Tuesday 30 August 2016

Frontier Spirit

Why shouldn't Britain's border be in Britain? Wasn't that why Kent voted Leave?

More broadly, British withdrawal from the EU would not affect this one little bit. It is a bilateral treaty.

But such is the difference between the Tory and UKIP areas that voted Leave, and the Labour, Lib Dem and Plaid Cymru areas that swung the referendum by also doing so.

Labour areas have far more politicised populations; far more people in them watch the news, for example.

That is true even of neighbouring parts of London. It has always been massively so between, most famously, the North East and the South East.

There is a reason why Hollyoaks, while ostensibly set in Chester, is full of people with nearly, but not quite, London accents. The makers know who is watching it instead of, say, Look North. And they know who is not.

The Tory and UKIP vote is arguably the leading section of the electorate at large where immigration is concerned, being particularly willing to lead voters in general to the stake on that issue, about which there is undeniably very widespread concern.

But the Number One issue like that in Britain is always the National Health Service, where it is the Labour vote that has the leading role.

In any case, the EU has never really had awfully much to do with immigration. It has, for example, literally nothing to do with the Calais jungle. But, being less politically aware, the Tory and UKIP vote does not realise or understand that.

Led by, or at least from within, the Labour Party, the trade unions, and the wider Left, the popular demand for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union would begin in earnest if and when the EU ever became a threat to the NHS.

That had been about to happen, under TTIP. Now, however, it looks as if there is not going to be any TTIP. So, that's that, then.

6 comments:

  1. This is an amazing victory, isn't it? We got the Old Labour vote out to swing the referendum for Leave and it led to the abandonment of TTIP. The North of England shook the world. We saw the first sign of it on the night, when the Sunderland result rocked the exchange rate. Melvyn Bragg should make an extra episode of his radio series about this.

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    1. Oh, at least. There is really an hour's worth of documentary here, if not more. I don't know whether he'd want to do it, but someone should. It could be called The Northern Powerhouse. We even got rid of the Prime Minister who had persecuted us, and put in one who wanted to implement the manifesto that we had voted for, although the South hadn't, a year before. How about that? Not bad going.

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  2. The South outside London largely voted Leave, but how many people is that? There's a South outside London? Who knew? And the Southern Leave vote seems to have got harder the more you got into areas that voted Lib Dem for MPs until last year and for councillors to this day.

    For what, about 10 years now, it has been assumed that the Old Labour North was the soul of England, purer and with a greater moral authority than the South. Everybody goes out of their way to say how much they want our votes as if they were worth more than anybody else's. That amounts to saying Labour should morally have won every election since well before the War.

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    1. Certainly, the logic of the Major-hating Right's position has always been Labour ought to have won the 1992 Election, while the logic of the Cameron hating Right's position has always been Labour ought to have won in one or both of 2010 and 2015.

      I have noticed this canonisation of the Old Labour vote, especially in the North, by everyone from Eric Pickles to UKIP, and now including Theresa May. That advantage needs to be pressed. As, indeed, it has been at and since the referendum. TTIP down, what next to go?

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  3. There's a South outside London? Who knew?

    You obviously work for the BBC.

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    1. "There may be problems outside London, but we can have no knowledge of them."

      RIP.

      Ho, hum. TTIP gone. World-changing stuff. Nothing desired specifically by the Tory and UKIP Leavers shows any sign of ever happening, however.

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