Reply to post: Re: Get your facts right

Dyson to build electric car that doesn't suck

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Get your facts right

Well funded? Well organised? That's some of the finest revisionist history I've ever seen made up on the spot..

Well funded? Well for starters, Arron Banks alone gave £6m to Leave.EU Of course, Leave.EU wasn't the official leave campaign, so I'm pretty sure the amount they spent won;t show up in your official figures. Ditto the other campaigning groups, and solid media support from the Mail, Telegraph, Sun, etc. etc. all owned by strong leave supporters.

Well organised? Well there was this political party formed with a single purpose - what was its name again? Oh Yes, UKIP. And as for talking about historical revisionism, you only have to look at the crud spouted by some of its proponents.

Also, I didn't claim that the remain campaign didn't have all the major political parties backing it. The problem was that it was run through government. In practise, this meant that any 'official' remain campaigning had to be done through them. The government campaign dictated the message that campaigners should be imparting, which was the rather uninspiring (although accurate) economic message. Those who wanted to get publicity for their own message (such as those in the scientific community who will lose not only funding but the international cooperation that makes the UK a great place to do science), didn't have the opportunity, funding, or platform to communicate their message.

The leave campaigning was quite different, as it was disparate and well targeted. The people doing this campaigning have had several decades to perfect the art, whereas those groups in support of the EU had to organise from scratch - after all you don't have established campaigning groups in place to support the status quo, which is why you won't find such groups to support thinks like votes for women or the abolition of capital punishment, whilst you do sometimes find public proponents of the opposite. And yes, I am equating the anti-EU campaigning groups with regressive political ideologies; leaving the EU is regressive.

Before the referendum, membership of the EU didn't figure very highly in most people's minds. There was a small nationalist Conservative-party breakaway group that wanted out of the EU, backed by a handful of rich interested parties. They had the organisation and money to get their opinions heard, skewing public opinion. On the day of the vote, most people won't have had much more knowledge of the issues than those shouted at them in the press, and were asked to vote on what was essentially a popularity contest. The whole concept of a vote (a sop to the right-wing part of the Tory party in an attempt to hold it together) was a fools errand.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon