Brexit: Anger over 'Bregret' as Leave voters say they wanted 'protest vote' and thought UK would stay in EU

A friend (who works in electoral services) writes... pic.twitter.com/KQwkUBFNO6
— Anandamide (@anandamide) June 24, 2016

sassy wrote:From interviews on ITV News and radio station phone ins.  You never read anything do you.

sassy wrote:Yawn

sassy wrote:You didn't note the part then where they were so angry BECAUSE OF THE LIES TOLD BY THE OUT CAMPAIGN.   You're priceless - literally..

Eilzel wrote:The number who have similar feelings may have been decisive or maybe not. But my feeling for those people is absolute disgust. Eithet for careless/reckless voting or naivity. There is a reason we have politicians, however corrupt they may be at times. Some people cannot be trusted to make decisions.

sassy wrote:

Eilzel wrote:The number who have similar feelings may have been decisive or maybe not. But my feeling for those people is absolute disgust. Eithet for careless/reckless voting or naivity. There is a reason we have politicians, however corrupt they may be at times. Some people cannot be trusted to make decisions.

Absolutely agree!


Oh, and on Channel 4 News: Teresa Villiers confirms Tories will change Human Rights Act- and so it begins. Leave promised no change to rights and protections

nicko wrote:When are you leaving Britain Sass?     you are ashamed to be British are you not?

Ben Reilly wrote:It would be awesome to be one of those people who, faced with hundreds of headlines reading "Things are bad," just goes, "nah, they’re all wrong, I know better than they do."

sassy wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:It would be awesome to be one of those people who, faced with hundreds of headlines reading "Things are bad," just goes, "nah, they’re all wrong, I know better than they do."

You mean the ones with their heads in a bucket of sand lol

Ben Reilly wrote:It would be awesome to be one of those people who, faced with hundreds of headlines reading "Things are bad," just goes, "nah, they’re all wrong, I know better than they do."

Eilzel wrote:The number who have similar feelings may have been decisive or maybe not. But my feeling for those people is absolute disgust. Eithet for careless/reckless voting or naivity. There is a reason we have politicians, however corrupt they may be at times. Some people cannot be trusted to make decisions.

sassy wrote:Yea, remember this:   A big fat lie



And funnily enough, now they are saying they probably won't be able to stop a lot of EU immigration either (it's in the Daily Telegraph)

eddie wrote:Either the media speaks the truth or it lies?
Which is it?

Didge wrote:

eddie wrote:Either the media speaks the truth or it lies?
Which is it?

You seem to be claiming it can only be one or the other Eddie, when the media can and do admit they get some things wrong at time, from misleading sources. That would not be lyiing. There is cases when they do blatantly llie, where it will be doften firectgly the journalist themselves, where then the paper later corrects inaccurate information published and the main media sources in the main are relatiovely accurate. So it will depend on each individual story and each individual jounalist that wrote them, how mancy complainst were received by each paper and how many corrected. To then form how accurate each paper is.

eddie wrote:

Didge wrote:

You seem to be claiming it can only be one or the other Eddie, when the media can and do admit they get some things wrong at time, from misleading sources. That would not be lyiing. There is cases when they do blatantly llie, where it will be doften firectgly the journalist themselves, where then the paper later corrects inaccurate information published and the main media sources in the main are relatiovely accurate. So it will depend on each individual story and each individual jounalist that wrote them, how mancy complainst were received by each paper and how many corrected. To then form how accurate each paper is.

You're missing my point

When we have complained about the uk and how things are in the past - we've been told the papers are lying and exaggerating
Now those same papers are used by the same people to prove the sky is falling down because we voted out

sassy wrote:Some said they had not forseen the immediate economic impact, while others were angry at Nigel Faraga's admisison that NHS funding claim was a 'mistake'

Remain voters are voicing their outrage amid claims by some people who voted for a Brexit that they regret their decision.
Electoral services workers have reported calls from people asking if they could change their decision after Friday’s result became clear, while some publicly admitted they intended to use a “protest vote” in the belief the UK would remain the European Union.

The anxiety – dubbed “Bregret” – emerged as the value of the pound tumbled and the markets crashed, while others felt betrayed by Nigel Farage’s admission that a Vote Leave poster pledging to spend millions of pounds supposedly given to the EU on the NHS was a “mistake”.

Mandy Suthi, a student who voted to leave, told ITV News she would tick the Remain box if she had a second chance and said her parents and siblings also regretted their choice.

“I would go back to the polling station and vote to stay, simply because this morning the reality is kicking in,” she said.
“I wish we had the opportunity to vote again,” she added, saying she was “very disappointed”.

