The people appear to have chosen to leave the EU.
Yet again I find myself on my sofa in the middle of the night watching a disaster unfold before my eyes.
This one, though, is going to hurt much more than the election nights of the past five years. I’m not quite saying that they can come back, all is forgiven, but the ramifications of tonight for the country are so much worse. Our future opportunities and standing in the world are all heading down the toilet.
Already we see the pound in free-fall, making the Prime Minister’s predictions during the campaign seem positively optimistic.
Yet people didn’t believe him. They didn’t believe that a Prime Minister would put us in this position if he thought it would do us so much harm? Well, that’s what happens when you have a Prime Minister who is weak, who chooses to pander to factions within his party against the interests of the country.
He is not fit to hold office, yet it’s hard to see anyone in his party who would be less bad as we face economic chaos.
It’s not just the economic chaos, which will hit the most vulnerable as the Tories now inevitably roll back the size of the state. It’s what this means for the politics. It gives a boost for the sort of right wing ideology that make any liberal sick to the stomach.
I feel numb. I fear for what this means nationally and internationally.
So why did Remain not win? Well, here are three of the reasons:
Learning none of the lessons of Better Together
The Remain campaign was terrible. The last thing it needed was ambivalence when the media had been dripping poison from their keyboards towards Brussels for decades. It needed to be led with passion and enthusiasm, yet both the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition were lukewarm about their cause. Those voices who were enthusiastic were marginalised by that same media.
None of the lessons from the Better Together campaign had been learned. There was no beautiful melody to engage people, to make them ready to hear the warnings which were legitimate to make. The “emergency budget” stunt was just laughed off.
Not only was the messaging terrible, the ground campaign and organisation was dire. A woman turned up at one of my events in Livingston who told me she had been trying to volunteer for 8 weeks via the website and nobody had passed her details on. The emphasis was on high vis events rather than actual door-knocking and getting accurate data.
Timing
Why on earth did this vote have to be held just 7 weeks after the Scottish and Welsh elections? Early September would have been much better. By the time the result was announced, most people had booked their post-Holyrood election holiday and in any event were knackered after a long 6 week Scottish Parliament campaign.
Again, Cameron put the tensions in his party ahead of common sense.
Failure to deal with the concerns of the poorest
So, you have a group of people who feel ignored by Government. They struggle with low wages, they can’t find houses that they can afford. So the Leave campaign rocks up with a big bad institution and immigrants to blame. The Leave vote was an entirely preventable disaster waiting to happen.
This is a horrible, horrible night.
A government elected on barely a third of the vote and a quarter of the electorate has played Russion roulette with all of our futures to assuage its own internal tensions. It’s showed recklessness of huge proportions.
We face economic, political and constitutional chaos. Thosee people who believed the Brexiteers’ lies will have a long time to repent at leisure.
Paddy sums it up – but we Liberal Democrats are going to have to come up with answers to some very tough questions very soon:
God help our country.
— Paddy Ashdown (@paddyashdown) June 24, 2016
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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Have resignations led to a rethink?
High Fell leaflet watch (2)
No, Leave didn't win the Brexit referendum because of Northern working class voters
Two new Makerfield by-election polls gives Burnham 5 and 12 point leads
Paul Fox
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16 Comments
Agreed Caron. But there’s a huge sense in me of this: this is so huge. The turnout was massive. We’ll just going to have to roll up our sleeves and see how we can help the country.
The working class want credible solutions. It’s why they go for things like mass immigration and pulling out of the EU – it looks like an easy target. Universal basic income and open borders? It just doesn’t sound credible.
Anyway, there doesn’t need to be a big change for remainers. Just a sort of widening of our appeal, because we shouldn’t be winning these things by at least 10 percentage points.
We should be winning these things by at least 10 percentage point I mean, not shouldn’t.
We had ample warning, see some postings from those of us in blue chip areas and marginal seats outside London and Scotland. I have asked several times, what is our position the day after a negative result. Will we be a viable force at all in the future? This is probably the end of political business at it was, it must now finally be business as it is not what we would like it to be. Will we face reality fair and square?. I am a Europhile, it is a tragedy but moaning about it will get us nowhere. What is our new approach going to be?. It might be an opportunity if we can be radical enough and be prepared to break from our current party positions but I doubt it
Does this mean that at last we can involve new people fronting our regime, with new ideas, fit for the countries new role, even last night Ashdown again, oh dear.
The only immediate good thing from my personal point of view is a small winning bet on the result at the bookies, something I had hoped I would lose!!!!
Most Remain people I know voted for the right reasons, I think we’ll be able to grow as an open-facing country outside the EU, not in it – at the end of it, Britain’s cut down the middle. What we need now is to heal the wounds. I’m personally glad we have a chance to build a new democracy and lead the way in Europe, not for the banks but for the people, building a liberal country and continent and ridding both of the corruption we’ve seen before us. All to play for, one thing’s for sure, we’ve taken the plunge.
The EU is too inward looking and only accounts for 20% of the world.
Now we can look to the other 80% that the EU did not want us to deal with.
Anyine know the number of a good plastic surgeon… the country appears to have cut off its nose to spite its face.
“So, you have a group of people who feel ignored by Government. They struggle with low wages, they can’t find houses that they can afford.”
