence, the insinuation is the nice and bright voted remain, while the unsophisticated, simple folk voted leave.
Let’s put an end to this London-centric sneering and belittling, then pause and reflect on what needs to be done. The nation and much of the media seem to be having a collective nervous breakdown. Westminster in general and individual politicians in particular need to accept that this vote wasn’t about them. It was about the people of the United Kingdom deciding how they wished to be governed. They were clear. They wanted to take back control over their borders, their taxation system and their laws.The turmoil in both political parties is the manifestation of a much deeper malaise. The referendum was arguably the first chance in the past 20 years where casting your vote made a decisive difference. Since the Labour landslide in 1997, the main parties have at the core become managerial rather than ideological. The referendum was different – 72% of the electorate took part and delivered a conclusive majority vote. There is no going back. The whole point of political parties and democratic institutions is to mediate between mob rule and bureaucratic tyranny. They have to give shape to the will of people in a fair and balanced way.
Westminster in general and individual politicians in particular need to accept that this vote wasn’t about them
The referendum wasn’t about Tories versus Labour. The dividing lines were quite different. For a small number, and I include myself in this group, it was about democratic accountability and creating new institutions that would be capable of responding to the challenges of globalisation and the flows of goods, money and people.But for the majority, it was about those who have a good life and for whom, broadly speaking, things are all right and those who felt they had nothing left to lose. That’s why Project Fear didn’t work. From the chancellor threatening a punishment budget, to the governor of the Bank of England, to a string of businesses and experts threatening everything from Armageddon to the Third World War – it had no traction, because if you can’t get your child into the school of your choice, and you can’t get a GP appointment and there is no chance of you ever buying your first house, then threats don’t work. People had to listen to others who don’t live in their kind of neighbourhoods, calling them racists when they expressed concerns about immigration.
The status quo was not on the ballot paper. The EU has to change and the euro countries have to become a country called Europe. Those who voted remain, because the world they live in is serving them well, ignored the risk of staying shackled to a failing euro and an outdated political structure. They have to resist the temptation to blame any ill from this that befalls us on Brexit, otherwise we will ignore the real causes and will fail to address them. Those who voted leave because they had nothing left to lose were largely in Labour heartlands. They feel let down by an increasingly metropolitan Labour party.
Where do we go from here? This was a vote for change and we cannot ignore it. In doing so, we must come together. There is no place for racism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant language. This is unacceptable and we need to say so loud and clear. It has no part to play in shaping our future.
Politics can be simple. People want freedom, respect and a fair deal for them and their children in return for hard work. If we don’t have a country where work and talent can take you from the bottom to the top in one generation, then we don’t have a country that is just. Inequality of opportunity and income has widened over the past 15 years to the point where it has become a chasm.
Membership of the EU has made things worse, pushing down wages, increasing pressure on public services and eroding democratic accountability while rewarding the better off with more opportunity and higher pay.
People knew what they voted for. They were not deceived and there is no second referendum. During the referendum, the cross-party Vote Leave team outlined some basic things that were essential. Democratic control of immigration, via a points-based system. Ensuring supremacy of UK courts and giving priority to public services in general and the NHS in particular.
Our place in the world includes shaping new accountable institutions that have consent and can deal with the global flows of goods, capital and people. The EU has shown itself incapable of doing this. This is about opportunity and about hope.
Finally – this photo sums up what I voted Leave. The sneering mockery of the Haves at the Have Nots is something I cannot abide. Sir Bob Geldof and his establishment mates are doing the best they can to undermine and get rid of the democratic vote – and who knows they may succeed and we will then have moved totally from a democracy into an autocracy. But I hope that the hope and optimism expressed by Gisela and Brendan O’Neill above turn out to be justified.
European referendum – The TIPPing Point
Footnote: After publishing this I was disappointed that several of the responses have just ignored the plea for understanding and have just repeated the shouting/mockery/ignroant racist type comments – sadly -even from Christians. I was also glad to get some more thoughful and helpful comments – although no-one managed to send me the best three articles on the Remain side. However I did find one! And it was worth the wait. This from Alasiter J Roberts is an excellent, if lengthy analysis
And I also came across this interesting piece from Boris Johnson – ‘experts’ tell us he was not really on the Leave side. This does not sound like it!
