A Mefi comment of mine from Saturday.
I should have spared my blood pressure and not read this Medium post on why one voter voted Brexit. Some of it is post-hoc rationalisation, sure, but some of it is the sort of stuff we’re going to hear a lot of in coming weeks and months, so it warrants debunking...
In three years, I’d like to see a reformed Labour government back in power — one that’s in touch with their voters who largely voted out of the EU.
“Largely” doesn’t mean “mostly”. Most Labour voters voted to remain. How will they feel about a “reformed Labour” that rejects their position?
So why did I vote Leave? Simply because I believe it’s more democratic to elect a government who have full control over affairs like taxes and immigration, and will work 100% for the economic prosperity of its people, services and industries. Is that so mad? It’s how it was for years before we joined. Do any Americans reading this find this position crazy? Or Canadians? Australians?
Hey, that last one is little ol’ dual-citizen me! Yes, I find it crazy, and suspect quite a few Americans and Canadians would too, because we all come from federal countries. We have the right of freedom of movement from state to state and province to province, and any attempt to abridge that would strike us as crazy—yet moving from Vancouver to Quebec is just as dramatic a change as moving from London to Provence. Individual states also have control over some taxation but not all of it, so that’s not going to strike us as crazy either. Also, we vote for different governments at state and federal level, and understand that democracy resides at both of those levels (and in local elections too, just as we do in the UK for councils and/or mayors). Just because you might not have paid attention to European Parliament elections doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.
You already had a UK government working 100% for the prosperity of its people. You also had an EU working 100% for the prosperity of its people. 1 in 8 of its people were British. (Are! Are British! I cling to the reassurance that I’ll be an EU citizen for a couple more years yet, at least.)
The government used to know they’d need to finance ‘X’ number of schools, houses and hospitals, to provide for a population they could predict the future numbers of... but when immigrant numbers are unpredictable but high we can’t cope
When my son was born in 2007 it was in the middle of a mini-baby boom, in part due to shameless economic migrants of child-bearing age like me, no doubt, but also for other reasons, and in any case only just passing the UK birth rate last seen in 1990, and never as high as birth rates from 1945-1975. Any council education departments paying attention were entirely able to predict that school numbers would be under strain five years later. They wouldn’t have been under strain in my city if the council hadn’t shut down urban primary schools in the early 2000s in response to a decline in the 1990s and lost the capacity to ramp up again quickly. Even then, they wouldn’t have been under such strain if the council had redrawn its school catchment boundaries to spread kids around more evenly. And even then, they might not be under strain for that much longer, because birth rates started going down again in 2013.
Most countries aren’t in the EU and do perfectly well for themselves.
Most countries have never been in the EU, so we have no way of knowing how they would cope with leaving it. We also had no way of knowing how we would cope with that, but we’re sure as hell going to find out now.
I also worry that Scotland will get a second referendum on national independence, and this time will vote to leave the United Kingdom — more as a pro-EU vote. A UK without Scotland would be terrible for both countries, I still believe.
Well, stand by for terrible, because it’s going to happen. The 45 will almost all vote the same way again for the reasons they held in 2014 (the crash in oil prices might give a few some pause), and if a mere 1 in 8 or 9 of the rest change their vote as a means of staying in the EU, Scotland will become independent. Nostalgia for long-retired fishing fleets won’t change that.
it’s possible they could vote to join a struggling EU just as the UK become a more dynamic and prosperous country outside of the EU
The rest of the EU has 6-7 times as many people in it as the UK, and many of them are (quelle surprise!) very clever. They’ve got just as much chance of figuring out how to make things work as the “dynamic” UK. And how dynamic do we really think the UK will be only a few years from now, which is when indy Scotland will rejoin the EU? How dynamic has most of the UK been feeling eight years after 2008?
Of course, there’s a chance I’ll read this article in 2, 5 or 10 year’s times and shake my head in utter disbelief at the nonsense I wrote. ... Was I brainwashed by Boris? Hoodwinked by Gove? Fed lies by the Leave campaign in a quest for autonomous political power? ... Maybe! I don’t know for sure.
Start paying attention to all of the Leave backtracking that’s been going on these past few days, and you’ll soon know for sure. No need to wait two years.