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by defrost 1331 days ago
In reality it would be more accurate to call the vast majority of pro Brexit voters ill informed .. and to lay the blame for that on those in power that initiated the entire ill conceived referendum.

The post Brexit vote polling indicated that a great many people had no idea that this was a binding referendum rather than some "national poll of the feels", many were not at all clear on the actual pros and cons, they were swayed by emotive nationalistic propaganda that simplified the question down to "are you proud of your country or not" .. which was almost entirely orthogonal to the reality being voted on "do you want to be part of a free trade union or not" (simplified of course but more accurate).
2 comments
nonrandomstring 1330 days ago
> post Brexit vote polling indicated that a great many people had no idea that this was a binding referendum rather than some "national poll of the feels"

It's remarkable isn't it, just how fragmented non-broadcast mass media had become at this point? Huge swathes of people in London had no real idea that an important vote was taking place, or what it meant - being busy working and distracted by social media frivolity. The fact that their chosen 'channels' simply did not 'feed' them vital information allowed millions to be hoodwinked.

We still need a postmortem on "Brexit" as a kind of nation healing. All of us, on both sides, were victims of information warfare/abuse of one kind or another.

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mytailorisrich 1331 days ago
It depends on the issue. Immigration has caused real problems among the lower earners and free movement prevented any curbs.

IMHO on this the EU put ideology before pragmatism in 2004 and the British government has also massively screwed up by being the only country (ok, also Ireland) not to put any restrictions when that was possible.

Then, obviously Merkel's open door policy in 2015 did not help at all...

Note that the result of the referendum was not binding. But it did not matter: democratically and politically you cannot organise such a referendum then ignore the result because you don't like it.

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