Should the UK remain a member of the EU

[Jose Jones]

Gnasher, on 08 Feb 2018 - 09:51 AM, said:

 

Sorry, but have they? I agree that people with nothing last out and vote for things that are against their interests, I agree with you if that's what you are saying (not sure sorry)

 

But look at it from the other way. People who had fuck all and were never really going to get fuck all.

 

Cameron and Osborne have gone and the

The Tories have been backtracking ever since, Sorry but that's a fact.

 

The so called chavs we deride have done a fucking favour.

Well, it's obviously not going from fuck all to fuck all, as all the recent links have shown. The worst areas are going to be worse off. Manufacturing jobs are going to go from places like the North East. The Tories are trying to use Brexit to make working conditions worse, reduce taxes on the rich and companies, and sell off even more public services and reduce the welfare state. There's four more years of them to do this, the country will be in massive debt and there will be very little money to be able to reverse any of this shit and reinvest in the infrastructure of state.

 

Everything that has screwed people over and driven inequality - is going to be worse by the Brexit vote.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

You can't keep defending the above link and make out I'm the one tapped in this thread

Who has defended it?

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Well, it's obviously not going from fuck all to fuck all, as all the recent links have shown. The worst areas are going to be worse off. Manufacturing jobs are going to go from places like the North East. The Tories are trying to use Brexit to make working conditions worse, reduce taxes on the rich and companies, and sell off even more public services and reduce the welfare state. There's four more years of them to do this, the country will be in massive debt and there will be very little money to be able to reverse any of this shit and reinvest in the infrastructure of state.

 

Everything that has screwed people over and driven inequality - is going to be worse by the Brexit vote.

But on the plus side, Cameron and Osborne are wallowing in cash somewhere away from Westminster, leaving May, Johnson, Fox et al to fight for the interests of the Working Class.

 

It'll be just fine, I'm sure.

 

Anyway, why haven't you mentioned Macron?

[Gnasher]

Well, it's obviously not going from fuck all to fuck all, as all the recent links have shown. The worst areas are going to be worse off. Manufacturing jobs are going to go from places like the North East. The Tories are trying to use Brexit to make working conditions worse, reduce taxes on the rich and companies, and sell off even more public services and reduce the welfare state. There's four more years of them to do this, the country will be in massive debt and there will be very little money to be able to reverse any of this shit and reinvest in the infrastructure of state.

 

Everything that has screwed people over and driven inequality - is going to be worse by the Brexit vote.

I do understand your points and your concerns are valid.

 

I can see the catch 22. But I look at all the govt backtracking over the past 2 years and Irs understandable why people thought 'fuck it's what have I got to lose.

 

I know what you meen though and I admit it is worrying what the future holds, especially if the far right of the Tory party get in. I understand that.

[Gnasher]

But on the plus side, Cameron and Osborne are wallowing in cash somewhere away from Westminster, leaving May, Johnson, Fox et al to fight for the interests of the Working Class.

 

It'll be just fine, I'm sure.

 

Anyway, why haven't you mentioned Macron?

Backtracked on a lot of policy. Thats a fact. Student fees?

[cloggypop]

Brexit will stop UK students taking advantage of the Netherlands student fees yes. Far cheaper for them to do a degree over here these days.

 

I'd imagine it's similar in a few EU countries.

[Moctezuma]

I know what you meen though and I admit it is worrying what the future holds, especially if the far right of the Tory party get in. I understand that.

They are 'in'.

[Moctezuma]

That was one of my main issues all along, that these gang of far right head bangers will have a free reign under this proceess for the next 4 years, the state of the country by the end of it could be seriously grim (it's pretty bad already).

 

Though the one positive silver lining would be that people would stop conflating domestic policy decisions with the E.U., but I'm sure the conservatives will find someone else to blame.

[Jairzinho]

Brexit will stop UK students taking advantage of the Netherlands student fees yes. Far cheaper for them to do a degree over here these days.

 

I'd imagine it's similar in a few EU countries.

All.

 

There isn't anywhere in Europe with more expensive degrees.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Backtracked on a lot of policy. Thats a fact. Student fees?

Who backtracked on what and when?

 

The Tories have had to rein in some of their worst ideas since the General Election. This has nothing to do with the Leave vote.

[Moctezuma]

Who backtracked on what and when?

 

The Tories have had to rein in some of their worst ideas since the General Election. This has nothing to do with the Leave vote.

 

I'm not sure it's that clear cut, the general election and their loss of a majority without the DUP has certainly had a significant effect, but the Leave vote and it's erroneous* framing as being predominantly motivated "by those left behind" has changed some notions on what needs to be done for people who are hard up (not that the Conservatives will enact any policies to help, but it changes their rhetoric slightly).

 

*Erroneous, because a huge chunk of the leave vote was from middle class and lower middle class types in the South east and Midlands.

[Moctezuma]

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/brexit-and-the-squeezed-middle/

 

This somewhat misses out issues around national identity (plus which paper you read) and perhaps misses the fact that more of the younger population have qualifications than older voters, but is interesting nonetheless.

