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Rod Liddle

Three great myths of the sulking Remainers

30 June 2016

1:00 PM

30 June 2016

1:00 PM

I think my favourite moment of the referendum campaign was John Major’s intervention, a couple of weeks before polling day. In that immediately recognisable tone of condescension tinged with snippy petulance, which we all remember and love so well from the time of his magnificent stewardship of this country, he said that people who didn’t want some degree of pooled sovereignty should go and live in North Korea, oh yes. No, John, that’s where you should go. I’m sure you can persuade the fat idiot who runs the place that his people need and deserve a motorway cones hotline, even if there are no cars on the roads.

It’s time for a duck shoot. Time to blow a few canards out of the sky, from where they have been flapping around our heads these last few days, quacking in a demented manner. Of course, it was to be expected that if Leave won the referendum, the Remainers would whine piteously and refuse to accept that the result was democratic and binding. That is how many of them are. People entirely unused to being gainsaid, unused to not getting their way. So they shriek and scream and stamp their little feet and there are tears before bedtime, and after bedtime on the social media websites. Effusions of disbelief, sorrow and sadness — and a real, visceral loathing of those who had a different opinion to them.

‘Hate won!’ a hilariously silly cow, sobbing her eyes out, said on a video now doing the rounds among the jubilant Brexiteers. Well, maybe it did, my little poppet. But it also lost. There seems to me rather more hatred among the Remainers, or ‘remnant ponces’ as Julie Burchill called them, than there ever was among those who wished to get the hell out. Hatred towards the elderly, hatred towards people who don’t live in London, hatred towards people who do not share their views. But it is the mindset of the liberal elite that hate could not possibly exist within them, just as they are utterly convinced that they are our intellectual superiors. All the Brexit voters were thick, whereas we know so much better.


Their post-vote caterwauling devolves to canard number one: the electorate was lied to. Well, heaven forefend. Have these people never experienced a general election? Are they not aware that politicians on all sides make exaggerated claims, spout idiocies and tell porky-pies almost as soon as they open their mouths? The Leave camp certainly did. If I thought for one minute that the money we would save from our EU contributions would go straight into the gaping maw, the black hole, of the NHS, I’d have voted Remain. But that is what voters were assured, although I doubt it shifted many votes. On the issue of migration, Leave was at least disingenuous. Worse still, considering it was the crucial issue for, I would guess, at least 70 per cent of the people who voted for Brexit, the politicians are already rowing back on the notion that we might now begin to limit the numbers of people who arrive in our country each day. But the principle on both issues holds: if we wanted to spend that money on the NHS, we could. And we are a little better placed to control immigration, if we have the will to do so.

And the lies from the Remain camp? Legion and staggering — the end of western civilisation, war likely, our homes worthless, our jobs taken away. And the continual intimation that anyone who was pro-Brexit was a hate-filled xenophobic shitbag about to go out and lamp a Pole. Leaving the European Union was a racist thing to do, apparently. Or the thing racists did. Billy Bragg, that faded liberal luvvie, remarked that while not everyone voting for Brexit was a racist, every racist would be voting for Brexit. I suspect Billy thought that was on a par with Confucius, bless him. Not all twats buy Billy Bragg records. But all people who buy Billy Bragg records are twats.

Following on from this, canard number two, which I have heard a lot — from the BBC, the pollsters and academics. Looking at the voting map of the UK, they point out that areas where immigration is high tend to be the most welcoming of it and also most strongly for Remain. This supports the liberal view that it is not immigration per se, but thick people’s fear of immigration that is the real problem. They then point to multicultural London, pro-immigration, pro-Remain — a society happy in its diversity, etc.

The answer to this should be self-evident to any normal person: the inner London boroughs voted heavily for Remain not because of enlightened white British folk who welcome diversity, but because the overwhelming majority of people in these boroughs are immigrants, or the offspring of immigrants, themselves. Newham, Tower Hamlets, Lewisham, Southwark, Hounslow, Lambeth, Waltham Forest, Brent, Islington, Camden and many more all have a white British population which is below 50 per cent. In Newham the figure, staggeringly, is just 16.7 per cent, in Brent 18 per cent. The white British have moved out a long time ago, to the ring around London — which is why Sutton, Bexley, Barking and Dagenham, Hillingdon and Havering all voted out. And yet the BBC trotted out this canard once again as soon as the votes had been counted. Is it surprising that immigrants, or the offspring of immigrants, would vote heavily in favour of immigration, as they saw it? It doesn’t seem terribly surprising to me.

Canard number three — the young, the yoof. The poor betrayed young let down by the wrinklies. A lot has been made of this. So a greater number of older people than younger people voted Remain — the young didn’t turn out to vote. They had better things to do. They didn’t care. Three ducks dead, then. Bring on more ducks.

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