E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

We knew what Remain looked like. Or...



But what you are talking about is a problem of people not knowing how to search, filter and digest information. Again, if they want democracy to function, they better learn. Democracy does not mean the abdication of political decision making to politicians of your choice. You may as well go for proper dictatorship.

Brexit is a leap into the unknown. Politicians tell us it will be great, but we can't trust them. Some other politicians tell us it will be awful, but we can't trust them either. But Remain is lived reality; we know what it's like. In the absence of good, trustworthy information about the alternative, do we take the leap into the unknown and hope for a soft landing, or stick with what we know?



Moreover, Brexit was conflated with austerity by the public as well as the Brexiteers, who blamed the EU for what were the results of six years of Tory policies.

I'm not saying that they're racist idiots (although about 25% of Leavers polled embraced the view that EU immigrants should all be sent back home if Leave won); I'm saying that the blatant racism in the campaign wasn't, like, a warning sign to them about the quality of the argument being made and the motivations behind it. It was emotive, it played on people's fears, nationalism and sense of entitlement. The 'thinking mother****ers' are possibly worse, because they should have recognised that they were being played; that if these were the arguments being made for Brexit, there weren't likely to be better, more rational ones; or because they knew that they were being played but quite cynically chose to ride the racist tiger to get what they wanted --which, as you say, was about personal financial gain.

Regarding my experience of the British populace: reader, I married one. I know that they are not all bad --at least, not worse than the Dutch. But for four years I lived in considerable uncertainty about my future after the vote, which was for a significant part made about there just being too darn many EU immigrants in this country, when by that time I had pretty much done everything that was expected of an immigrant trying to integrate and contribute to society. I filled an NHS post that had been vacant for 2 years because no British psychologist wanted to work in Hull --no "queue jumping" here. I did 20% unpaid overtime, like most NHS colleagues do. I paid my taxes. I supported local business and gave to local charities. I speak the language fluently. I say "Ooh, lovely" when someone offers me a cup of tea.

Then I hear the PM --not some racist bloke on the street, not some Daily Heil tabloid, but the ****ing Prime Minister of the UK-- referring to us as "queue jumpers" and people who "should stop treating this country as if it was their own". I mean, wasn't that the whole ****ing point of integrating as an immigrant?

Seriously, **** them. I don't ask for thanks --what I do is my job, after all, and I get paid well for it. But I will not be spoken about like I am a commodity to this country, to be used when needed and dismissed when convenient. That **** stopped with my great-great grandmother when she was freed from slavery and bought her own name, refusing to use the one given to her by her slave owner.

If the UK wants to see this relationship in purely business terms, well, I'm a Dutchman: I know how to do business. So this is not my country. I just work here, I get paid; I take nothing that isn't mine and I give nothing I don't owe. And now I'm retiring and I am leaving the UK with my wife, and it will lose two mental health professionals. Nothing personal; it was just business.

 

Anecdotally, having lived in England for the lions share of my life, I'd say that about 51% seems low for racists. I'd estimate a maximum of ten of the English people I knew (In a traditional face-to-face sense) when I was there hadn't said something aggressively racist. Not counting one time meetings, or family members (Although at least one of those is at least a little bit racist and a lot bit homophobic, so..).

Spending all those years learning the jingoistic 'rule Britannia' nonsense, having been on the winning side in two world wars, learning that Britain owned half the globe (And not in a 'this is bad' light. Insert reference to 'retaking control of America' comments.), it kinda lends it self to a sense of entitlement that seems a lot like racism, or so racism adjacent that racism isn't a red flag.

 

Little sods, I had to void the warranty of my brand new percolator within a day of buying it to circumvent the eco-design directive, which allowed me to use it how I saw fit, and wanted.

 

I am persuaded on most of your points but not on the glut of racism and jingoism in Britain. I think you guys just lived in shite areas. Or maybe I live in an exceptionally good one. My American friend, who leans heavily pessimistic about the human condition, often alleges that I do.

 

UKIP and many right-wing Tories, actively promoted racist sentiment in the UK.

