The British public being either A) complete idiots or B) willing to participate in a mass delusion if their heard a journalist/politician/campaigner telling them they could have their cake and eat it too was the basis for the Leave campaign.
They didn’t fail to account for large swaths of the British public being idiotic or self-deluded, they counted on it.
I do so love the “It’s your fault for not stopping us” argument, whether it’s “It’s the Democrats’ fault that a conman like Trump got elected” or “It’s the Remain campaign’s fault that the Leave campaign got away with lying and cheating so egregiously”. But I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise to me that campaigns that were engaged in such fundamental dishonesty are disinclined to accept accountability for it.
Judging by my observations, very few Leave voters have changed their minds, and for those who have it’s after seeing what a mess the government has made of the negotiations. Anything negative that journalists or politicians say continues to be written off as ‘Project Fear’ (despite the insanity of the idea at this point).
Thanks DC Trekkie. I’d honestly like to read more about that. Could you please provide a link? Most of the analysis I’ve been reading regarding Brexit and rural impacts has come from the University of Portsmouth, and they haven’t raised that point.
Really? Nobody hereabouts seems worried. The BBC have much publicised a pro-EU mussels farmer, of course, who says he’s had to stop.
No, it’s the argument that post-referendum, a significant chunk or Remainers have turned into petulant whiners who refuse to accept that the Remain campaign had a losing hand and lost because of it. And what’s worse, many of them are now saying that Leavers were idiots. All those clever knowledgeable cosmopolitan Remainers lost to a bunch of bumpkin gullible idiot Leavers. Basically, that means they were neither as clever nor as knowledgeable as they thought, and now they’re doubling down on their lack of both.
Remain never had a chance to win by extolling the virtues of the EU. The best they could do is to say the EU’s not that bad, we can make it better, and it’s good for the economy. And when that wasn’t working, they went with Project Fear, campaigning that leaving the EU meant economic doom. George Osbourne even stated that a Leave vote would require an emergency budget and drastic action to save the economy. Did that emergency budget happen?
The Leave campaign pointed out the faults in the EU, and valued sovereignty over economic stability. They countered Project Fear by honestly pointing out it was the worst-case scenario and not the likely one. And that simply is all it took. The EU was and is unpopular and the UK people voted against the EU. The UK people listened to the economic argument, and they listened to the sovereignty argument, and they chose sovereignty over economics. All the whinging about lies and campaign overspending is just sour grapes from sore losers who won’t accept they lost by 1.27 million votes.
If you voted for Brexit because you chose sovereignty over economics, you’re the only person I’ve heard of who did, online or in real life. Most leave voters I’ve asked claimed the economy would boom if we left the EU, and that the EU would easily give us a deal that was much better than we had before. Some said the UK would hold all the cards because we imported more from the EU than we exported, and others that the German car manufacturers would force the EU to compromise so they could keep selling us BMWs. They parroted fake news from Facebook claiming the number of EU workers was much higher than the official figures, and that the >1m Syrian immigrants recently arrived in Germany would be able to move to Britain immediately due to free movement.
When the negotiations did not unfold as they expected, they complained about how unfair the EU was being (how dare they support Ireland after we insisted the EU was ruled by and for Germany?) and demanded a ‘hard Brexit now’. I’ve seen a Brexit supporter insist the EU was unreasonable for not letting us stay in the Customs Union while simultaneously setting our own tariffs.
Wrenching Spanners, such views do not inspire respect for their holder’s intelligence or judgement. Neither is seeing the results of Brexit up to now likely to convince any Remain voter than it will be anything but a disaster for our country. The ‘whinging’ is not due to sour grapes but real fear for the future.
Indeed, I still hear these arguments. Jacob Rees-Mogg made them the last time he was on Question Time, and audience members were still pushing the “The EU needs us more than we need them so they’ll give us everything we want” despite two years of the EU demonstrating conclusively otherwise.
