tavyred
Very well known Exeweb poster
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2004
- Messages
- 13,911
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.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 ?
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.It was the perfect storm - the European migrant crisis and the UK's Eastern European influx fuelled the rise of UKIP, after years of anti-EU and anti-migrant rhetoric by the rags, Cameron seized the moment with a reckless election pledge giving the 'hard won' majority, then bailed out. The xenophobic vicars daughter discounted a soft version with her red lines with well-known Lexiter 'oh jezza' in opposition. Jezza flip-flopped within 2 years, under duress, and in waltzed de Pfeffel, jettisoning all moderate Tories to create a UKIP-lite Vote Leave party and a pledge to 'get it done'. The People losing the will to live by this time give the bounder an 80 seat majority, now having acted in haste, we can all repent at leisure.