If Nigel Farage had his way, today would be a public holiday, because it's the fifth anniversary of "independence day" when the UK voted to leave the EU. There's an interesting story in today's Guardian about it, not so much for what the writers conclude, but for the results of a survey about what people feel about Brexit now.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...-referendum-eu
Some of the findings from the survey remind me of my own feelings before the Referendum when I was very much in the not sure what to do camp. One of the reasons for my uncertainty was that, as someone who was old enough (I was in my late teens when the first Referendum to enter what was then called the Common Market took place), I couldn't say I noticed much difference between what the UK was like before we "went into Europe" and after it (in saying that, we had much more manufacturing industry in the early seventies, as well as significant coal and steel industries, than we do now), so I figured that the difference to my life would be pretty minor whatever the result of the 2016 vote.
If I had to pick the two main reasons for me voting Remain in the end, I would say that, first, I just could not bring myself to side with someone like Farage and, second, i did not want to be sided with people who called the country that was voting Remain or Leave England, not the United Kingdom, like so many Leave supporters I heard interviewed did in the lead up to the vote.
According to jacob Rees-Mogg, it's going to be another forty five years before we start seeing the real benefits of Brexit and so it seems that me, definitely, and many others on here maybe will never find our whether we made the right decision or not.
One thing the 2016 vote did for me though was put me off Referendums - I can remember many Scots saying that they found the 2014 independence vote a depressing experience because of the sort of feelings it brought to the fore on both sides of the divide and, having experienced 2016, I know now exactly what they meant.
Whether it was the lies put on the side of a bus by the Leave side or the endless "project fear" claims made by the likes of Cameron and Osborne on the Remain side that got more ludicrous as the vote got closer, it all helped make for a pitifully low quality debate which had so many consequences that we still see today including the emboldening through a feeling of vindication of a minority of racists among the Leave voters.
Whoever was right or whoever was wrong, I think we're a more fractious and intolerant country now than we were five years ago.