Yes, the EU has frequently been characterised as being mean to the UK for not giving the UK what it wants despite the EU having no reason to do so and the UK not actually knowing what it actually wants. If it’s not the Remain campaign’s fault, it’s the EU’s fault. Everything is always the fault of everybody else except the Leave campaign’s.
In other words, exactly what I said above - “It’s Remain’s fault that they didn’t sufficiently expose the Leave campaign’s lies”. Also as previously noted, the complaints of the Remain side are nothing compared to the “petulant whiners” on the Leave side who, despite winning, have not shut up about the fact that they’re not getting the unicorns they voted for.
It’s neat how you simultaneously imply that Remainers were mean for saying that Leavers were idiots and also imply that Remainers are idiots.
The problem wasn’t that Remain weren’t extolling the virtues on the EU; it was that they couldn’t counter the lies of the Leave campaign fast enough - and certainly couldn’t counter the mass market propaganda outlets like the Sun and Daily Mail which proclaimed those lies from their front pages on a daily basis.
And speaking of Leaver propaganda, here you are with the perfect example: “Project Fear”. A spectacular bit of projection from the side that beat the xenophobia drum loudly throughout their campaign, don’t you think? Meanwhile, have you read the Bank of England report? “Economic doom” is a pretty reasonable interpretation, at least for the next decade; even the better case scenarios are pretty bad.
I can’t help but notice how narrowly you frame your arguments in order to avoid being caught out. I listed a bunch of Leaver lies and you narrowed it down to the reciprocity point. And here you are, defining “economic doom” by one specific metric.
No, the emergency budget didn’t happen - but the pound fell sharply, there has been a mass exodus of businesses, UK universities are being excluded from millions in research funding, none of the brilliant trade deals we were promised have materialised (unless you’re excited about the Faroe Islands) and the government is literally stockpiling food and medicine. Does that sound like the economic boom Leave promised?
No they didn’t. They countered “Project Fear” by calling it “Project Fear” and simply denying reality over and over and over again.
“Whinging about lies and campaign overspending” - that’s the standard Leave campaign version of “We don’t want to be held accountable for our lies and campaign overspending. Because we can’t blame them on someone else.”
The “UK people” voted for a fantasy version of Leave. As we have seen time and time again, they didn’t all vote for “Leave in any way and at any cost”, which is why three years on neither the public nor Parliament can agree on what leaving the EU should look like. And it’s why the Leave campaign are so adamantly opposed to a second referendum based on a realistic version of leaving the EU.
Here’s a well-written fairly balanced review of Brexit from the US Council on Foreign Relations, which I believe is a bipartisan think tank.
It contains this paragraph:
Or you can just Google “Brexit sovereignty argument”.
My personal perspective of Leave views comes from speaking with and reading columns from Leave proponents in the City of London. Almost no one here thinks that there’s a short-term or medium-term economic benefit from Brexit. People espousing a long-term benefit from Brexit are indeed assuming that there will be a working UK-EU trading relationship, and that the UK will be better off with trade deals focused on the UK economy, rather than the EU-wide economy. The other economic argument is that a Eurozone collapse is inevitable, and the UK shouldn’t be paying money into the EU when that happens. The Leave sentiment here, from my viewpoint, is based on active dislike of the EU and the belief that it is moving towards being a federation, rather than an association. More or less what David Cameron was arguing against in his Chatham House speech before the referendum.
I disagree with this. The official Remain campaign was lousy; it was largely negative and did seem to follow a ‘scare them straight’ policy. There was very little talk about the benefits of being in the EU, and enough overblown threats of what would happen if we left to lend credence to the ‘Project Fear’ nonsense.
I was so hoping Cameron would have learned something from his near disaster with the Scottish Independence Referendum, but he just doubled down on the fear-based campaigning. I’m not sure what Wrenching Spanners expected ordinary Remain supporters to do about this, though.