Finally I always enjoy reading Carl Trueman – even when I disagree with him – here I think he gets it spot on –
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/06/bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn-to-be-alive
What disturbs me at the moment is the lack in Scotland of any voice as a counterbalance to the apparently universal “Remain” view. Leadership demands an engagement with reality. Scotland sorely needs a voice that will articulate the possibilities of Brexit for Scotland. By that I don’t mean the threat of an indyref 2, which is the last thing we need, but rather to portray how Scotland could prosper outside of the EU. Who will fill the vacuum?
“This is about opportunity and about hope.” Agreed.
Celebrities, media and politicians that all voted remain and this uproar from some now against a democratically chosen decision to leave? Its a victory for the people against the elite. I think the country has had a shake up starting with the Scottish referendum and those in power have had a shock to the system (literally) and realised that with great privilege comes great responsibility. One cannot govern selfishly without consequences. Let’s hope that this has been a wake up call to the media. That this celebrity and political culture that serving the people on whom they are dependent for their position is preferable to whatever personal gain can be had from the position.
I want leaders that will unite the nation with the challenges that we all face in this time of uncertainty, not virtue signalling and nastiness that only serves to cause more division and fear. It’s going to be difficult or impossible to work together without leaders who foster unity.
Brexit has been a victory for every decent honourable hard working ordinary person in the UK against oppressive forces in media, politics and celebrity culture.I say this having voted remain. .
“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Yes David,
But sneering mockery is not just confined to the wicked Remainers.
My abiding memory of the post-referendum period is a sneering, mocking Nigel Farage addressing the European Parliament. His utter contempt for them was evident. And this is the memory which will remain with our European friends and colleagues – UK is contemptuous of us. When I heard him I was ashamed to be British!
You may argue that he is not representative of Brexiters, but 4M voted for him at the last election and during the campaign I heard many similar views expressed.
Of course I am not a suitable person to comment or possibly even vote, being a WASP, a pensioner (worried about my pension fund) and probably “elitist” into the bargain.
But I remember a conversation a week before the referendum in Crete, with the man at the till in a petrol station. In good English and with an excellent grasp of the politics he asked me, “Why UK want to abandon us? We need you, we need your views. Without you what will happen to the rest of us?”
I think of a good friend who has recently become the associate pastor of a local church. He and his wife are EU migrants and have lived in the UK for eleven years. They now feel unwanted and rejected by the nation (not by their church obviously), and they are seriously concerned by the comments of some of our politicians that they may not have an automatic right to stay in the UK (they have a disabled son who is well settled in a good school).
I agree that there is much wrong with the EU, especially on the issue of democracy. But although I am convinced that Brexit will be very harmful to the UK I believe that it will be very damaging to the rest of Europe, especially the poorer countries.
I wish I could believe the rhetoric that we have now flung off the shackles of corporate interests and multinational companies and can consequently develop in our own interests, but I think this will prove illusory.
It is my view that, having rubbished its Christian heritage, our nation is under God’s judgement (as in Romans Ch. 1 – God no longer restrains evil), and no political decision (seismic or otherwise) will make things better.
Indeed – and I would not use the argument of ‘wicked remainers’ – to do so is to fall into the trap of you bad, me good type politics.
In terms of your man in Crete = that only works if the EU is a democracy where we can make a difference. As regards Greece we have done nothing – we have just gone along with the austerity imposed on the Greeks by the EU.
As regards your pastor friend – there is NO chance of him being sent back (see even the parliamentary vote today)….it has not been helpful to have people project these fears. If I lived in the Netherlands and the Dutch decided to withdraw from the EU I would not take it personally!
Europe is already damaged – the EU is much worse because of the EURO. And if you think Brexit is bad wait until you see what happens with Italy.
I agree with your latter comments.
Reblogged this on Talmidimblogging.
I found this article interesting:
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christians.and.brexit.did.god.command.the.uk.to.leave.the.eu/89427.htm
No doubt David has already read it.
Indeed I have…fascinating….
3 comments on the article.
1) The article says “Polling from Lord Ashcroft showed that nearly six in ten of those who identified as Christian voted for Brexit. This is significantly higher than the 52 per cent who voted for Brexit across the nation.”
Actually, 58% may be significantly higher, but it is not that much higher than 52%.
