Ignorance Not Immigration Caused Brexit

The chattering classes don't speak up

A historic change in the future of one of the world's most powerful countries has been made on the basis of what many now acknowledge was a series of half truths fed to the whole nation at the EU Referendum. They were swallowed hook line and sinker by the nation's least informed and voted for. Ignorance of: macro economics, the EU, our place in the world, what underpins it, and the wider implications of our votes, has put Britain out of the EU.

Chattering classes

I do not blame the ill informed. Macro economics is a total yawn to most except economics nerds. The complex linkages between growth, governance, security, immigration, is like solving a Rubik cube even for the informed. I think it is the middle classes, the relatively well-travelled, the relatively well informed who pulled the stunt of not speaking loudly enough (for fear of causing offence or intruding on others' points of view, even exposing their own privileged positions perhaps?). The only people in Britain who EXPLICITLY talk to their children about racism and immigration are the fascists, extremists and racists. "Decent" people talk parenthetically and think they've covered it off! Like talk of drugs, sex education and pornography, if you dont discuss these things clearly and offer young people steers, they will grow up to be informed by a media and public opinion we absolutely cannot trust. We will grow ignoramuses in very important areas of life even among the chattering classes.

Related Post: Brexit - A New Dawn Or A Long Night

How ignorance grows

Speak directly to children with guidance on race

Finally the biggest lie of all...Britons are too great to be ignorant , that being English willy nilly, ipso facto means you are savvy with the world. Neither are true! Being British gives you a fantastic opportunity to be savvy with the world because Britain has so many connections with the entire world. However this is so only if you avoid the know-it-all sense of entitlement, or the "let's take it all for granted" attitudes which are the greatest incubators of ignorance. Again it's the literate, chattering classes who are best placed to lead this charge, but do they? No! They sit on their hands, feel embarrassed or ashamed to call the issues and act on their RESPONSIBILITY to themselves and their society based on what they know.

Denial has a price

Brexit Leader Boris Johnson - Half truths

Sometimes I think we've had it too good for too long. We feel our privileges will remain forever without attention. Or we act to maintain the narrow privileges assured to mostly white Britons which they take for granted yet often deny. It's this casual denial and avoidance that puts us in the pickle we are in today, and enables a few strongly motivated totally self interested Britons to present themselves as social saviours when their falsehoods border on the treasonous. Treasonous because their popular but false claims have facilitated the disintegration of the nation and its status. Well now we shall see the price of denial and minimisation. And no, wringing our hands won't be good enough in response! We are going to have to engage with the mess we are in and at last call a spade a spade.

Brexit - A New Dawn Or A Long Night ?

Cameron resigns at No.10 via Daily Telegraph

The British people have just taken their country out of the EU by a narrow margin of 52% to 48% on a huge turnout of 72% of the electorate. Donald Trump has called it a great result because "people everywhere are angry!" The result flew in the face of early polls all of which predicted a narrow Remain win.

Rebellious north

It seems traditional labour voting areas like the North East and Wales handed the Leavers this referendum. They are not nuts. They, like many leavers acted on the information they were most credibly fed. Economic decline in their regions was painted as the result of an influx of foreign migrants, giving rise to a sense that we had lost control of our borders, and with that our national character and even independence. So the pitch to call this referendum a vote for independence or taking back control sounded not only appealing , but a way to kick back at the migrants, their patrons (read political elite on all sides), and the cosmopolitan rather effete and even dilettante urban well to do in places like London, who had neither listened to or responded to the pain of the poor.

Related post : Ignorance Not Immigration Caused Brexit

Election Results via BBC

Ugly campaign

The campaigns took on an increasingly ugly, border-line xenophobic, sometimes crypto-racist , tone on the one hand; and rather out of touch, pie in the sky, we know better than you ordinary folk (despite your experience of recent government policy) tone on the Remain side. No one could own up to the fact that austerity for the many presented as economic success for the few was the main cause of the anger. The scapegoating of migrants who make a NET contribution to our country was totally overlooked. To defend migrants was seen as unpatriotic. The rest of the claims about the Brussels gravy train and unaccountability of un-elected officials were easy to present and make stick.Especially in a country like the UK with centuries of Empire in its past , and used to being looked up to everywhere, our language spoken in most of the world, the call for a return to past glory , freedom and the economic privileges this country once enjoyed easily found traction. Even if not consciously, I am certain these thoughts played strongly in the subconscious of many, particularly older, Leave voters.