 

I take it you're a White male?

Power means not having to be aware of problems. You're not going to experience racism unless it's directed at you and yours, like you and I, as males, don't experience misogyny so don't notice when it's there. It's just how things work.

 

Lived in Lichfield, which as far as I know has been a Tory stronghold since the dawn of time. According to the gubmint the last GE was a 64.5% majority Tory vote. https://members.parliament.uk/constituency/3579/election/397 Somehow Fabricant has held onto that seat despite looking, and behaving, like one of the rejected Boris clones. Red faced tosser used to come to my primary school when I was a kid, do not have fond memories of him. But that's the kind of place Lichfield is. NIMBY old white people to the max.

It wasn't ****, but it sure wasn't many shades other than white, white, and old white. The racism and jingoism was strong. Strong enough that even I, another generic white man, noticed it. And the history I remember from school was quite often barely rebadged "Look at how great England always has been, no we didn't do slaves and military force to take land shutup they gave it to us. We were invited. Look how much worse everyone else was". Hell, one of the music teachers barely managed to go a week (With two music lessons a week) without being a racist, sexist, white old person. 'Rule Britannia' was order of the day for any practical tests/demonstrations.

 

Sorry, but this is entirely incorrect. I don't mean that in a barbed way, you don't know me and haven't experienced my setting, and in absence of that information your assumptions are reasonable, but you might have noticed that I go looking under rocks. I poke things with sticks to see what noises they make. I've encountered pretty much every sentiment my local population has to offer, from climate change denial, chemtrail tinfoil hattery and old-school colonial racism to anarchism, socialism and neo-Nazism. I don't know what exactly it is about the context of my profession but my customers are very open and willing to express their views without a filter. I also go out of my way to start conversations with strangers and try to glean information about their life experiences.

So I'm not that insulated by my demographic qualities. Perhaps by my general area, as mentioned before, but that's what I'm saying - around here, despite my best digging, I have not encountered a significant amount of racism, xenophobia or colonial sentiment. A few, mostly the older generations, mostly people with a lot of experience abroad in places like South Africa or India (go figure, literally colonial types), or super-isolated rural farming families with absolutely no contact ever with ethnic minorities (again, go figure). But to my surprise most people I speak to here, even the conservatives (of which there are many), are not xenophobic or racist. Many aren't even anti-immigration, despite voting Tory. The overlap is not clean here.

I attended a really white middle-class school steeped in history and all that. The old white staff members there did not articulate or push racist, xenophobic or conservative views - most were liberal and progressive. One was quite open about being a socialist, and was delighted to learn I had a copy of the Manifesto (which naturally put me off reading it, because ugh, adult approval).

What I'm getting at is that my location might be blinkering me to the nature of the British population, leaving me playing with half a deck - but yours might be too. If you've never experienced this - a native population that leans fiscally conservative but is socially progressive, tolerant and welcoming of outsiders - then maybe you, too, are playing with half a deck, unaware of the existence of other kinds of people with other attitudes and norms. Because you think British people are majority racist, and that racism and xenophobia overlap neatly with conservative politics, and I can categorically tell you that that's simply not true where I live.

 

If memory serves, Nexxo's stomping grounds aren't that far from mine, and some where I spent time unwillingly. It's really easy to find racism around those parts. Like. Throw a rock into a crowd and hit a racist or six kinds of easy.

 

I've definitely been to areas like that. Grimsby, in particular, is dreadful for it - probably one of the worst places, culturally, politically and economically, that I have ever visited. Preston was also bad. Something about coastal industrial towns?

Edit - oh and Blackburn, holy moley with that racism.

But again, my point is that these areas may not be representative, and to take them as a litmus test of the nation is to indulge in a terrifically negative and myopic bias.

 

While pre-brexit I'd have agreed with you in so much as I didn't want to see England as a home of racist morons, post brexit I don't find it so easy to do so.