I suspect most Leave voters do not get their views from the City of London, but from tabloids like the Express. Yes, I heard arguments about sovereignty, but there was no recognition of any kind of trade off. They believed, as Boris said, that we could have our cake and eat it. The EU would give us a good deal and everything would be roses and unicorns. Several seemed to think WTO terms equalled free trade and being in the single market prevented it. They would simultaneously argue that the EU was an evil, bureaucracy driven behemoth and that it would easily make an exception for our convenience. More recently, companies taking concrete (and expensive) action like moving offices abroad is still dismissed as Project Fear.
The common thread seems to be wishful thinking. People dislike the EU for (often) good reasons, so they seized on any source that said leaving would be beneficial, and ignored anything and anyone saying the opposite.
I haven’t replied to your post #1022 regarding lies. It was a reply to Quartz, and he can counter-reply if he likes. No disrespect, but I’m not interested in doing so.
The reciprocity argument, started in posts #1030 and #1036, is more interesting to me. Please do keep that discussion going, especially if you’re able to cite a specific case of a Leave campaigner promising a benefit from the EU to the UK that would be non-reciprocal and without a UK financial contribution.
My rebuttal discussion on Leave lies was in respect to Steophan’s post #1037 which was a blanket statement, and in my opinion a lousy argument. I’ve continued the discussion a bit, but frankly it’s turning into a regurgitation at this point.
As for the “economic doom”, the current slowdown in the British economy is due to uncertainty because Parliament can’t make up its mind, and because the government hasn’t prepared for a WTO exit, but one may still happen. Feel free to criticise May’s government all you want. I’m sure I’ll agree with you.
Your point seems to be that the Leave campaign was nothing but lies, and Leave only happened because of a gullible electorate. I disagree with you. There were hundreds, if not thousands of newpaper and online articles written before the Leave referendum. Likewise, there were hundreds of hours of televised discussions and commentary. With all that information out there, I disagree that people made their voting decisions based on their Facebook feeds and a bloody bus slogan. Maybe I just have a higher opinion of the British electorate than you do.
My additional counter-argument is if all Leave had going for them was a bunch of lies, Remain should have been able to destroy them. Instead Remain lost. That means that either Leave had a legitimate argument that carried voters, or the Remain campaign was incompetent. Feel free to take your pick.
In the abstract, I think this is a false dichotomy, otherwise presumably we wouldn’t have flat earthers and anti-vaxxers.
I’m an American, and based on recent history I think the premise that liars can be shut down by having their ideas calmly refuted is a naive one. If a person is mistaken they can be stopped by correcting them, but a liar knows he’s wrong and doesn’t care. When you refute him, all he has to double down.
It’s really not.
And it’s my strong impression from the last couple of years on this side of the ocean that those who bought into the lie in the first place are likely to double down on the double-down, because a) the lie appealed to them, and/or b) they don’t want to admit they’d been had. So “calm refutation” in this situation is next to useless.
And corollary: you can’t logically persuade a person out of a position they weren’t logicked into in the first place. When somebody adopts a position based not on facts but on feelings or biases, then telling them facts is pointless because the facts don’t matter; only emotions do.
“Emerging markets.” We used to call those “Third world countries,” didn’t we?
So what does happen when the UK transmogrifies itself into one of those? And how is JR-M’s company positioning itself so as to benefit from that? Peer-to-peer rules different, are they?
Why would the Remainers want to repudiate something so patently valid? AIUI, they WERE campaigning on the side of factual reality.
Did you mean to ask whether any of them ENDORSED it?
Well, Leavers have ALWAYS been idiots,* whether anyone was impolite enough to say so out loud or no.
(or dastards, or dastardly idiots)*
**(present company excepted, of course, consistent with forum rules)
Name calling is easy. Fortunately, so are facts. Here’s a list of groups and individuals who provided endorsements on both sides of the referendum.
Neither David Starkey nor The Sunday Times editorial board, to pick two you may have heard of, are idiots.
See? Took me less than a minute to prove you wrong. Easy. Not that I expect you to stop spreading misinformation. Fortunately, I doubt your efforts will improve.