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Majority of Brexit voters ‘would accept free movement’ to access single market
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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UK Politics
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It's almost like Brexit was misconstrued as something other than what it really was.
I don't know, was it?
I'm almost as tired of the Brexit conversation as the Trump conversation, but in both cases I struggle with the idea that people were misled. Obvious lies were out there, right alongside very clear warnings from people shouting from the rooftops that they were lies. At some point the choice to go with the comforting anti-establishment fashy lie is a willing choice.
At the time I, like many, explained the details of how all of this was going to go to convinced Brexiteers who appeared to have zero object persistence when it came to all the fact checking. Who is doing the "misconstruing" at that point?
I mean, the pro Brexit camp painted this as a way to stop immigration (from non -EU citizens). The EU did not have any say on immigration policy, (besides free travel for EU citizens) so Brexit didn't change anything in that regard.
I do agree that that information was available to anyone that wanted to know more, but there's a lot of dumb people among the electorate, that's true of any country.
Right. But it wasn't just "available", it was being shouted from the rooftops. The brexiteers had to come up with an entire conceptualization of experts as fearmongers to try to dismiss it.
I mean, yeah, you can present that as stupidity, and there's certainly something to it, but it was also being ignored by perfectly reasonable people. I am not ready to argue that we live in an idiocracy with no recourse. Or that the UK does, anyway.
There is definitely something broken in a world where our political communication lands on that pattern over and over again, though.
Near where I live, there was a lot of noise about the fishing industry - a small employer, but for historical reasons, carries a lot of weight with the "my dad/grandad/uncle was a trawlerman" crowd, which is a huge chunk of the population.
The bullshit came from Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage etc, but also from a number of local MPs, and also from leaflets put through the doors of every house - "Brexit was going to save the fishing industry". "We're taking back control of our waters from the EU" - those who'd lost their jobs would get their jobs back, those who were unemployed would find new job opportunities. Those who had jobs would he safe. If you didn't have Brexit, you'd all lose your jobs in the next few years.
The whole shitshow, repeatedly rammed down people's throats - and as soon as "everyone down the pub says it's true", it may as well be true. Once everyone you know "knows" it's true, no amount of fact-checking is going to shift that.
It wasn't true, and things actually got worse after Brexit. A lot of people were furious and felt betrayed.
Sure, but then the question is, how did it become something everybody at the pub knows to be true?
Because all the way Boris and the rest were saying that, others were saying it wasn't true.
So what are the mechanisms to amplify the lie and block the more accurate narrative? How much of it is confirmation bias from a group of people who want to believe their chosen bugbear is behind everything wrong with their lives and how much of it is some fundamental difference in how each of the messages were treated at key points?
It's a nuanced conversation, but as we speak the same process is radicalizing the youth worldwide towards fascist ideas. We saw it in the US, it's going on all over Europe. Democracy hangs on the answer to that question.
It's a very good question to which I don't know the answer!
The lying version spread very well by word of mouth, and a constant bombardment of old/new/social media. People didn't seem to care beyond "vote Brexit get our jobs back". The factual version was easily dismissed as "elite media propaganda" - when the exact opposite would be likely nearer the truth.
There's other questions wrapped up in the same set of things - how is multimillionaire investment banker and former career Tory politician Nigel Farage able to present himself as "normal bloke", "man of the people", "underdog", "not one of those elites"?