 

Brexit was not the voice of the working class nor of the uneducated – it was of the squeezed middle

Lorenza Antonucci, Laszlo Horvath, and André Krouwelchallenge the popular view of Leave voters as those left behind educationally and financially. They explain why it is individuals from an intermediate class, whose financial position has been declining, that represent an important section of the Brexit vote.

 

Over the past year or so, Brexit has been interpreted as the symbol of a historical shift to anti-establishment politics, kicking off a surge in the ‘outsider’ vote across Europe and the United States. In line with this narrative, initial interpretations of the vote depicted Leave voters as marginalised segments of the population – both educationally and economically – who had channelled their discontent through the referendum.

Another popular view that emerged is that Brexit was the unified response of the working class which finally found its long-lost voice. Yet subsequent, rigorous analysis showed that the profile of Brexit voters is more heterogeneous than initially thought, and that it includes voters with high education and ‘middle class’ jobs. If Brexit is really connected to socio-economic factors, how do we make sense of this apparent contradiction?

For our own study, we implemented a unique set of questions in a post-referendum survey, focusing on the ‘ordinary Brits’ – the intermediate class. This intermediate class refers to ‘ordinary’ families with intermediate or upper-intermediate levels of education, stable jobs, and median levels of income, but which nonetheless face an increasing challenge in maintaining their life-style. This term is preferred to the popularised understanding of class in the UK, which opposes the ‘working class’ to the ‘middle class’. Echoing what Joan Williams has stressed in her analysis of Trumpism, public debates discussing the popularity of populism amongst the working class in most cases refer to the impoverished middle class, rather than the poor and the left behind. Our argument is that, rather than representing the ‘left out’, Brexit was the voice of this intermediate class who are in a declining financial position. This category of voters represent a group of high sociological relevance also labeled as ‘the squeezed middle’.

Brexiters: the least educated voters?

The left-out argument has been constructed around voters whose low levels of education render them unable to compete with those with a university degree in the globalised economy. Academic research has already argued against this. For example, Goodwin and Heath show that voters with A-level education from low skilled communities had similar pro-Leave voting profiles to those with no education. With this in mind, the first set of our models looks at the probability of voting Leave within a number of educational categories, and also explores the combined effect of education with financial circumstances.

In all specifications of our regression models, we also include gender, age, and 2015 GE vote as individual level predictors, as well as cluster respondents within 11 UK regions to account for the geographical variability in the Leave vote. Samples sizes vary for these models between N=1,473 and 1,382.

Figure 1. Predicted probabilities by education (left panel) and by perceived change in financial situation (right panel).

Our findings confirm a negative relationship between education and voting Leave: the higher the level of one’s education, the lower the likelihood of them voting Leave. Our findings, however, reject the dichotomous view of the low-educated Brexiter vs the high-educated Remainer, by showing that two groups with intermediate levels of education (voters with good GSCEs and A-levels) were more pro-Leave than the low-educated (those with no formal education and with low GSCE grades).

Looking into how personal finances have changed within these education categories, we find an interesting dynamic (Figure 1). While worsening financial conditions increased the probability of voting Leave, the effect of stagnation is ambiguous. In our model, respondents with A-levels slide towards a Leave vote as their economic conditions worsen. Our model also predicts that those with lower grade GSCEs would vote Leave only if their economic conditions had not changed.

Challenging the myth of Brexit as a working class vote

A second set of models presents the impact of self-assessed social class membership and income on voting Leave. In other respects, these models are identical to the previous by controlling for individual-level demographics as well as geographical clustering. Our sample sizes, however, drop significantly as we had to recover these variables from previous waves of data collection, down to 279, meaning these results must be read with caution.

Looking at class first, we find the Leave vote to be associated with middle class identification and the more neutral ‘no class’ identification. But we find no evidence of a link with working class identification.

Self-assessment of class presents obvious limitations, but our findings become even more relevant if we consider that Britons tend to identify themselves as working class – even when holding middle class jobs. This analysis does not rule out the popularity of the Leave vote within particular working class communities, but it aims to show that the Leave vote is far from being the expression of a singular and conscious working class, as commentators assume. It instead confirms that the middle class support was very relevant to the Brexit outcome – perhaps the predominant group behind Brexit, as argued by Dorling.

We then turn to analyse whether Brexit has been supported by an intermediate group in objective terms. In order to do this, our models tease out the proportion of Leave voters within income categories. The result is partly similar to previous reports in that higher income would link to the Remain vote. Still, it is only the top quantile – the richest respondents – who slant significantly towards Remain. But we do not find enough evidence to show that the effect of income is incremental: that the intermediate class would be more likely to vote Remain than the poorest groups (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Predicted probabilities by income quantiles and class identification.

 

• lick to share on Twitter (Opens in new windoOver the past year or so, Brexit has been interpreted as the symbol of a historical shift to anti-establishment politics, kicking off a surge in the ‘outsider’ vote across Europe and the United States. In line with this narrative, initial interpretations of the vote depicted Leave voters as marginalised segments of the population – both educationally and economically – who had channelled their discontent through the referendum

So, based on the above, the Leave vote was not more popular among the low skilled, but rather among individuals with intermediate levels of education (A-Levels and GSCE high grades), especially when their socio-economic position was perceived to be declining and/or to be stagnant. These findings point to an alternative narrative to that of the left behind.

This argument of the squeezed middle being behind Brexit raises new questions about how the new politics of inequality influences voting, for it shows that Brexit was the expression of a widely felt social malaise that affects ample segments of the population.

[Anny Road]

We shall just skip over that post Moctezuma and continue to blame ignorant working class rascists.

How dare you post evidence to The contrary.

 

The I’m cleverer that the idiots who voted leave brigade will no doubt be along with a BNP or UKIP article soon.

[skend04]

The Japanese ambassador has just said if there's no profit from Brexit they, along with other businesses will be gone. Meanwhile Rees-Mogg takes a jibe at Peugeot...

 

...Oh, I forgot Peugeot own Vauxhall and the factory at Ellesmere Port.

 

Why don't the Tories literally set fire to the UK instead of just using words?

[Pureblood]

Racists stole my maroon passport. 

[Gnasher]

Who backtracked on what and when?

 

The Tories have had to rein in some of their worst ideas since the General Election. This has nothing to do with the Leave vote.

This is where you are wrong, Cameron and Osborne had the political landscape wrapped up. After the vote that changed.

[Gnasher]

Who backtracked on what and when?

 

The Tories have had to rein in some of their worst ideas since the General Election. This has nothing to do with the Leave vote.

Here's a few you have obviously missed.

http://www.lbc.co.uk/politics/parties/conservatives/theresa-may/theresas-u-turns-key-tory-policy-reversals/

 

 

If only we hadn't voted out and cut the cancer of Cameron and Osborne eh?

[AngryOfTuebrook]

This is where you are wrong, Cameron and Osborne had the political landscape wrapped up. After the vote that changed.

You are wrong.

 

The Referendum only happened because, far from having it all wrapped up, they were threatened by the right-wing of their party and hoped to buy their loyalty with a vote. When that backfired, they fucked off to spend more time with their money, leaving the nastiest bastards of a thoroughly nasty party a clear run at power.

 

The Parliamentary Labour Party decided to help them, by attacking the democratically elected leader immediately after the Referendum.

 

Perceiving Labour as weak, divided and unelectable (and learning nothing from Cameron's misjudgement) May tried to "crush the saboteurs". It's only since her failure in the General Election that there has been even a whiff of democratic accountability to trouble the party of neoliberalism.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Here's a few you have obviously missed.

http://www.lbc.co.uk/politics/parties/conservatives/theresa-may/theresas-u-turns-key-tory-policy-reversals/

 

 

If only we hadn't voted out and cut the cancer of Cameron and Osborne eh?

And you attribute them to Brexit? For example, as a sop to Leave voters she decided to take in more refugees?

[Gnasher]

You are wrong.

 

The Referendum only happened because, far from having it all wrapped up, they were threatened by the right-wing of their party and hoped to buy their loyalty with a vote. When that backfired, they fucked off to spend more time with their money, leaving the nastiest bastards of a thoroughly nasty party a clear run at power.

 

The Parliamentary Labour Party decided to help them, by attacking the democratically elected leader immediately after the Referendum.

 

Perceiving Labour as weak, divided and unelectable (and learning nothing from Cameron's misjudgement) May tried to "crush the saboteurs". It's only since her failure in the General Election that there has been even a whiff of democratic accountability to trouble the party of neoliberalism.

No you're wrong, the Tories were untouchable until the referendum.

 

Cameron was Teflon and Corbyn was seen as nothing more than a joke.

 

Certain events spiral to change history. It causes an unstoppable force. It's the trigger that sparks the change.

 

It's like throwing yourself in front of a horse. The establishment backtracks; it has no choice.

[Rico1304]

The Japanese ambassador to the UK has a blunt warning for Theresa May - If there is no profitability of continuing operations in the UK.. no private company can continue operations.. it's as simple as that.. this is all high stakes & we should keep that in mind

 

#StopBrexit #FBPE

[AngryOfTuebrook]

No you're wrong, the Tories were untouchable until the referendum.

 

Cameron was Teflon and Corbyn was seen as nothing more than a joke.

 

Certain events spiral to change history. It causes an unstoppable force. It's the trigger that sparks the change.

 

It's like throwing yourself in front of a horse. The establishment backtracks; it has no choice.

Do you imagine that the Referendum changed how Corbyn was perceived?

 

You have the memory of a goldfish with severe head trauma.

[Gnasher]

The out vote was the beginning of the end for the Tory party. Since that vote it's falling apart at the seems.

[Gnasher]

Do you imagine that the Referendum changed how Corbyn was perceived?

 

You have the memory of a goldfish with severe head trauma.

Er not what I actually said was it?

[Rico1304]

The out vote was the beginning of the end for the Tory party. Since that vote it's falling apart at the seems.

Their lead in the lastest poll is the best in been in ages.