Stand up and be counted of you're a thinking Leaver (I never claimed they didn't exist)

Well Liz Truss has already delivered (not very convincingly), just four years+ since the referendum and Leavers' promises of new trade deals galore and an easy agreement with the EU. Perhaps Private Eye's brilliant cover sums up their hopes

 

A friend remarked a little while ago that Salut! seemed to be a forum for thoughtful, reasoned debate free of the sheer nastiness that detracts from the obvious values of social media. Well, sometimes maybe. Most of the time we struggle to attract readers, let alone ones willing to debate. But we keep going, in part because every so often interest explodes, bringing in hundreds of visitors and loads of interesting comments.

 

At Facebook,  where it's easier to stimulate discussion, I posted what you see below. For the record, I never - except in banter - allege that all Leave voters were thick, selfish, leaning (or worse) towards the far right and, if not simply racist, xenophobic by nature. What I do claim is that if you remove the pro-Brexit  votes of those fitting all or part of that description, Remain would have won.

 

What I repeat here is very short and will be followed by a much more substantial pro-Leave analysis from a valued former colleague with whom I naturally disagree but who fits no part of the description above of another sort of Brexiter.

 

There are other points of view and dozens of people took the trouble to respond. See them all at this Facebook link; I may get round to reproducing a selection in Comments at the follow-up piece mentioned in the last paragraph. As for those seeing this for the first time, why not get involved, here or at https://www.francesalut.com/2020/09/stand-up-and-be-counted-if-youre-a-thinking-leaver-2.html ?...

 

My Facebook post

 

Someone on Twitter asked  if anyone knew of an intelligent person who was (or was still or has become in a born-again way) pro-Leave.

 

Obviously this was an unreasonable question. There are undoubtably a few people, far better or expensively educated than I, who do not necessarily dislike foreigners, even darker skinned ones, or the idea of having such effete things as jobs, trade, freedom to move at will in Europe and Erasmus but found some reason for backing the great NHS lie and, with it, Boris/Farage/IDS/Gove/Hoey/Tommy R. With, of course, the support of every far right nutter in the world - and one man now in prison for murder.

 

But what do we suppose might have happened to the famous 17.4m vote - not the 1975 one that supported, at 67 per cent not 52, staying in Europe, but the 2016 one - had we been able to discount racists, xenophobes, those who think breaking international law is perfectly OK?

 

Not to mention the disturbing number of people who know they want out of the EU but cannot even articulate a coherent reason for believing so.