What I think is more interesting is that while Christians in the UK tend to be largely middle class (ABC1), only about 48% of the ABC1 demographic voted Leave according to Ashcroft’s poll. 58% is significantly higher than 48%. It is not so much that Christians were out of step with the country as a whole as that middle class Christians were out of step with their middle class neighbours.
2) The article doesn’t mention the fact that going back to the 1970s and 1980s there was a large amount of Christian literature which featured interpretations of the book of Revelation which managed to identify the EU as one of the players involved in future history – and not on the side of good and right! Such literature was not exactly mainstream, but it did have influence in a lot of places. Hence there has long been suspicion of the EU in some evangelical circles.
3) The article says “This failure to convince Christians of either the economic, spiritual or cultural benefits of the EU was disastrous for the Remain campaign”. The fact is that the Remain campaign does not appear to have been very convincing anybody of any benefits of the EU – economic, spiritual, cultural, or otherwise.
That’s now 11 posts you’ve written on the EU Referendum and Brexit! And rightly so, because politically and constitutionally, it is probably the most important story for the UK for a generation. Keep them coming.
And it is also appropriate that 5 of those were written after the results were declared – because the reaction and response to the referendum, in my opinion, has not only been more interesting than the debate before the vote, but probably even more interesting and revealing than results.
Two specific comments:
1. “Sir Bob Geldof and his establishment mates are doing the best they can to undermine and get rid of the democratic vote – and who knows they may succeed and we will then have moved totally from a democracy into an autocracy.”
And it’s not just Bob Geldoff. There are a host of other high profile individuals, and the London march, and the petition. Who would have guessed that the result would have sparked a mass movement movement against democracy in Britain?
2. “The status quo was not on the ballot paper. The EU has to change and the euro countries have to become a country called Europe. ”
That is an important point. And that is what makes Nicola Sturgeon’s recent comments so astonishing. She is asking for a second independence referendum specifically because it will enable Scotland to remain in the EU. She believes that Scotland will suffer terribly if it is not in this emerging United States of Europe, or European superstate, or whatever one wants to call it. In other words, she is effectively saying “Scotland is too small and weak to be an independent country.” If someone had told me 12 months ago that she would be saying that, I never would have believed it.
Bretix and the Moral Vision of Nationhood:
Some observations:
1 Well written and wide ranging and wordy.
2 I was struck by how the seemingly objective balance and counterbalance could only come from a lofty intellectual perspective.
3 But the summing-up, conclusion, was subjective, deeply personal and appears to trump the objectivity. Despite the author’s upbringing of broad geographical and social mix there was a longing for roots, for a solidity, for a belonging deeper than peer grouping, a universality of longing that transcends all boundaries,classes and stuctures and longings which has many counterfeit fulfillments but which can only be truly fulfilled by and in Christ Jesus. Only in Him is there true uni- versalism, true unity in diversity, of class, nationality, race, colour, ethnicity: no need to become westernised, young, old, white collar, blue collar, middle class, middle aged and middle minded to be a true believer in Christ Jesus, not many wise, but in Christ, the true wisdom of God. For we have a God who left His home, to have nowhere to rest His head so that he would bring us home to be with Him, to be where we belong, and to whom we belong. True rest indeed, true security, true safety, true blonging.
4 As an aside, he mentions Durham. Durham may be a tourist destination today, the land of the Prince Bishops, but on the skyline in the heart of the City there is the world known Cathedral, and an intellectually renowned University, neither of which dominate the third landmark, the prison – a reminder of the heart of darkness of humanity.
5 More to be forgotten will be the Durham miner’s gala (except where it will continue to be akin to a vestige of a long forgotten religious observance), and the former category D villages throughout County Durham, not on the tourist trail, other than, perhaps Chopwell, known as “little Russia” because of communism at it’s core.
6 Yes, Durham voted “leave”, as did its neighbours Sunderland and Gateshead and Northumberland: Not so Newcastle.
7 Perhaps where these places have in the past been strong in their own communities, what sociologists call “bonding social capital” they have been weaker at building bridges to outsiders “bridging social capital”. But equally, nationally, incomers are generally poor or hostile to building bridges to integrate.
8 And where the communities have been strong, it has often been to the exclusion or “withering away” of saving faith in Christ, of Christianity, of grace, but strong in works and acceptance or rejection of morals.
