Brexit - Why I Did It - Confession of a Man to Blame For Absolutely Everything!

The First Step

I spend a quite lot of time on Twitter attempting to defend my viewpoint with regard to the European Union and Brexit.

Even with the recently increased allowance of 280 characters this is no simple task.

My Twitter timeline resides in an area of British social media that is predominantly hostile toward Brexit. It has a large number of people who are liberals of one variety or another who tend to congregate at the intolerant end of the spectrum. According to many of my Remain critics Brexit is synonymous with Conservative Party policies (in the mainstream media 'Brexit' has been crafted as a shorthand for Tory policy) Theresa May and all things bad. 

So, for the moment I will just sketch out what I think happened on 23 June 2016 and what Brexit means to me as a 'leave' voter. 

The Referendum

On 23 June 2016 I made my way to the local polling station to vote in the EU referendum. There were two choices Leave, or Remain a member of the European Union. I voted leave fully expecting the other side to win. As a lifelong supporter of progressive causes this would have been a familiar result for me, losing the vote that is. For most of my adult life I have not voted for very many candidates because I particularly believed in them, I have just voted against all the rest.

The last thing I expected from my leave vote was that it would actually win, although I had spent weeks on Twitter raising questions about the legitimacy and purpose of the polls that put Remain ahead...victory still seemed a faint prospect at the time.

  

However, I had been somewhat inured to the shock of winning when in 2015  as a Labour Party supporter I voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader, which really was the first time I think I'd ever voted for anything I could actually believe in, except perhaps on those few occasions in the past when I'd voted for first-past-the-post no hopers. 

When I voted for Corbyn this time as I would have done anyway, (having both been National Union of Public Employees (now part of Unison) conference delegates in 1989-91) the media and almost all establishment figures were saying he couldn't win and even if he did he couldn't survive as leader, but we all know what happened next. Jeremy Corbyn won with a landslide - twice - despite the dirty tricks of the Blairite rump and the bias of the Tory media, especially the BBC. He was propelled into power on the shoulders of the forgotten and the disenfranchised as well as trade unionists and the rank and file movement, to the horror of the rightwing.  

Even flushed with that success winning the leave vote seemed unlikely, all the pundits and many liberal media commentators were sure that Britain would vote for Remain, they were never wrong (except with regard to Corbyn up to that point). 

The corporate media had been awash with commentary and prognostication of terrible disasters that would befall us if we voted to leave the EU, the infamous Project Fear as it was dubbed at the time. According to the bulk of the liberal MSM only UKIP racists and xenophobes supported Leave, whereas the great and the good were confident that remaining in the EU is such a wonderful idea, we would all see it from their enlightened perspective and vote accordingly. 

When the vote was announced the following day the entire political establishment went into deep shock. In the completely invisible communities of England and similar parts of Wales the subliminal messages and all the avuncular indoctrination of the BBC had failed - hit a brick wall in fact - and the repercussions of this mutiny echoed through the opulent mansions of the political elite. Celebs were distraught and pleaded with fans to sabotage the vote and turned with savage recriminations against the very people whose sufferings under genocidal Austerity they had for most part ignored. 

The referendum was a massive tactical error by David Cameron and an opportunist hobby horse for Boris Johnson. That Tory cabinet, especially by the inclusion of George Osborne as Chancellor a central figure, had effectively unleashed a class war against the most vulnerable - a style that might be anticipated by the warped Bullingdon Club mindset to which both Cameron and Osborne belonged. It is basically a posh boys excuse for being a total arsehole in a vain attempt to prove their manhood to each other. This sociopathic sense of entitlement sets the scene for the EU austerity programme that has more or less killed off 'Social Europe' and replaced it with corporate totalitarianism headed up by bankers.

The Bullingdon bent gave the Cameron regime, itself a committee of the Bilderberg Group, the arrogant self confidence to play a little game with fellow Bullingdon yobbo Boris Johnson. This time they weren't burning £50 notes in the face of the homeless men sleeping on our streets as an expression of pathological contempt for the less fortunate, now they had a bigger jape to pull and Boris Johnson agreed to fight for Brexit in what was to become an addled Oxford debate, in which the great unwashed would be led by the nose as in the past, while bigging-up Cameron as PM in preparation for Austerity writ large. 

Thanks to Osborne there are homeless people everywhere to burn £50 notes in front of and scoff at their misery on the way home, it's the Bullingdon way.

Grassroots communities all over England saw an opportunity to hit back at what they saw as these posh personality disordered dilittante's who had taken on Brussels' austerity agenda with characteristic sadism and a sneering hatred for the working class.

For weeks running up to the referendum I had been in discussion with professional colleagues, most of them from Black or Asian ethnic backrounds, all of them graduates and all highly qualified mental health professionals. The majority voted to leave the EU, but that was only typical of this region as a whole where over 59 per cent voted Leave (the highest proportion in the UK).