New dawn or long night for the UK?

Reaping what we sow

This referendum was won on a lie. But life is lived on the bases of truth and reality. We are about to discover which of our attitudes were political and media manufactured fantasies and which were really true of life. There will be consequences which have started already. The PM has gone, Corbyn and the Labour leadership can expect to pay a price for the rebellion of their voters. The Kingdom has moved steps closer to losing one of its parts (Scotland), and the international economy will act on facts not emotion. Sterling has dived, and Banks like Barclays have lost 30% of their share value within minutes of the results. The anti migrant rhetoric has been legitimated by the result and it will become more "ok" to be fearful or nervous of people who look and sound un-British.

I think Britain just became a smaller country and it hurts. Yet no one can buck the law of cause and effect. You reap what you sow. We shall see in short order what crop we shall harvest

The Scottish Referendum - No One Heard Their Screams

Referendum Day

Tonight Scotland will decide to continue or end its 307 year membership of the UK. With the latest polls suggesting a narrow win for the “No” Vote, it’s been a close run thing, far closer than anyone ever thought possible. (Ipsos Mori: Yes 47%, No 53%). I’ve gazed into my crystal ball, and writing 4 hours before the results, am inclined to call a narrow win for the “No” vote.

There will be no exit polls for TV pundits to support or refute, prompting James Ball of the Guardian Newspaper to speculate: “Why no exit poll for such a momentous and consequential vote? The first possibility is that no one thought the vote would be close, and so deemed it as not interesting enough to be worthy of the spend.”

Things will never be the same again.

Whatever the result, things have changed and will never be the same again. If the Yes vote polls more than 40%, then we have a nation deeply divided and not a happy member of the United Kingdom.

Ever hear the one about the married woman who cheated on her husband and had an affair? Everyone called her a traitorous adulteress, ungrateful, irresponsible, selfish. Then she told her story of the lack of attention from her husband for years, focussed as he was on career and maintaining their family lifestyle. His wife’s pleas for him to listen went unheard, or was responded to with the occasional perfunctory gesture of a night out, half of which he spent checking his messages on the smartphone.

Understanding Scottish Feelings

Alex Salmond First Minister of Scotland, "Yes" Campaign

Those who have most passionately pleaded for this nation to stay together among my friends have been English. I don’t think they know how the Scots feel. I don’t think they understand that economic analysis won’t change a feeling though it may frighten a person to do what he does not wish to do. That is not free will, that is coercion by circumstances. This election will be won or lost on the basis of people’s feelings and I don’t believe any of the nation’s leaders have understood what the Scots feel about their situation. If they had, they would have made the broad and still unclear offers of greater autonomy by the leaders of the political parties about week ago, several years back. Those gestures sound a lot like the husband who offers dinner out with a wife whose affections have slowly withered possibly beyond the point of resurrection, after years of neglect.

The Start Of The Federation

Even if Scotland stays in the Union, nothing will ever be the same again, and the consequences will indeed be enormous. I can see the UK heading towards a federation of regional states. When that happens the groups within it will have to re adjust their identities and loyalties to fit. Most Asian and Afro-Caribbean Brits are happy to call themselves Brits, but few see themselves as English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. Their presence in the UK was a function of the British Colonial phenomenon with a strong Imperial British identity. I don’t expect the non-colonial populations to understand this. It’s an irrelevance to them, but it sure as hell defines many key facts of life for those of colonial origin. If the notion of “Britain” as such declines in importance, with the regional states assuming greater identities, what happens to those new members of the old UK’s population?

The Union Jack would probably change with a "Yes" win

One thing is for certain, the days of listening and not hearing are over. It will be a difficult transition, for the English as a people are notoriously shy of expressing what they really think. The English fear coming across as bullies, or too strident. People talk of Orientals as being inscrutable, but in many ways the English reserve reflects a similar social shyness. I believe those days are over. England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, but most especially England must find its voice and have the courage to speak it. Perhaps then it will also be able to listen to others as they speak what is true for them.

Pic via the Guardian Newspaper. & Lib Dem Party