Never heard of an Airbus G2K ?
How do you reconcile 'Cameron's hard won 2015 majority' with 'Cameron gave people an opportunity to give him a well-deserved kicking' in 2016 ?
Simply because one was a run of the mill election requiring a mere circa 30+% of the voting electorate to give you a majority and one was a once in a generation referendum that gave many people who’d never voted before the opportunity to make a judgment on the sitting Government, and indeed the whole political establishment.
I think most of what you describe above is what happens in democracies, ie politicians trying desperately to be where majority public opinion lies. A vote on continued EU membership was always going to happen because it became a democratic imperative, ie the Tories had to promise one to stop UKIP denying them election victories. To suggest as you are that other voters were swayed by the rags and their anti EU/immigrant rhetoric is to say that you were clever enough to see through that rhetoric and others were not and thus the UKIP agenda took hold in the minds of those ‘not so clever as you’ voters. The fact is that wanting controlled, or at least the perception of controlled immigration is a perfectly reasonable ask of any voter and to suggest as you constantly do that those who hold that view are morally deficient and/or prone to being swayed by the “rags” is precisely why so many in left wing politics continue to get the motivations informing the Brexit argument so catastrophically wrong.
By that rationale, that it (the result) was nearly 50/50 suggests that Cameron, the sitting government and whole political establishment are generally very popular.
And as we know if more under 25's voted we wouldn't be having this "Arguement" nearly 5 years later.
I’m suggesting that a considerable number of working class English voters, many of whom had not bothered voting before, had the opportunity to signal their displeasure at Cameron and Osborne’s austerity agenda and thus that helped carry the leave vote over the line.
So you're saying that instead of voting in an election a mere year before (or ever?) they chose to leave the EU, as a sign to the government that they're unhappy with what the government are doing.
It makes total sense to me. The referendum was the first real opportunity to change the direction of the country many people had ever had. In forgotten areas of England it mattered not who was in Government just the same old. My point about Cameron/Osborne specifically was merely to point out that two leading members of the remain campaign were tryiing to sell us the ‘status quo’ at the same time as inflicting their austerity agenda on the people of England.
As I have said before, the Independence Referendum removed the usual safety net of FPTP and so, for the first time in a long time, every vote counted. People who hadn't bothered voting for decades suddenly all came out of the woodwork and I suspect the vast majority of those voted Leave, if nothing else just to stick two fingers up to the Establishment who had ignored them for so long.