Khembe Gibbons, a lifeguard from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, also said she had regrets about her decision after Mr Farage said he could not guarantee NHS funding.

"We've left the EU, David Cameron's resigned, we're left with Boris, and Nigel has just basically given away that the NHS claim was a lie,” she wrote.
"I personally voted leave believing these lies, and I regret it more than anything, I feel genuinely robbed of my vote."

A woman calling into an LBC radio show echoed the sentiment, saying she felt “conned” by the claim and felt “a bit sick”.
A voter who gave his name as Adam told the BBC he would have changed his pro-Brexit vote if he knew the short-term consequences it would have for the UK economy.
“The David Cameron resignation has blown me away to be honest and the period of uncertainty that we’re going to be magnified now so yeah, I’m quite worried,” he said.
”I'm shocked that we voted for Leave, I didn't think that was going to happen. I didn't think my vote was going to matter too much because I thought we were just going to remain.“
A blogger from Sheffield shared a message from a friend working in electoral services, claiming regretful Brexit voters and pro-Remain members of the electorate who failed to turn out because they were confident of the win had been calling in.
“We had people phone up today wanting to change their vote or ask if they could still vote as they don’t want to leave,” the message read.

A friend (who works in electoral services) writes... pic.twitter.com/KQwkUBFNO6
— Anandamide (@anandamide) June 24, 2016

Several pro-EU politicians voiced their suspicions that some Leave voters would have regrets on Friday, with Labour MP Diane Abbott and Green MP Caroline Lucas said Euroscepticism had become a “kind of proxy” for deep-seated problems with immigration, the NHS and other key issues.


Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, said the Remain campaign had failed to show people the referendum  “was not a protest vote against the Government or indeed the Establishment”.

Opinion polls in the months leading up to Thursday’s historic vote had dominantly shown a lead for Remain, although surveys in recent days showed the result on a knife-edge and around 10 per cent of the electorate still undecided – generating a huge swing.

The final result was 17,410,742 votes for Leave (51.9 per cent) compared to 16,141,241 for Remain (48.1 per cent), on a turnout of 72 per cent.

The close result has generated calls for a second referendum, as well as growing fury from pro-EU voters at the regret from some Brexiter.

Paul, a gamer, tweeted: ”So leave voters have realised what they done and regret voting leave and would vote remain given another chance? Bit late now.“

“Really NOT enjoying people saying they voted Leave and now regret it, just shush please, not helping,” another added.

The result has sparked plans for a second independence referendum in Scotland, where all electoral districts voted Remain, and a petition for London to declare independence from the rest of the UK and apply to join the EU.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-anger-bregret-leave-voters-protest-vote-thought-uk-stay-in-eu-remain-win-a7102516.html



How bloody dumb can people be.   As an aside, the call for another referendum now has over a million signatures

sassy wrote:You didn't note the part then where they were so angry BECAUSE OF THE LIES TOLD BY THE OUT CAMPAIGN.   You're priceless - literally..

Ben Reilly wrote:

Eilzel wrote:Lies tokd by the remain campaign are speculation at this point. There certainly could have been no bigger lies than '350 million to the NHS' and the massive cutting of immigration. Both massive, perhaps the biggest' draws of the lying Leave campaign- both reneged on IMMEDIATELY. Disgraceful.

Eilzel wrote:Do you think leaving the EU is a small issue?
I don't. And I have every right to a) be bitter and b) express that opinion.

Goodness knows we'd have never heard the end of it had it gone the other way.

I am optimistic though, renegotiating our way into the single market will probably require continuing free movement. So there is a light  

Eilzel wrote:Nothing to do with me moving to Thailand, vic. But having difficulties created in travelling to and from and having the possibility of easily going to live and work in Europe are the tip of the iceberg. And pleasant addition to going to Europe without the need of visas. It is now a possibility we will need visas. But if not that will come at the cost of the same applying to EU citizens coming to the UK.

And none of that negates the other reasons for wanting to stay. Ultimately I believe little will change in the end. Cameron was clever in standing down. He knows renegotiations with the EU will probably lead to continuing to pay some money in, like Norway, open borders and complying with a lot of EU rules. We just won't get a say. Stepping down he is a man who fought for what he believed in and lost. If he stayed he would become the man who lost then screwed over 17 million voters. Now its in Boris's court to not upset his followers.

Eilzel wrote:Do you think leaving the EU is a small issue?
I don't. And I have every right to a) be bitter and b) express that opinion.

Goodness knows we'd have never heard the end of it had it gone the other way.

