Is Brexit breaking Britain?
Local elections point to Remain but big parties sell mantra of ‘need to deliver Brexit’
... Brexit is breaking British politics. Brexit is also coming perilously close to breaking Britain. Last week’s local elections saw a large electoral shift towards parties that are anti-Brexit. What might this mean?
First, and most obviously, there is interpretation. Electoral desertion of the two main British parties was not a shift by voters towards “Remainy” parties, as described by Robert Peston, ITV’s economics editor. The parties in receipt of voters favour were 100 per cent Remain.
This is not just semantic quibbling: the British media, with one or two exceptions, immediately bought into the narrative that the electorate now just wants Jeremy Corbyn and Teresa May to “get on with Brexit”. Surprisingly, it wasn’t just the ultra-right wing, billionaire owned bits of the press. Even the BBC was at it. In the unlikely event of a referendum on the future of the BBC, I would now vote to abolish it: the betrayal of its public broadcasting mandate has been grim to observe.
Secondly, there is the psycho-pathology of the whole thing. It’s tempting to talk about gaslighting, Orwellian double-speak, believing six impossible things by breakfast, confirmation bias and lots of other psychological theories and descriptions of the oddities of human behaviour. None of these come close to an explanation. Perhaps it is a form of mass psychosis...
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/brexit/is-brexit-breaking-britain-1.3881604?fbclid=IwAR2kVXnN7lxwE9rIKAnAZ13_eo1SSAWrSPPKxdaA2qm0QRxZ0y5D9LNvTk8XPost in UK Group:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/108815948
From the comments at the Irish Times:
"The Tory performance was the worst since 1995 and the halcyon days of Tony Blair. UKIP lost 145 out of its 176 Councillors. The Lib Dems gained 703 seats, the best performance in their history, and the Greens gained 194 seats putting them on the map as a significant force in UK politics for the first time. So between them the major Leave parties lost almost 1,500 seats while the main committed Remain parties gained almost 900. But the lesson Conservative and Labour leaders appear to have drawn from this resounding defeat is that "the people want them to get on with delivering Brexit"
= new reply since forum marked as read
