Just 24-hours after the EU referendum on 23 June 2016, I posted this on my blog:
‘Just over half of those who voted bought manky lies dressed up as a better life after Brexit. They were told they’d get their country back. Their lives would be transformed.
‘More jobs, homes, schools and hospitals. Fewer migrants. No more rule from Brussels. We’d be British and Great Britain again.
‘They were duped. They were deceived. They were sold a dodgy time-share by cowboy politicians, who made claims and promises they can never deliver because it was all a delusion.
‘Those who conned voters, when they realise they’ve paid dearly for faulty merchandise, will need support and direction. The rogue politicians will need to be kicked out.
‘We can do without those politicians. We cannot do without voters.’
James O’Brien on LBC has consistently agreed with this line; blame politicians, not voters, he implores.
He says he has
‘Contempt for the conmen, compassion for the conned.’
In 2020 he broadcast:
‘Blame the people who sold it, please, not the people who bought it. That’s going to be my most important message for the next couple of years.’
It’s the same message I posted just a few hours after the referendum result, but now, of course, it’s almost seven years later.
Today, many of us understand that politicians must own and take full responsibility for the horrific, catastrophic mess that Britain has got into as a direct result of Brexit.
Remember this: most voters in the UK didn’t vote for Brexit – Leave was only supported by a mere 37 per cent of the electorate.
What’s more, in the general election of 2019, most voters did not vote for the Tories; most voters voted for parties that wanted another referendum on Brexit.
The Tories only won their landslide 80-seat majority with just one per cent more votes than they got in the 2017 general election, in which the Tories lost their majority entirely.
They clinched their majority with the votes of less than 30 per cent of those eligible to vote.
Our system of politics and voting is broken and unfit. It’s allowed a result that the country at large didn’t, and doesn’t, want.
What a cunning, clever, coup this has been.
The bottom line: blame politicians, not voters, for Brexit. We can do without lying politicians. We can’t win without voters.
Many Leave voters have now changed their minds about Brexit. Let’s welcome them to our side and win more of them to our side.
‘Contempt for the conmen (and women); compassion for the conned.’