I am optimistic though, renegotiating our way into the single market will probably require continuing free movement. So there is a light  

Eilzel wrote:I appreciate that didge, but what I mention is what Norway and Switzerland have. Plus, the will of the people was not hugely one way. 52/48 is almost even. Half the people would not be sad if things didn't change much. And that number may be different considering the anger from some leavers over the lies they've been told.

Its the Wrong North, Gromit wrote:


Two days and some sleep later and I have some thoughts.

Thought 1 is to make it clear that I was at all times – and still am – very much in the Remain camp. Thought 2 is to note how wearily reductive and predicable much of the post-cataclysm commentary from appalled Remainers on the Left has been.

Thought 3 is that I live in the North – heartland of Brexit.

Much of what I read in the media and on social media seems to boil down to a howl of outrage that those outside London were ever handed an opportunity to express their democratic rights. Draw a line somewhere north of Milton Keynes, South and West of Swindon and East of Peterborough and they simply can’t be trusted. Londoners are at this very moment petitioning the higher powers (Thom Yorke, perhaps?) to either hold another vote or to declare a city state that can rejoin Europe and run screaming from association with the grubby provinces: “You’re all a bunch of racists!”

When reasonable folk point out that this might display a degree of ignorance and prejudice in equal proportion to the alleged crime of the Brexiters, even hitherto sensible dead-centrist folk like Dan Hodges  - now of the Mail on Sunday – come over all self-assured and self-righteous:

Mention the “North-South divide” and the full weight of the South-East (with a per capita atomic mass roughly equivalent to that of a 3 bedroom loft-style apartment in groovy Hackney) drops from the sky onto those impertinent enough to suggest that the vote might tell us something important about our nation and that deserves scrutiny.

In the 1980s as the North bore the full brunt of the Thatcherite attack on the working classes who toiled in heavy industry, the Left expressed its love and admiration for those plucky Northerners. Both in London and up and down what was to become the M4 corridor, you couldn’t move for Constituency Labour Parties and the SWP, RCP & CPGB organising Miners Solidarity Groups. A cynic might imagine that there was a fetishising of the North and all who sailed in her from those who knew almost nothing of life there and what that looked, felt and smelled like. But never mind that – we all had the donkey jackets and Coal not Dole button badges. We loved those Northerners, fighting the fight on the sharp end of the class struggle. They were worthy.

A generation and a half later and the pits are now logistics distribution centres handily located close to the M1. Former pit villages are teetering under the weight of a structural unemployment that crushes and splits communities. Cities like Sheffield -built on the sheer good fortune of proximity to both seams of coal, rushing rivers and iron ore – lurch from one funding crisis to the next, locked in a death-grip with endless disappointment and never-quite-arrested decay. The North doesn’t die; distinct bits of it do – of course – prosper, thank you very much. But it’s not like London and the South East. It just isn’t.

Here’s the thing, and at face value it’s quite simple: there are not enough jobs. What jobs there are are often low paid and insecure. In London and the South East there are – broadly – enough jobs. That doesn’t mean they are all fulfilling, well paid and involve foreign travel, but the jobs are there.

In Sheffield, for example, if you’re a white-collar worker (say, an administrator) the reality is that if you can’t get a job in one of the two universities or the dwindling Home Office presence, you will a) struggle to find a permanent job and b) when you get one, it will pay roughly a third less than a similar job that your friend has at the university. Your mortgage or rent however will not go down by a third. If you’re an unskilled blue-collar worker – well, good luck with that one.

In the North this lack of jobs now and the lack of prospects of jobs and prosperity for the next generations has combined with a discourse around immigration. London’s “progressive” elite may find it distasteful – and some of this discourse is indeed unpleasant – but it’s there, it’s real and we have ignored it at our peril.

Here’s an example of how we got here. In 2013, Liberal, progressive proto-Corbynistas in the South poured rage and scorn on David Blunkett when he spoke out about the pressures facing Page Hall in Sheffield. That’s an area where just under 40% of families claim benefits and over 50% of children are regarded as “at risk” from poverty. Tensions between the existing residents of Page Hall and the newly arrived and rapidly expanding Roma community were escalating. After calling attention to this problem in his constituency, Blunkett was hounded for being a racist and accused of using language akin to that of Enoch Powell. It was the River Don of Blood speech.  Of course, a significant proportion of the settled Page Hall demographic was in fact Bangladeshi in origin, but not many of those branding Blunkett a simple, old-fashioned racist seemed to want to think about the complexities that might signal.

In describing the behavior of the UK Left around the common “anti-Israel “ discourse, David Hirsh uses the concept of the self-declared progressive circle whereby the virtuous Left defines and polices the borders of normative discourse. Step outside the circle (i.e. give voice to an idea that may not be on the tick box list of pre-approved tenets) and the full force of disapproval and anger comes crashing down: “We understand what you are saying. We can decode it instantly. We have the tools. And what our tools show is that you are bad. You are not virtuous like us”.