The propaganda stereotype of Leave voters being uneducated racists is sharply contradicted by my own experience. Nobody I know, or knew personally at the time of the vote, ever supported UKIP and that is borne out in their poor showing in local elections in the West Midlands. In my parliamentary constituency for example, UKIP lost their deposit in the 2017 General Election, but neither were my colleagues Tory supporters, or in any way influenced by politicians we more or less all despised.

Most of us, me of course included, are Labour supporters or voters and in my own case a vocal Corbynista.

In social media we are characterised as being anti-immigrant and the fact that amongst the multi-ethnic group I worked with, most of us had post-graduate degrees and professional qualifications contradicts the stereotype of leave voters.
But actually we were statistically predictable as Joseph Rowntree Foundation research (August 2016) suggests:-

• 
  
• Support for Brexit varied not only between individuals but also between areas. People with all levels of qualifications were more likely to vote leave in low-skill areas compared with high-skill areas. However, this effect was stronger for the more highly qualified. In low-skilled communities the difference in support for leave between graduates and those with GCSEs was 20 points. In high-skilled communities it was over 40 points.  In low-skill areas the proportion of A-level holders voting leave was closer to that of people with low-skills. In high-skill areas their vote was much more similar to graduates.
• https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities?gclid=Cj0KCQjw1a3KBRCYARIsABNRnxvq5ENnXuAOsDS2C5TXnuonjO_BC6jEiYWSq2VpA2LIIZY0ilQ8LgoaAtmCEALw_wcB

We all had our reasons for voting leave but I think I can say without exception these were conclusions drawn from the logic of our own experiences. Our votes were not influenced by the promises of Tory politicians, neither were we persuaded by the naive optimism of the Liberal Democrats at the opposite pole, most of us were old enough to remember 2010. 

Reasons I voted Leave

I voted leave for a variety of reasons which included in no order of priority; the abolition of historic rights and freedoms by secret TTIP/CETA negotiations in Brussels undermining 800 years of democratic struggle in England; my repugnance at the savage treatment of Greece by the European Central Bank and the German-led EU; the abandonment in 2009 of Social Europe and the principle of subsidiarity; the centralising intent of the unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy; the EU's militaristic ambitions, including a European army; the spread and influence of far-right politicians in the Council of Ministers and increasing number of national parliaments within the EU; Corbynism and Brexit are in my view symbiotic phenomena and that is why the political establishment wants to kill both of them off; and finally to have the space and international potential to build upon UK expertise in green industries and to uphold and develop the decarbonisation lead in the G20 we as a country currently have. 

In a nutshell I voted leave to reinstate genuine internationalism as opposed to corporate cartel globalism. I voted for democracy and against vote denial. I voted against Austerity, the central social and fiscal policy of the EU politburo. I voted for a cleaner and sustainable future for whatever is left of the UK after the Northern Ireland tiny minority takes more than its fair share of Britain's resources. My vote didn't stop there though I voted for a National Assembly for England - an English Parliament of the regions elected under a proportional voting system, so that influence will be shifted from remote and alien Westminster, now well past its use by date, to a vibrant and democratic government with the voting age reduced to 16. 

My post-Brexit vision is of selling solar cars built by renewable energy robots to Ecuador or Botswana, with no tariffs or political sanctions holding our new industrial digital revolution back.

Historically of course England has been in a similar situation since it was founded. How many English people celebrate the country's foundation on 12 July - perhaps none?

On 12 July 927 the monarchs of Britain gathered at Eamont in Cumbria to recognise Æthelstan as king of the English. 

This can be considered England's 'foundation date', although the process of unification had taken almost 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_England

The initiatives that grew out of a suppressed history of rebellions and revolution have shaped England from Magna Carta to the Peasants' Revolt and the English Civil Wars, the agrarian and industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, Chartists, Suffragettes and the evolution of the British welfare state. Brexit is the defence of all those gains of all the People who occupy these lands, all communities and subcultures with a stake in the future, just as it has been so in the past.

We must now stand up to bullying again and I believe we will again prevail, because it is right and because it is part of the current of history in the early twenty-first century that is propelling us on into an uncertain future. The crisis is global, Brexit is a localised response to the crisis in neoliberalism.

Brexit is the advance guard in a mission to save civilisation itself in my view and beyond that to protect the biosphere from the rapacious central bankers and their political agents once again seeking to clip our wings. 

So to me, when I set out on that Thursday to cast my vote to leave Europe I wasn't expecting to win, I was doing what I do in every election, voting ultimately for a Second Republic of England, based upon popular sovereignty instead of a seedy monarchy that kow-tows to bureaucratic diktat, and/or corporate bullying by transatlantic mobster lawyers.

So I hope that is plain enough to see. I never give credibility to Tories, bankster class operators and crypto-Tories, like Nigel Farage or Vince Cable. I want to have a sane and humane discussion about immigration but the topic itself played no part in my decision to vote leave. The arrogant, cocky Tory regime played another Bullingdon jape and it blew up in their faces, the population of austerity victims saw their chance to hurt the political establishment and they took it.

Obviously the manipulators always back both sides, I'm just in favour of taking control of the experiment we're all in - now that the chance has by happenstance presented itself.