I knew it was going to happen. I don’t know why, but I just had a bad feeling, especially in the week leading up to the vote. Even though I was expecting it, I still felt surprised and shocked when I woke up on Friday morning and saw the result…
52% Leave – 48% Remain
Of course, I am a remainer. And I’ve been quite taken aback but how much the result has bummed me out. But a few days on, watching the news and people’s reactions on social media, I feel I’ve started to wrap my head around how I feel about it.
We’ve decided to kick off this site. Why? Because we want to try and pull together some sort of home where we can share ideas, opinions and stories about how all of our people feel, regardless of where they are from, how it is affecting them, and hear from as many people as possible.
Whatever comes next isn’t going to happen quickly. It’s going to take years, and all of the issues that have come up, plus many more are going to take time to work through.
We’re going to be here keeping you up to date on all of it; researching the facts and figures of everything the government and Leavers do from here on out so everyone can understand what is happening.
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We’ve been coming across some of the same attitudes and statements from both sides the last few days, and we just want to bring everyone back down to Earth on these:
The just accept it and pull together to make it work point
We actually just don’t understand this. What is it that we’re being asked to do? Before the vote we’ve already been outspoken about social issues, multiculturalism and anti-racism generally. We’re going to carry on doing that now.
The Leave campaign promised a lot, that actually it’s not really in a position to deliver. They complained that the EU enforces free movement of EU citizens, for example. They never said that voting to leave the Union would end this, but that is (fairly) reasonable for people to expect this to happen, and so, am I being asked now to work on removing free movement?
Because I don’t believe in that, and I’ll be campaigning to retain it, and that’s that.
Additionally, not that I would generally advocate doing something because UKIP would, but do you imagine that if it had been a Remain vote on the 24th that they would pack it up, simply saying “well, that’s democracy folks, the people have spoken.” No, they’d continue fighting for what they believe in until they got what they want. And that’s what we should do.
So just accept it and move on? I don’t think that’s for us.
The young VS old point
We’ve seen many a graph highlighting that looking at the votes result by age band, the older groups voted to leave, and the younger voted to stay.
The is correct, but actually was already known before the referendum even took place via polls. We’ll get into the data soon in a new post, but the difference in votes wasn’t even that large. Most of the graphs don’t show the fact that considerably more of the older generations actually bothered to turn up to vote or indeed, the total number of people that are in each of those age bands.
All of this aside, this has been reasonably upsetting older people, especially those who voted to remain, feeling that their generation is effectively being blamed for the result.
The last thing we need is to create a division amongst the 48% based on age. WE ARE ALL ON THE SAME SIDE!
People voting out are not stupid
Another point about not segregating, tarring many people with one brush and being generally unkind to large groups of people – these are the kind of traits typical of those that have something against migrants or Muslims.
The Leave vote were actually pretty convincing. If you saw the debates you may have noticed that they just had the whole thing together more.
We’ve got a lot of people in our country and that fact that large numbers of people were swayed by some of the arguments being given, especially having been warmed up by some of the press for some time now, is it surprising that so many people bought in?
Does that make them stupid? Not really.
Political campaigns are basically marketing machines. If you are immune to marketing then you’re a special kind of person.
Bottom line here is that if you’re annoyed that people don’t have a high enough intelligence level for your liking then you should be directing your anger at the governments that have failed them from an educational perspective, getting off your arse and doing something about it.
The 52% are racist
Come on now, I think we all know this isn’t true.
The problem here is that immigration should never have been a part of this discussion, because the notion that immigration is responsible for pressure on jobs and public services is a lie. But, the press have been warming people up to this for the last forever.
The likes of Britain First, the BNP and UKIP feel this is one of the biggest issues needing addressing and one of the biggest drivers for voting Leave.
Dear the 52%, unfortunately, whilst you may not be racist, you voted on the site of those who definitely are, and your side won with a significant number of people voting for these reasons.
You can’t escape that I’m afraid.
We’ll get back into the numbers on immigration soon enough.
There are some reasons why the EU generally isn’t working
People have got large issues with being represented by officials who are unelected, it’s true, I’m not sure that bringing more power back to the UK, and by the UK I mean Westminster and the ever unelected House of Lords is the way to fix this.
It also appears to be true that the EU does far too much for the rich and large corporations, much like our own government. A worthy cause to try and rectify, I agree.
But here’s the thing, while the discussion is dominated by irrelevant or fake promises, many who might actually want to fix or leave the EU for legitimate reasons won’t, because they can’t bring themselves to engage with the crap.
There are further arguments about affecting positive change from within rather than standing on the outside and howling at the injustice of it all. A subject for another time perhaps?
We don’t know what is actually going to happen and people probably won’t be getting what they think they voted for
It’s already been coming out of the woodwork that what the Leave campaign has apparently promised may not actually be the case after all.
It’s not uncommon knowledge that to continue trading with the EU we are likely going to need to keep abiding by many of their rules. But hey, at least we’ll be deciding on that ourselves and not having it forced on us by Brussels?
The problem is that when people ticked Leave, they probably did so for a specific reason, thinking something would happen, and that something may not come to pass. Cutting immigration numbers, pumping our EU membership fees into the NHS, to name just a couple.
We receive a lot of grants to enrich our culture by the EU
Surprisingly a lot of our charities and cultural initiatives receive substantial funding from various EU bodies and we will need to figure out what will happen to these now. Either we need to find them ourselves or like many other things valued by so many, they will need to get the axe.
I’m not looking forward to finding out which way that swings.
Need to focus on making the world better for not only us and our children, but people everywhere
Here’s a challenge for everyone.
Next time you are asked to vote on something, think about it differently. Don’t just ask what will be best for you, your family and people in your country, what what is best and fairest for all people everywhere.
Even the least xenophobic arguments from the Leave campaign, i.e. the economy, the arguments were pretty selfish and took little account of their effect on people in other countries.
Sure, I know that we all worked really hard to be born in the UK and have all of our luxuries and rights, and that everyone else just needs to work as hard as us before we’re willing to share. But maybe let’s focus more on sharing, helping others, and doing what is right for everyone, not just ourselves.
Let’s stay together on this
As we said at the start, we want to make this into a community where we can all stay connected and share our ideas and stories and stay plugged in to what is happening. If you want to hear more, enter your email address below, or share your thoughts and feelings in the comments.