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.
If you want to join, stay in touch and potentially contribute to the project with research or personal experiences, sign up here:
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.
Devastated by the result, our European neighbours have called us inselaffen for years and we had to prove them right.
Hi Richard,
I tend to try not to care what others think of me, but in this case I can’t help it. I understand that those who voted leave don’t like to be tarred with the same brush of those voted leave for race reasons etc. But here we all are, being viewed all in one group by the rest of the world.
Hopefully they can see that many of us didn’t want this and will try and stay as close to them as possible.
Thanks,
Folks – hopefully you’ve already noticed this and are acting on it, but – just in case…
Your URL is spelled wrongly – it should be thefortyeightpercent [no letter U]. This is not going to help drive traffic to your cause (which is valid and laudable, by the way).
The correct spelling of your URL doesn’t seem to link to anything yet but does appear to exist. I hope you’ve got it and it’s not been cyber-squatted.
Good luck – we need all the level and balanced voices we can get.
Thanks Steve. Yes we are aware, an initial typo, followed by a conscious decision to keep it. The others are in fact being squatted I’m afraid.
Either way, I know domains can be important to appear in search engine results, but we’re really just hoping to spread our (and other’s) messages via social means so hopefully it won’t have too big an impact.
Thanks again,
Thanks for the response… do you mind if I copy/paste it on a FB thread where this cropped up (on a “Last Leg” fan page)? Just so folk know that the “quirky” spelling will be the main route in to your page?
Hi Steve, by all means, copy and paste away!
Thank you for setting this up.
Being married to a Frenchman this referendum has a huge impact on me personally.
I now have to relocate my life including my home and 2 kids over to France and find a new career for myself.
At the moment I am not sure if I am lucky or not.
But my eyes filled with tears as I tried to click the ‘apply for French citizenship’ button today.
I’ll try to click it tomorrow and hope I feel up to announcing myself as a dual citizen rather than just being an English European.
Hi Tracy,
Thanks for getting in touch. Sorry to hear that this has such a negative impact on you so quickly.
I think one of the things isn’t clear is that if people will HAVE to relocate, i.e. if your husband would be forced to. Or do you mean now you feel you have no choice?
Anyway, please do stay connected, we’re going to want stories from those impacted so will be great to hear from you again later.
Thanks,
Hi,
Forced, out , no.
But it’s unlikely that he will keep his job on Anglo French collaborations.
So maybe that could be considered a choice for us.
Depends how you spin it I guess.
I’m pretty sure there will always be a call for bilingual middle management skilled employees somewhere, I’d just assumed that those attributes would be important in the UK too.
I’ve written middle management in case anyone thinks we’re a posh ex pats.
😉
Ha, no judgements here. You are allowed to be a posh ex-pat. And by ex-pat I do of course mean immigrant.
OK, well as I said, we’d really like to hear how things pan out for your story so speak again soon.
Dear the48%
I agree with pretty much all of your opening statement above, and look forward to the developing discussion. I wonder though, do you envisage any ultimate objective for this platform, beyond a talking shop to ‘get it off your chest’ and kick ideas around, such as to formulate policy proposals, perhaps start petitions to put forward to specific MPs, Ministers or Parliament itself?
Hi Ben,
Thanks for leaving a message.
We are going to want to get contributions from lots of people so to an extent it will become whatever people want it to be.
Although people’s personal experiences will clearly contain emotion that we will want to help get across, in the main we’d prefer to avoid a continual slamming of those who voted leave and aim as much as possible to keep it fact based, helping people to understand what is actually happening as opposed to only being exposed to the limited snippets from the media.
That’s the aim at least, we’re looking forward to seeing how it develops.
Thanks,
I am not at all surprised by the result of the vote: in fact, it is close to what I was looking for, but I am utterly gobsmacked at the reaction to it.
This was an ADVISORY referendum and it is clear to a blind imbecile that a significant amount of the “Leave” vote was cast in protest or stupidity yet they are treating it as a total landslide.
And I am disgusted at the attitude of the EU: have they no concept of how representative democracy is supposed to work?!
They have today passed a motion instructing us to get a shift on and get out when all we have done is advised parliament that all is not well.
I am moved to wonder if there is any scope for a challenge under ECHR Article three, the right to free elections because that motion appears to me to interfere with “the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature.” they are trying to force us to act on what was no more than a muttered suggestion.
Hi Kieth,
Thanks for your comment.
I think this is part of the point that many of the Leave votes may have been cast in protest, but we would prefer to call some of them mis-informed rather than stupid. We have people here of all levels of intelligence and for some all they have is what they are told by the folks on the television. Right or wrong, I personally feel bad for these folk.
Sounds like you are quite clued up on some of the detail about some of the EU rules though, if you haven’t already it might be worth staying tuned via our mailing list. We’re going to be asking people come forward to contribute well researched, factual pieces that can help some others understand more of the detail and rise above the limited info they are fed through the media, and we’d value your contribution on that.
Thanks,
I would agree absolutely that some, or indeed most of the “Leave” voters were misinformed, but I stand by my assertion that some of them are stupid.
Take for example the chap interviewed for his reason which he gave as “to keep the Muslims out”.
Meaning no disrespect, I think that if we are going to get anywhere with this, then we need a robust and effective communication platform and I am not yet seeing that here.
We need a means to organise, divide and locate the various discussions, and a means of regulating spam and trolls whilst at the same time avoiding censorship.
Whatever means you choose to use, it ought to be as transparent as possible.
Thanks for that Keith, and I agree, we do actually have the ability to do that here, but we’re still getting it set up and gauging interest. Hope to see you engaged.
I’d suggest you want to get things set up and in place as soon as possible: you’re either going to get a rapid and exponential growth in members or the project is going to fail.
Imagine if all 48% turn up…
This is brilliant.
I’m devastated by the result. It’s like the death of a parent, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get over it. Especially if people keep telling me to ‘get over it’.
Hi Sue, yes I’m not sure I understand the get over it point at all. All we can do now is work to keep as many of the things we hold dear as possible.
Considering all the misleading information, and the fact that so many seem to have voted in protest, standing by this vote and calling it democracy is like one of those playground games where you mumble a question and laugh at the answer.
This answer is not so easily laughed off.
Hi,
I am very interested in getting involved in this. I am devastated by the response, but am not one of these that is calling for a new referendum. I believe that the 48% that voted to Remain now need a voice and need to be represented in this new Britain. Let me know if you need any help!
Darren, thanks so much for leaving a message. The response to this has been pretty positive so we’re now trying to make sure we’ve got a good way to get contributions from people and keep the whole thing organised.
I respect your position on the matter. I personally think it would be hard to justify to those who voted leave that we didn’t like the outcome so we want to vote again, but absolutely we need to make sure that we make our voices heard and help shape this in the best way possible.
We’ll likely be inviting people to start contributing via the mailing list so make sure you’ve joined to stay plugged in.
It should not be hard to justify to those who voted leave and are capable of coherent thought why we should have a second referendum: all of the good arguments point that way, except for the one that says “parliament is sovereign and they are not stupid enough to follow a vote that close”, and I trust I don’t need to point out the flaw in that one.
There is a great northern march on 24th March in Leeds to highlight the problems of brexit. There are some high profile people talking after the march