Thread: My Mum the Brexit voter.

My mum is a working class single single mum of mixed race children.

We grew up in a council house on a horrid estate

Though she now retrained she was, throughout my life, employed in menial jobs or unemployed. Some times were okayish

Some times were awful. I hold a distinct memory from age 14ish - my old shoes got a huge hole in them. Unable to afford new shoes, I wore my mum's trainers, 1.5 sizes too small. I still get those familiar foot cramps even now, age 29 and a half. I digress. The okay-notokay times
Endured into my uni years. I was lucky to join a year BEFORE the tuition fee rises. My mum commented to me "they don't people like us, our kind, lads like you at uni". That was 2010s. The resentment, in me and her, was already tangible. Cameron the enemy already. This remained so
For a while. My mum was not very political and never voted. From 2010-2016 her only political commentary came came maybe 2 or 3 times a year, in which she believed Cameron-Osborne had some agenda against her as a single working class mum. That resentment and paranoia built.
In 2014/15, she didn't vote. She expressed regret as she felt bad for Ed Miliand. Why? Because in a Q+A session on disability grants (we had a severely disabled cousin, mitochondria syndrome) he used those underrated words - "I Don't Know." But promised he'd revise it as he
Felt their pain and worry. However, as usual, she did not vote. She never did. Cameron won a majority and we moved swiftly on to Brexit. She didn't know whether to trust Farage "is he racist?". She sat on the fence poised to, as per, abstain at the ballot box. But then, George
Osborne made THAT announcement, that if we voted leave, a new, harsher budget would be made. For the first time, I saw my abstainer mum FURIOUS at the TV, at politics. Years of low level anger at austerity came to a head. "They're gonna punish mums like me if we don't vote how
They tell us to. They're threatening me. They do all these things to bring us down- tuition, disability cuts and that..and they're threatening us with more! THEY DONT GET TO THREATEN US ANYMORE!!!" That low level austerity anger was apparently not so low level. My mum was angry
At austerity and cuts all along and this simply pushed her over the edge. She made up her mind. My abstainer mum couldn't fûcking wait to vote against Osborne-Cameron's threats by voting brexit. No opinion about sovrin'ee or fish. She'd had it with cuts, attacks on her as a
Single working class mum and austerity. She was gonna teach them a lesson by voting Brexit. Nothing I could do or say btw. So she voted leave. I voted remain. I tried to talk her out of this and failed. We never talked about it. Years later, she denied, says she didn't vote.
She said she didn't care either way, that she liked Umunna for example, he seemed nice. 2019 election came. She didn't vote. She'd NEVER vote conservative. Corbyn "has never been working class" so no to him too. My attempted pleas at tactical voting ignored. Boris won. Is she
Happy with Boris? No. Is she happy with this brexit deal? "Don't really know or care tbf". Is she happy with Brexit? Doesn't care. She did, however, show a willingness to vote Starmer next time, because at least he used to be working class, like her. And that matters to her.
Austerity, for her, hurt both wallet and feelings, even through her thick layer of voter apathy. She is deeply wounded by class constructs. As am I, naturally. It made Tories AND Corbyn a no go, and made her vote Brexit simply to defy Cameron-Osborne threats that scared and
Angered her. Is there some wider electoral lesson to be learned here? Not sure. Are there others like her? Probably. Do I think any of this made voting Leave a good idea? Fk no. I don't. I have decided to share this anyway, though. Make of it what you will. Ty.

More from Brexit

This very short article by Jeremy Cliffe is the best thing I have ever read on Brexit and the EU. It pivots on the contrast between Delors’ and Thatcher’s authentically provincial Christian visions and suggests the battle in Britain between the two is not over.


Thatcher: Protestant believer in the totally free market and absolutely sovereign centralised nation state. Delors: Catholic believer in third way personalism, corporatism and federalism. Individualism versus relational love. Heterodoxy versus Orthodoxy.

The article useful gives the lie to the idea that the Catholic vision of the EU has altogether vanished even though it is weakened. Delors wanted a social dimension to the free market and single currency and yet lexiteers laughably insist the EU is more neoliberal than the U.K.!

Subsidiary federalism is a doctrine of democracy and human fraternity. State sovereignty is a doctrine of naked power. It is a face of Antichrist. Leviathan.

Those combined that democracy can only be inside a single state fail to power just how much of private law and evermore so is necessarily international. Thus if political institutions don’t extend over borders there can be no democracy.
1/ A challenge in parsing Brexit news is that businesses are facing overlapping types of challenges that can be difficult to separate.

The key questions are:
1⃣ Given the model of Brexit chosen, could this have been prevented, and by whom?
2⃣ Can it get better?


2/ To put those another way:

"If you knew everything you needed to know and did everything right, is your existing business and delivery model still viable and competitive?"

The answer to that question determines if for you the problem is Brexit, or how Brexit was delivered.

3/ Some of the challenges at borders could have been prevented while still having the exact same model of Brexit (No Single Market, No Customs Union, but an FTA).

That they're appearing is an implementation failure and you can fully support Brexit but still be pissed about them.

4/ Examples include:

1) Government guidance and IT systems being ready earlier and/or easier to navigate;

2) More support for businesses, and more affordable bespoke help;

3) More time to prepare and better government communication about what preparation actually requires.

5/ This thread you've all seen from Daniel Lambert the wine merchant (primarily) deals with problems in this category.

There's no policy reason he can't export his product, but the procedures are a nightmare to navigate and he's badly under-supported.

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