Dan Hodges and all those rushing off to sit in front of their laptops and log into the latest post Brexit petition seem to me to be engaging in exactly this type of behavior.

Significant parts of the North (and of course Wales & Cornwall) have never recovered from the loss of heavy industry. London and the South East is simply not in the same boat. Unless you live in the North (or Wales & Cornwall etc) there is a very good chance that actually you don’t understand. Not really. Now, the smart thing to do with this is to engage and unpack. The easy and less smart thing to do is to draw out the virtuous progressive circle. The trouble is, it really is much easier to get out the felt tip pens and start drawing, so largely that’s what people seem to be doing.

Gone is the eye-welling tsunami of love from the Left for the brave, noble North. It’s been replaced by a visceral disgust and a knowing mistrust: “it’s not us that have changed. We’ve compared the circle we drew back in 1984 and it’s more or less exactly like the one we drew out yesterday. So if it’s not us, it’s them. In the North. They’re not who they once were. “

http://hurryupharry.org/2016/06/26/its-the-wrong-north-gromit/

Larry Summers: "The effects on the rest of the world will depend heavily on psychology"

For Britain, the economic effects are two sided. On the one hand, a major jolt has been delivered to confidence, to future unity and down the road to trade. On the other, the currency has become more competitive, and liquidity will be in very ample supply. I would expect that a significant deterioration in growth and a recession beginning in the next 12 months has to be a substantial risk though short of an odds on bet. As suggested by the fact that stock markets in Italy and Spain are down almost twice as much as in the UK, the prospects for Europe may in some ways be worse than for the UK. There is the real risk of "populist exit contagion" in a number of countries. A credit crunch is a serious risk. Unlike in Britain, the trade weighted exchange rate is unlikely to decline very much. The central bank has less room for incremental policy measures. ... The effects on the rest of the world will depend heavily on psychology. Brexit will rightly be taken as a signal that the political support for global integration is at best waning and at worst collapsing. Dramatic exchange rate fluctuations tend to portend upswings in protectionist pressure. And problems in European banks could as in 2009 lead to a drying up of trade finance. Already global trade has lagged global growth in recent years. A clear sense of commitment to avoid backsliding towards protection from the G20 will be essential going forward. Specific efforts with respect to trade finance may be appropriate.

Scott Sumner: "The ultimate effect depends ENTIRELY on how the central banks react"

At this point (midnight) the global economy has been hit by a negative monetary shock, one of the biggest in years. ....
I’d emphasize that this is an almost purely a monetary shock—in real terms it makes little difference whether the UK is in or out of the EU (especially in places like the US and Japan). It’s monetary. That means the ultimate effect depends ENTIRELY on how the central banks react. Do they show imagination and leadership, or . . . do they keep acting the way they’ve been acting since 2007. We won’t have to wait long for an answer. (Obviously the markets believe that the central banks will not rise to the occasion.)
The odds of a global recession in 2017 just increased, by at least a few percentage points (albeit still less than 50-50). I think this also makes it slightly more likely that Trump will win, although he’s clearly still the underdog.

Capital Economics: "Brexit is not a disaster for the world economy"

It is highly probable that a favourable trade agreement would be reached after Brexit as there are advantages for both sides in continuing a close commercial arrangement. But the worst-case scenario, in which Britain faces tariffs under ‘most-favoured nation’ rules, is certainly no disaster. Exporters would face some additional costs, such as complying with the European Union’s rules of origin, if they were outside the single market. However, these factors would be an inconvenience rather than a major barrier to trade. ...


Financial services have more to lose immediately after a European Union exit than most other sectors of the economy. Even in the best case, in which passporting rights were preserved, the United Kingdom would still lose influence over the single market’s rules. The City would probably be hurt in the short term, but it would not spell disaster. The City’s competitive advantage is founded on more than just unfettered access to the single market. A European Union exit would enable the United Kingdom to broker trade deals with emerging markets that could pay dividends for the financial services sector in the long run.


Concerns about a drying up of foreign direct investment if Britain votes to leave the European Union are somewhat overblown. Access to the single market is not the only reason that firms invest in Britain. Other advantages to investing here should ensure that foreign firms continue to want a foothold in the country. It is likely Britain would remain a haven for foreign direct investment flows even if it was outside of the European Union. Of course, we could see a period of weak foreign direct investment inflows as the United Kingdom’s new relationship is renegotiated. However, if Britain is able to obtain favourable terms, then foreign direct investment would probably recoup this lost ground.