Because 51% of the turnout did not see any of the leave campaign for the racist ******** it was/is - Which, to me, is compliance with racism if not racism itself. Every discussion I had with a pro-brexit person invariably turned into them blaming X on immigration. The X changed, but ultimately the reason that shook out was 'them thur foreigns have done Y which has caused X which means remove them thur foreigns and Y is fixed" ignoring the fact that Y was caused by some old white racist ****, and nothing to do with immigration. Usually because some old white bellend told them by way of terrible 'news' paper that it was immigrants that did it. Which, to me, screams racism - Because if they had done any independent research on the subject of Y, they'd come to the conclusion that blaming the not-English person is probably not a viable argument to make. But blaming immigration better fits their world view. Which, really, is racism. Maybe not lynching a person of colour amounts of racism, but I'm not going to try and create levels of racism because it's all demonstrably ****ing stupid, and no one deserves respite for being racist just because they're "less" racist than someone else.

 

Again, though, you're conflating the Brexit campaign with the Brexit voters. The campaign was dreadful. The entire premise was dreadful. But that is separate from the motives and ideas of Brexit voters. Yes, some of them voted Leave for dumb racist reasons - certainly sounds like most of the Leavers where you live did. But where I live, a lot voted Leave for much more benign reasons.

 

But that's kind of my point.

"Dumb benign reasons" should have, at even half a glance, been debunked. They didn't see through the absolute horseshit of the leave campaign to see the racist undercurrents barely covered up by their other garbage-grade opinions.

That ad campaign "Breaking point" that Nexxo linked a picture of Farage in front of earlier, for example. It's such blatant racist ******** that it should have made anyone not comfortable with racist ******** question the other wholly stupid claims of the same campaign - Like the godforsaken bus with some nonsensical numbers on it and references to the NHS, ultimately tied together to make it seem like the UK was sending way too much money to the EU and getting nothing (???) back.

Was the leave campaign racist ********? Absolutely yes.

Is anyone taken in by that racist ******** also, to me, somewhat racist? Also yes.

Because their world view is such that the racism wasn't obvious (Which implies they already kinda thought that way anyway), they didn't bother to dig any deeper. They believed it and went 'Yup, that stands up to my internal reasoning.' That's compliance with racism. Which might as well be racism.

 

The fallacy here is that you're assuming all Leave voters were 'taken in' by the campaign, didn't dig deeper, didn't have reasons for voting Leave that stood outside of what the campaign was about.

Euroskepticism is a valid line of political reasoning that does not exclusively rest on anti-immigration sentiment. There are economic reasons to be Euroskeptic. Maybe you think it'll help local farmers, or local businesses, or change the balance of power between employees and employers, or make our own government's bureaucratic processes more efficient and thus better able to react to crises. I considered all those factors. I happened to disagree with them in the end, but they're not racist. If someone voted Leave because they thought it'd benefit the UK's economy, then they and I disagree about the UK's economy, but they're not racist.

An interesting fringe case I encountered that really blindsided me was educated left-leaning people old enough to have voted for the EU the first time. A couple of those people expressed that they were voting out this time simply because they felt they had a right to - because they'd voted in before, and they remembered what they'd been sold at the time, and that what the EU had become, in scale and scope, wasn't what they'd been promised. Yes, it was more. Yes, arguably it was more beneficial. But its ability to simply evolve into a bigger and bigger superstructure without any public involvement beyond the initial "yes" alarmed them. As the people who voted it in to begin with, they felt they had a right to vote it out again. I agreed with their sentiment, even though I didn't share their fears.

And again - they weren't racist. Not everyone who stands politically adjacent to a person who stands politically adjacent to a person who is racist, is racist.

 

There are always people who voted Brexit for Other Reasons, some of which may genuinely not be (believed to be) racist. But correspondent inference applies: the campaign was blatantly xenophobic, and Brexit Is perceived to have won on the basis of that campaign, ergo it it's perceived to have won because of xenophobia. Leavers can't get away from that, unless they actively distance themselves, and they haven't yet.

