Brexit thread

[Taunton Blue Genie]

I watched Newsnight on IPlayer this morning and couldn't believe what I was seeing - politicians are tying themselves up in knots to the extent that Nicky Morgan (who is at least willing to be flexible in her thinking to try and get us out of this mess) is going to be voting for a no deal Brexit today - given her stance during and since the Referendum, that just seems absurd to me.

Ever since yesterday's vote I've seen and heard no end of politicians saying they can fully understand the public's frustration with Parliament and that people need to get together now to thrash out a solution, but, almost always, the conversation ends with the speaker making it clear that others need to come around to his/her way of thinking - they just don't get it.

But who does get it? Theoretically, soft Brexit is not what the electorate voted for. There was no fine-tuning regarding the question posed regarding referendum vote: Remain being one option and leaving the EU the other option. It is so ironic that the compromise that may be reached was not voted for by anyone (not that I think that the electorate have been the wisest judges regarding the matter, as you know from my previous posts).

[the other bob wilson]

But who does get it? Theoretically, soft Brexit is not what the electorate voted for. There was no fine-tuning regarding the question posed regarding referendum vote: Remain being one option and leaving the EU the other option. It is so ironic that the compromise that may be reached was not voted for by anyone (not that I think that the electorate have been the wisest judges regarding the matter, as you know from my previous posts).

The point I was trying to make was that, even after nearly three years of deadlock, we're still hearing too much of it's got to be my Brexit!

For me, there were two main things to come out the 2016 Referendum. The first being that on one particular day more of those who could be bothered to vote wanted us to Leave the EU than stay in it. The second was that more than 16.1 million people all voted for the same single thing - i.e. the status quo where things "Remain" as they were. People go on about the 17.4 million leavers, but any analysis of that figure will show a multitude of reasons as to why so many people wanted to leave and so you would probably get thousands of different answers if you asked each Leave voter to set out why they voted the way they did - when you go beyond the figures revealed in the vote, Remain would be the largest single answer in any detailed analysis of precisely what motivated people on that day.

I say one particular day, because my perception was that the issue which resounded most with Leave voters was immigration - maybe I 'm wrong there, but there can be no doubt that it was something that was debated at length in the time leading up to vote.

Nowadays, it barely gets a mention, yet this

https://fullfact.org/immigration/eu-migration-and-uk/

suggests that any fall in immigration to the UK from the EU since the 2016 vote has been offset or even surpassed by an increase in non EU immigration - this suggests that people feel less strongly about immigration now than they did back on that given day in 2016.

All of this shows how hard it is to come up with any sort of precise definition as to what Brexit meant and still means to your average person. By it's nature, Brexit has to mean an awful lot of different things to the UK population, so it must follow that any solution to the issue which, broadly, is to the satisfaction of a majority has to be a compromise. That's what I meant by "they just don't get it" - people with too many personal agendas are having too big a say as to where the country should go from here.