A lot of the comment in the news and elsewhere are about the disaffected non-urban working class in the UK made a huge mistake in voting for Brexit. But, assuming this cohort of voters is not insane, there must have been some very serious mis-steps the EU was making in selling their value proposition to these members of the EU.
What were these mistakes that made the voters think the EU was not (overall) a good deal for them? Is the EU now going to work harder to correct these problems?
Well, the EU, as such, didn’t participate in the campaign. What you have is different groups of British politicians, and the British media, taking positions about the EU. So if anybody screwed up in the presentation of the EU, it wasn’t - at least on the face of it - the EU itself.
In a macro sense I think I would disagree unless the dysfunctional aspects of the EU as perceived by the leave voters were completely illusory. If you want to stay in power in a scenario where people have the power of choice you have to deliver value and the UK leave voters perceived the cost was greater than the benefit.
Leaving the EU is a BFD on any scale. If you are not making your case to your constituents (ie EU members) they will find alternatives. You can’t say the EU (as an organization) did not drop the ball in some way to get to that point.
Well straight away I think we need to question the premise.
I think it’s not so much mis-selling as mis-information – on the part of the Leave campaign. And that the benefits of EU membership, while substantial, are often difficult to articulate (it’s worthless trying to tell someone that it’s worth N% GDP for example).
One thing that perhaps could have been made clearer is immigration.
There is a degree of xenophobia that the Leave campaign made use of. Immigrants were frequently depicted as just as strain on the NHS, and competing for your jobs (and women). They were also depicted as brown-skinned, I’m sure for non-racist reasons.
But actually every analysis I’ve seen, shows the free movement of labor within the EU being a net benefit for the UK; with mostly skilled people coming and doing jobs native Brits can’t or won’t do. And far from being a drain on the NHS, many of them are encouraged over to help staff it.
Already many commentators are saying Britain will try to keep free movement rules with the rest of the EU, which makes a mockery of much of what Leave was campaigned over, and is part of why many Brexit voters are starting to wonder if they really had a good appreciation of the situation.
Many of the popular right-wing papers in Britain have been ‘priming’ the electorate for a Leave decision for literally decades - while the benefits of the EU have rather been taken for granted. It’s not like the EU as an organisation has felt the need to advertise itself to its own members. Tragic.
A lot of it boils down to contempt of the proles by the elite. Concern about uncontrolled immigration is decried and dismissed as racism when people want it to be controlled. Yes, there are some racists, but many more are not. Even on the SDMB the two have been conflated. They see other countries forced to re-run referenda when the ‘wrong result’ is obtained (e.g. Ireland IIRC). They see EU interference in Greece. They see the EU as undemocratic - the party list system is not a help here and the EU parliament is seen as subservient to the Council of Ministers - and corrupt. Stuff like the recent UK MPs’ expenses scandal is small beer. They saw Cameron take a paltry few of their concerns and get turned away with a pat on the head and a kick up the arse. They saw Cameron cynically break his promise about those negotiations. They saw Corbyn cynically switch from being a vociferous Leaver to a Remainer. They remember that they were deceived (by Edward Heath) into going into Europe in the first place (if memory serves he openly admitted it on in a TV interview years later), being promised purely a common market, and not an economic and political union.
It’s very telling that not one official who made a pro-Remain statement has resigned.
A lot of commentators were predicting a Remain win a few days ago. So did I. They were wrong then. So was I. Why do you believe them now? I’m going to wait and see.
To a significant extent people were not so much voting against the EU, but were instead expressing their dissatisfaction about a whole bunch of things–but these other things were not on the ballot–so people used a LEAVE vote as a proxy for this dissatisfaction.
While the website has been taken down and links are hard to come by, it seems that some voters were sold a snake-oil / Hemlock cocktail by a shaved ape with a bad hair piece.
I just wish there was something the world could learn about fact-checking political claims so something like this could never happen again…
American here, who didn’t follow the whole thing that closely. In the articles that I did read, the Remain side seemed to have basically two arguments:
(1) Racists! Bigots! Xenophobes!
(2) Here’s an expert who’s smarter than you. He will explain why a Leave vote will leads to Armageddon.
I would not expect either argument to be convincing. First of all, both arguments are overused. Since the media and political elite are always calling everybody a racist and a bigot, most people just tune it out. It’s utterly annoying and tends to drive people away, rather than convincing them to support you. As for insisting that the economy will collapse, people know that’s an overblown claim. Voters always get told that if politicians don’t get exactly what they want, the economy will go down the tubes. It’s never true, in first world countries. (And in third world countries, it’s generally the politicians who sent the economy down the tubes.)
Working class voters had perfectly legitimate concerns. Excessive bureaucracy is strangling small businesses in the country, and the EU was responsible for a lot of it. Massive numbers of immigrants were arriving. There was the Rotherham scandal, still fresh in many people’s minds, and the wave of terrorist attacks in Europe over the past year. There was the fact that the EU is anti-democratic, subjecting the British people to laws made by people they didn’t vote for. The Remain camp didn’t seem to have any desire to address these concerns, or even acknowledge them. It was just “Racist! Bigot! Apolcalypse!” over and over again.
In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Sherlock Holmes solves a mystery based solely on the fact that a dog didn’t bark. I never saw an advocate of Remain write about an EU law or bureaucratic rule that would benefit the British people. I never saw them write about anything that the government in Brussels had handled well. Like Sherlock Holmes, I can deduce things from this absence. If nobody is bragging about things that the EU government has done well, it’s probably because they don’t do anything well. If nobody is advertising the benefits of the EU’s regulations, it’s probably because there are no benefits. And if that’s the case, why would anyone vote to stay?