I think you’re half way to explaining it there. It wasn’t just that Leave offered some kind of solutions to these problems – most of them illusory, but a few of them actually evidence-based. Liberal politicians (and I mean small-l there) not only failed to offer alternative solutions, but they spent the whole time calling people bigots for having those concerns, even though a lot of them (and we all know many, many Leave voters) are not actually bigots at all. This was still one of Remain’s chief tactics even last night.
You don’t persuade people to your point of view by insulting them. Every time a politician has dismissed these concerns with retorts of “racist” and “xenophobe”, another pile of votes has been moved to the Leave side of the table. This has been going on for years and I’ve predicted many times that it would lead to this kind of disaster, with the UK now the darling of Le Pen and Wilders and every other right-wing extremist in the world.
The left/centre need to learn the lessons from this, and fast, otherwise the right will have a completely free run at determining what sort of post-EU country we become. And that prospect is terrifying.
Disapointing though this is, positivity is called for. Despite the dire warnings of Remain’s crystal ball gazers (aka “experts”), it’s entirely possible for the UK to emerge from this stronger rather than weaker. One thing we could do to get the ball rolling is start negotiating trade deals with countries like China, which the EU has failed dismally to do (unlike Iceland which has just signed one).
Lawks, woken up to see 2 Unions likely end today, and older folk and angry working folk up-ending the barrelcart for their own reasons.
Anyway, the ragtag Brexiters have got the mother of all delivery problems ahead of them – and expect Cameron’s instinct will be to bale and leave them to it’
My first thought were the final lines in the original “Planet of the Apes”…
“You REALLY did it…………….
The promises are already unravelling…”Nigel Farage has admitted that it was a “mistake” to promise that £350 million a week would be spent on the NHS if the UK backed a Brexit vote. Speaking just an hour after the Leave vote was confirmed the Ukip leader said the money could not be guaranteed and claimed he would never have made the promise in the first place…”
No, it’s not ‘disaster’. It’s a vote to withdraw from a minor and failing regional political administration, of which most nations on the face of planet earth do not have membership. Achieved via a process Nick Clegg himself proposed a few years ago. ‘Read the small print’ as he asserted, on his referendum promise leaflet. (Albeit that there was no actual small print on that leaflet?)
The progressive, liberal agenda was irrelevant in most people’s decision on the EU. If we’re not very careful it will be just as irrelevant at the next general election.
I don’t think some of you get out much. There is a real groundswell of right wing populism that remindes me of the early1980s.
If the Lib Dems can’t find a message to cut through to ordinary people the party itself will become increasingly irrelevant.
Stuart “You don’t persuade people to your point of view by insulting them. Every time a politician has dismissed these concerns with retorts of “racist” and “xenophobe”, another pile of votes has been moved to the Leave side of the table”
How true. Nick, Paddy and other did this throughout the campaign and I felt ashamed of being in the same party the people making such statements. Political activists may think it was all about the misleading campaign of Leave winning the day, but they forget that many decent people will have voted leave yesterday for a variety of reasons. We must respect the result of a democratic vote.
Beckley is also right. Nick is on record repeatedly supporting an In/Out referendum and I was in the room when he stated this, incidentally, along with his views on the strategic importance of Turkey joining the EU, which anyone might now think was a lie made up by the Leave campaign.
There is no point trying to rewrite history and blaming Cameron for delivering the referendum he promised in his manifesto, or finding fault with everyone else apart from ourselves.
We have no control over what other parties do or say, what has been done in recent years to destroy my party and the trust of those who supported it could not have been managed by anyone else or any other parties.
We now need to do two things.
Accept the result, move on and decide where the party goes from here.
Stuart – totally agree.
One thing we could do to get the ball rolling is start negotiating trade deals with countries like China, which the EU has failed dismally to do
But you are forgetting about the UK proposition to any potential trading partner, which has been totally devalued! Before the referendum the UK was a potential foothold and gateway into the Single European market, today it is not.
Hence what investors get in return is significantly reduced. However, the UK decision has just vindicated the decision of those who invested in Ireland since the 1990’s (eg. Starbucks, Google, Facebook, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, etc. etc.) and hence we can expect to see more investment money that would have come to the UK now be diverted, to the detriment of the UK.
So I do not hold out any real hope that trade deals with China et al. will be favourable to the UK; to China the UK is just a market of circa 60m people ie. 4.3% of it’s own population, so it is insignificant. When it gave access to a market of 508m people, China would have entertained trade talks with the UK – as it did last year…
We have just experienced a democratic revolution. What else do you call it when the powerless in a society overthrow all the existing establishment? We have ignored those with no hope of a better life, who have suffered from local services in decline and large numbers of people who speak languages they do not understand coming to their local community and we have called them bigots. Jo Cox took their concerns seriously, suggesting hypothecating migrants taxes to improve local services for these communities under strain. We have ignored the powerless and they have overthrown the status quo.
What should we do now? We should be glad that the revolution was free from violence and return to our Lib Dem principles of belief in democracy and standing up for the powerless and we should be there for them when they realise they have been manipulated, offering help and solutions and ways to support our true belief that a vibrant diverse society improves life for all.