Originally Posted by
Trickytreesreds
Read this morning, I thought it was very amusing and sums up the chat in here brilliantly.
Yes, as I reported a month ago, our two resident Remainer sons have been looking at their parents reproachfully since we voted for the winning side in the referendum (the other two, far more typically of their generation, didn’t vote).
But when we’ve talked it over, the boys’ tone has been more sorrowful than angry, as if they are simply mystified that anyone but an eccentric could possibly wish to leave the lovely EU.
More belligerent by far last weekend were the Remainers among my four beloved, feisty sisters-in-law — only one of whom, I think, voted to Leave (though I abandoned my survey before I had questioned them all, not wishing to be responsible for a bloodbath at my mother-in-law’s party).
One, in particular (no names, no pack-drill) positively fizzed with fury when I told her that not only had I voted for Brexit but I was very happy about it and hadn’t regretted it for a moment.
‘How could you say that?’ she hissed, fixing me with her celebrated death-stare. ‘I’m going to get very, very angry now. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’
With that, she turned on her heel and stalked off to the other end of the garden to seek the more congenial and intelligent company of one of the birthday girl’s legions of infant great-grandchildren.
If only she had stayed to continue our little chat, I would have gone on to explain the many reasons — economic, constitutional, moral and political — why I believe the EU is indeed broke, and why I and most who voted judged that the only fix for Britain would be to pull out.
But, as I say, I didn’t want to be the son-in-law who wrecked the birthday celebrations by inflaming sister against sister, sons and daughters and grandchildren against parents, uncles, and aunts.
So I didn’t pursue the subject, confining myself to asking a niece (another Remainer) why her mum felt so passionately against Brexiteers.
Tom Utley sees nothing irrational in being concerned about the impact of uncontrollable numbers of migrants on our public services, politics, security and way of life. Pictured, Nigel Farage in front of the controversial 'breaking point' poster
‘Well, you’d be furious, too,’ she said, ‘if the vote had gone the other way.’
But here’s the thing: I would not have been angry at all. I would have been disappointed, for sure, if voters had chosen to remain shackled to the Brussels bureaucracy.
I would have considered that they had made a big mistake by throwing up this rare and wonderful opportunity to reclaim our national independence and restore meaning to British democracy.
But then I have often thought in the past that the public has made the wrong choices, not least, by voting three times to elect Tony Blair. Yet I never woke up on the morning after a Blair victory spewing venom against Labour voters, condemning them as thickos or impugning their motives in the way that so many Remainers have attacked us Leavers.
Indeed, I’ve been taken aback by the uncomprehending bitterness and anger of so many in the pro-EU camp, who have dismissed the Brexit majority as senile, backward-looking, uneducated, socially excluded, knuckle-dragging racists, contemptibly duped by the lies of the Leave campaign (as if the peddlers of Remain’s Project Fear told no whoppers).
Six weeks on, I’m also becoming weary of hearing from Remainers that the margin of Leave’s victory was so small that it doesn’t really count as a proper mandate. So let’s tackle that claim first.
True, the referendum was a close-run thing, with 51.9 per cent voting Leave against 48.1 per cent for Remain. But look at the distribution of the vote around the country, constituency by Parliamentary constituency, and a remarkable picture emerges.
If Leave had been a political party standing at a General Election, according to a study at the University of East Anglia, it would have won a thumping landslide of 421 seats — 65 per cent of all seats (including Scotland) and 73 per cent in England and Wales.
I have often thought in the past that the public has made the wrong choices, not least, by voting three times to elect Tony Blair
In the words of Gary Bennett, chief executive of number-crunchers The Stats People: ‘If higher turnout in London and Scotland had tipped Remain over 50 per cent nationally, the result would have lacked a mandate in three-quarters of seats in England and Wales, leading to a historic democratic disaster.’
Or take the Remainers’ claim that they are far better educated than those who voted Leave.
This appears to be based on a poll by Lord Ashcroft, which was reported under headlines proclaiming that those with no formal education were twice as likely to vote Leave as those with university degrees.
That’s true enough as far as it goes, says Mr Bennett, but when you consider that only one per cent of Leave voters had no formal education, it is highly misleading about the other 99 per cent.
As for the Remain majority among university graduates, that hardly tells us much either. It certainly does not mean that Remainers are more intelligent than Leavers. After all, when I was at university in the Seventies, only about eight per cent of the population went into higher education. Today, the figure is almost 50 per cent.
So, given that the young were more likely to vote Remain than the older (and wiser!) among us, it’s hardly surprising that the losing side included more graduates.
Why, anyway, should a degree in sports science from a former polytechnic — or a doctorate from Oxbridge, for that matter — make us any better or worse qualified to vote on such visceral matters as our sovereignty and national identity?
On a question like this, the vote of a dustman is surely every bit as valid as that of a professor of economics.
But it’s the accusation that we Brexiteers are racists and xenophobes that annoys me most. For one thing, we’ve just voted to leave a club that insists European beggars, who are mostly white, must be given precedence for migration over Indian nuclear physicists, who are mostly brown. Race wasn’t a question on the ballot paper.
As for the charge of xenophobia, ‘an irrational fear or dislike of foreigners’ akin to a mental disorder, I also reject that absolutely.
I am not denying that many Leavers were swayed by concerns over mass immigration (though some of us had been wanting to pull out long before the influx of millions from Eastern Europe made migration an EU issue).
But I see nothing irrational in being concerned about the impact of uncontrollable numbers of migrants, brought up in different traditions from ours, on our public services, politics, security and way of life.
So please, Remainers, drop the bitterness and hysterical recriminations. Feel free to disagree with us, by all means. But stop impugning our motives and intelligence. Like you, we voted according to our judgment of what would be best for our country’s future.
I am convinced that we were right. But let’s see.
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Whether we stop in or come out, exponential economic growth is not sustainable in a finite world. Along with climate change that is the real problem which must be sorted.