In the end (and I edited my previous post to add some of my personal views, so you may have to go back and read it), the upshot was that us EU immigrants weren't made to feel welcome anymore. We have in fact been asked to prove that we even deserve to be here (after a decade of two, three, of integrating and contributing). Any Leavers express objection to the broken promise that EU immigrants already resident in the UK would automatically be granted settled status? Nope. I'm sure that there were many progressive, lefty, open-minded Leavers who voted Leave for the best of reasons but they sure didn't give a thought how we might be experiencing the Brexit campaign, nor what might happen to us if Leave won.

So do I think all Leavers are racist? I dunno, do Leavers think all EU immigrants are freeloaders? Do I even care about their feels? As much as they care about ours. My relationship to this country is strictly business now: I do a job, I get paid; I take nothing that isn't mine and I give nothing that isn't owed. And end of this year I'm retiring and then I'll be leaving. Tot ziens!

 

But again I say - If the campaign is based on racism (And not very subtly), and the people who agree with that campaigns goal have no argument that holds water and routinely boil down to muddying the waters around racism, how exactly are they not racist by association?

Like I said. Maybe less racist than a cross burner, but I don't believe racism should have a sliding scale. You either are, or aren't. If you don't want to be called racist, stop being racist. It's not hard. It's arguably easier than being racist.

Xenophobic and racist attacks appeared to rise in the aftermath because the whole campaign had lent itself to that narrative rather deliberately, and the majority voting to leave emboldened those racists enough that more appeared to act on their idiocy. No one distanced themselves from this convincingly, or made some song and dance about how they 'aren't racist but'.

If leave voters weren't 'taken in' by the campaign, why are there expats in the EU bricking themselves about the rules that now apply to them? And then making a stink about how they didn't think their vote would affect their situation?

Racism. The innate belief that because they're British they're entitled to do what they want and other places are lesser - And should, thus, kowtow to their wants purely because they come from the UK.

If euroskeptics can provide one good, irrefutable, argument for leaving the EU, I'm all ears. But none of them did in the lead up to, or the terrifically **** display after, the fact.

Vote leave winning emboldened racists to act more blatantly because it was extremely racist in its campaign. Not being able to see that makes them wilfully ignorant of racism, and that is not something that should be tolerated. Supporting racist ideas, to me, makes whoever supports the idea as much a racist as the person spouting it.

Having voted leave either paints the voter as racist, or an absolute, arguably selfish, moron IMO.

I am English. Vote Leave made England not feel like home. It made it feel like a barely corralled bunch of racists, selfish idiots, and people who were too young to vote.

 

I'm obviously over-simplifying and exaggerating here, but that's kinda like Germans back in the early 30s saying "I voted for Hitler because he said he'd build the autobahn. Sure, he also said all this hateful and racist stuff, but you have to take the bad with the good sometimes", isn't it?

 

"I've got no problems with Jews personally, but you've got to admit that Adolf has got some good ideas for this country..."

There's the racism: no regard for how EU immigrants might be affected if they voted in favour of the side with all the racism. "I'm with the racists on this one, but not for racist reasons, you understand...". Nope, does not make me feel any better.

The same superiority complex showed, as liratheal points out, when expats in places like Spain confidently voted Leave in the expectation that surely it wouldn't affect them.

 

My own experiences simply don't align with any of these extremely reductive and harsh stereotypes of Leave voters. I don't know what else to say, really. If the second-hand evidence of my extensive experiences talking to these people is worth nothing to you guys, and will do nothing to change your dystopian vision of the British population, then there's no point me trying to offer it, I guess. But I've offered it anyway, for whatever it may be worth to anyone passing through this thread.

 

Don't worry, you're absolutely correct. There is literally a meme for this...




Think it through, guys. Eventually, there will be an Irish reunification referendum, or "Should N. Ireland leave the Union?". There will be two options - Leave or remain.
Voting to remain part of the UK doesn't mean implicit support of the Loyalist Paramilitary's campaign of violence, just like voting to leave doesn't make you an IRA sympathizer.
If voting a particular way did denote endorsement of every action taken/belief espoused in support of that option, it would mean every single person in N.Ireland is a bigot by association.
And calling 1.5m people you've never met bigoted sounds pretty bigoted to me.