In the aftermath of the EU vote, I suggest we need to ask ourselves why – with most of the politicians, world leaders and ‘experts’ saying we were better off staying in the EU and talk of this and that being under threat if we leave – the majority voted to leave.
If we put look at how people voted: http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-voted-and-why/, we can see that education, employment status, housing status, income and social class were indicators of how people voted. The evidence seems to suggest that people who you could say have better prospects tended to vote remain and those with poorer prospects voted to leave.
Poorly-paid insecure work and the prospect of never having decent affordable housing are perhaps two of the main issues that face many of those with poorer prospects. Immigration is seen as being responsible for poor employment and housing prospects, and as contributing to pressures on health services and education, to mention a couple more issues that have a greater adverse impact on those struggling to get by. Membership of the EU is blamed for our immigration levels, even though the likes of Boris Johnson and Daniel Hannan now concede that numbers won’t fall after we’ve left the EU.
Yes, if immigration is higher than planned for, it makes it difficult to match supply to demand – you cannot quickly build more schools or provide additional GP services in an area. But, for me, the principal point is that the UK could have done much more on these and other issues, but the Governments we elected didn’t. It was the UK Government that chose to build too few houses for decades, the UK Government that significantly deregulated employment, the UK Government that chose to underinvest in education and the UK Government that semi-privatised our NHS. Nothing to do with the EU. People know this, but how to you try to make your voice heard? You vote to leave the EU.
My fear is that the next Prime Minister and their reshuffled Government are likely to make matters much worse. The cream of the jobs are likely to go to Brexitiers. Look at the people involved – mainly on the right of the Conservative Party. These are not people who believe in investing in housing, schools, hospitals or public services etc. or regulating employment. We need to read between the lines of what they say. Take ‘removing EU red tape,’ for example. This should be read as ‘removing people’s rights at work.’
My further fear is that, when people’s prospects are still no better as a result of leaving the EU and possibly much worse, their frustration will lead to an unleashing of anger with whatever consequences that will bring.
The people have voted for change. The task now should be to understand and articulate why people voted to leave the EU. This could be the silver lining in the ‘cloud’ of the Brexit vote. A Remain vote would probably have meant that the concerns of so many in our country would have continued to be low down the political agenda.
And, having listened to those concerns, the task is then to promote policies that respond to them and improve people’s prospects. This it is how we can heal our country and bring our people together in a post-EU Britain.