One of the best things about referendum night was that Sunderland shook the money markets.
The North East used to be rich.
The North East used to be rich.
But the areas that had been betrayed by globalisation, and which had thus been impoverished, were finally asked what they thought about a key aspect of it.
And they answered.
The same thing has just happened in Wallonia, which also used to be rich.
If anyone still had any doubt, the Goldman Sachs speech made it clear once and for all: Britain is never leaving the EU. But there are all sorts of other ways of keeping the focus on the areas that rejected neoliberalism by rejecting one of its key pillars.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, there are. And Theresa May is quite open to many of them. It is to leaving the EU that she is completely closed. Don't even bother asking her about it. As Jeremy Corbyn can tell you.
DeleteThey knew Daily Mail Land would vote Leave and they had made allowances for that on the assumption they'd still win overall. But our votes swung it in Wales and the North, it gave them the shock of their sweet little lives. Glorious stuff.
ReplyDeleteThere has been a fairly frantic attempt to show that it was won in the South. But that would be like saying that the 1997 General Election was won in the North East, which did indeed return a lot of Labour MPs in that year.
DeleteTony Blair made absolutely no attempt to placate the North East, nor did his opponents make any attempt to win it over.
Likewise, it is not the South that has to be pleased by whatever comes out of this result, because it was not the South that delivered it. Left to the South alone, as you are right in saying had been pretty much expected, then Leave would have lost.
Greg Clark has just pretty much admitted on Question Time that the Government bought this, paid Nissan to do it. They are softening up Sunderland for a second referendum, look out for that in the other Northern, Midland and Welsh Leave areas. As you say they don't have to do anything for the South, which is bound to vote Leave the way it's bound to vote Tory or the North East is bound to vote Labour.
ReplyDeleteAt last, we are going to know how it feels to live in a marginal seat, and to be lavished with goodies accordingly. I'd still vote Leave again, but there's gratitude for you. By then, we'd already have all the sweeties.
DeleteIt was Southern Tories (and UKIP) that fronted the Leave campaign and the South that voted overwhelmingly Leave, in greater numbers than anywhere else.
ReplyDeleteNorthern Labour MPs all voted Remain, including your MP, Pat Glass.
And the issue of immigration-which overwhelmingly affects the South-was the major campaigning issue.
It's also the issue Theresa May has made her defining policy, and the centrepiece of her party conference agenda.
It was the South wot won it.
No one is listening to you. A Conservative Cabinet Minister who is the MP for Tunbridge Wells has just bragged on television, to a Southern audience, that the Government bribed a multinational corporation to invest in the totemic Northern Leave city.
DeleteBuying a second referendum? Quite conceivably. But don't expect that to involve the expenditure of one penny piece in the South. Welcome to our world.
So now we know what "Industrial Strategy" means, paying companies to pay people in the places that voted Leave while voting Labour. We should screw every penny we can out of this and then vote Leave again.
ReplyDeleteDamn right.
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