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This thread is really just a big echo chamber. A load of people in London (a reasonable proportion earning significant salaries and owning expensive houses) pointing at Brexit voters and declaring them all racist idiots. You can see why a lot of people in deprived towns thought Fuck you, what relevance does this have to us.
If you want to reduce the argument to this level of analysis: I grew up in a city that topped Europe's murder and poverty rates, and still outstrips the rest of the UK/EU for public health issues, has suffered enormously from liberalisation and Tory economic policy but remains emphatically pro-EU in outlook (68% remain).
Why? We've not lost sight of who the cunts are that fucked us then and continue to fuck us now. There's still a percentage of self-hating McGammons who have been indoctrinated into Unionist ideology through generations of political divide and conquer exploiting religious fault lines, but thankfully they're a minority and are rightfully derided for the corrosive nasty social influence they are in a way that the kippers down south should have been too. Funnily enough, May made a deal with the DUP that helps sustain and legitimise these imagined grievances and acts against years of hard won political progress for her own self preservation.
And FYI I don't live in London now, have no assets to speak of and am looking to move permanently to the EU just to guarantee a basic standard of living because there's less and less of a chance of finding it here and I don't want to waste another decade of lost opportunity thanks to austerity and recession.
But ye. Keep telling yourself this small, niche cycling forum is an echo chamber representative of a wealthy urban elite, symbolic of some kind of anti proletarianism if it helps you ignore the fact that the UK is one of the most rapaciously right wing countries in Europe, driven by the Murdoch dominated press on behalf of offshore trust funds, and that takes advantage of poor disenfranchised people by both promoting policies that act against their interests whilst sheltering their own wealth from taxation, and then drip feeding them the message that it's all Jonny Foreigner's fault they can't get ahead.
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mi7rennie
This thread is really just a big echo chamber. A load of people in London (a reasonable proportion earning significant salaries and owning expensive houses) pointing at Brexit voters and declaring them all racist idiots. You can see why a lot of people in deprived towns thought Fuck you, what relevance does this have to us.
Any questioning of free movement of people is shouted down as racism. People point out that immigrants are net contributors to the economy without taking into account the impact on local workforces (a number of studies suggest that the net contributor figure doesn't stand up when this is taken into account).
When people look at the local factories and see what used to be reasonably paid roles gradually being replaced by foreign, non-unionised labour on the minimum wage I think they're entitled to wonder what benefits the EU has brought them.
It's become a race to the bottom in many cases, unscrupulous owners know they have a ready supply of cheap labour, often not that familiar with UK employment rules and less likely to kick up a fuss, so they can push the pay and working conditions down and replace them at will.
The response to this is generally, that isn't the EU's fault, the UK government should be doing more about it. They're not though, and haven't been for years, so what other choice did people have? If you're already at the bottom then if you shake things up the worst that can happen is you stay at the bottom. It's no coincidence that if you look at the 20 most deprived local authorities, all but a couple of them voted to Leave.
Undoubtedly some did vote leave because they were racist but the patronising response that all Brexit voters are racist or too stupid to understand.
Before the vote the lack of willingness to engage was one of the reasons that Remain lost. The continuation of that is partly contributing to the fact that most of those leave voters are still pro-leave.