Friday 24 June 2016

EU Referendum verdict, some initial thoughts

The nation has voted to leave something they know absolutely nothing about. I've only met one person who knows the difference between the Council and Commission in the last year. Now comes the reckoning. Will the sky fall in as Remain argued? Will the NHS be 350m a week better off as Leave pledged? And that's the problem. An electorate that is deeply suspicious of politicians - which has increased greatly since 2008 - is about to find out that Remain were exaggerating, Leave lying. What happens when you whip up anger and resentment and people find they've been conned? The official Remain campaign was a disgrace, let's hope we never see Project Fear again. Le's hope we hear nothing more about Mandelson, Will Straw and the rest of them. They were almost a parody of the Leave's parody of Europe; with a dictatorial our way only approach, turning away people with other ideas regardless of experience. The other guilty party is the EU. Their communications are abysmal, yet the practitioners and the pet PR agencies think they're simply wonderful, Darling. I've long taken them to task for their, not just inability to connect with citizens, but their disinterest in doing so. I've rages against their wasting of hundreds of millions of euros every year on stupid ideas. Yet they continue. If they carry on as usual more nations will have referendums, more will leave - essentially because of this disconnect. Until a few months before the last European elections, Commission officials were happily dismissing concern over the pathetic turnout at the elections, arguing that it showed people were happy with the EU. They aren't. It's no longer a question of turnout, it's a question of winning hearts and minds and all my experience says the EU will be unable to do this. It's not euroscepticism that's killing the EU; it's their own hubris.

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