9 There are many opportunities for the gospel today in this vacuum created vortex, opportunities, as David Wells book names it, for “God in the whirlwind.” For while all this is of importance, would that Christians engage with and in gospel, with such vigor, time energy, thought and commitment, including me.
As requested:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/occams-corner/2015/jun/17/brexit-and-science-lets-not-make-the-same-mistake-as-the-swiss
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/24/leave-uk-brexit-german-london-human-rights
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/areeq-chowdhury/eu-referendum_b_10431872.html
http://www.thejournal.ie/brexit-crash-course-2-2716727-Apr2016/
http://chronicle.gi/2016/03/the-eu-is-not-an-infringement-of-sovereignty-but-an-extension-of-it/
Thanks Douglas….The only one that really cut any ice with me was the first. The others are just the normal scare stories and anyone who votes to leave the EU is supporting racism mantra….disappointing…
What about the issue with the Irish border? You think that the peace process wasnt helped by open borders? And that Gibralter is not under threat of a closed border with Spain?
And I dont think its racism but nativism that is the problem. And anyone who says that the UK is full really falls into the former category. Can you not see how worried, concerned and actually threatened non-British people are? When is a fact of an attack not merely a scare story?
Yes – I think the peace process was helped. And I don’t see why it should not continue. It would be churlish not to allow continued passage between the two. Do you really think Gibralter should belong to Britain?
There have been numerous attacks, before and after Brexit vote – for many different reasons. You just choose to pick and select some. There have been attacks on people because they are English in Scotland, there have been attacks on asians, blacks, whites, etc. You choose only to highlight some. What about the white girl who was told to ‘xxxx off you white xxxx’? Or the five white policemen shot dead by a black racist? Where were the angry tweets followed by gross generalisations from the humanists then? And why do you feed the narrative ‘if you are not British you should be scared?”….it seems that you are talking all this up just to make a political point.
David,
I voted ‘remain’ but, since my reasons for doing so were vastly reduced by your arguments for ‘leave’ – thank you – I wasn’t nearly as devastated as I would have been. I have no articles to refer you to, but there are a few things I would like to see recognised as lessons learned, primarily by the remain side but not only by them.
1. We are not really all in this together, economically speaking, and the pretence that we are was, sooner or later, going to be protested against by people who think they have nothing to lose by voting anti-establishment.
2. We have a history of intervention-punctuated ‘soft’ influence on the Continent but closer involvement has always led back to withdrawal behind our ‘moat.’ Even if we have become Europeans it was unrealistic not to expect a significant number of people to take this oportunity to ‘touch base.’
3. Older people will sacrifice for the sake of the younger generation but in order for them to do so, they must see the need. By and large since they have never seen the benefits of being in the EU, they can be expected to be blind also to the dangers of leaving.
4. Appealing to the interests of individuals is only going to work if those individuals have personal aspirations. It was a supposed National interest that made the difference in Scotland.
5. The big lesson is that we have to leave room in our national discourse for the public expression of principled non-approval. It is far too easy for those of us who think that the free movement of peoples is a good thing, to condemn those who disagree as racists. It is undoubtedly the case that some people have taken permission from the referendum debate to use language and display attitudes that would not normally be tollerated but I suspect that a great deal of what we have heard is not meant to sound as unwelcoming as it does. If there is no room to express non-approval gently, politely, and peaceably and nobody modelling such counter-cultural non-approval then people are going to sound violent and bigotted even when they aren’t.
6. We always were a multicultural society but just because it’s fairly easy to remove cultural elements from people who don’t know that they have one – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8223453.stm – doesn’t mean that they are going to vote for something ‘foreign’ to replace what they’ve lost..
7. Just because my grandparents didn’t wear tartan, didn’t mean they didn’t watch The White Heather Club. The arrogance of elites who know what’s best for us sometimes has its comeuppance.
Yours,
John/.
1. I know you read the Spectator so you will have read Matthew Parris
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/for-the-first-time-in-my-life-i-feel-ashamed-to-be-british/
2. It’s also worth watching the expert evidence given to the Treasury select committee on 13th July. http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/treasury-committee/news-parliament-2015/future-economic-relationship-with-eu-evidence-16-17/
A pity this evidence was not heard before the referendum.