the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The more I think about it, the more I’ve come to realise who the real villains were in the E.U referendum, the one’s who really stitched up the country like a kipper are. (Although how or even why you’d want to stitch up a kipper in the first place is beyond me. I’m not even sure why it’s a saying. It just is.)

It isn’t the politicians, who with their false claims and scaremongering heaped a lot of heat and very little light on a very complex issue. As ‘The Guardian’ reported only this morning;

But within hours of the result on Friday morning, the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, had distanced himself from the claim that £350m of EU contributions could instead be spent on the NHS, while the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan said free movement could result in similar levels of immigration after Brexit.

Hannan said: “Frankly, if people watching think that they have voted and there is now going to be zero immigration from the EU, they are going to be disappointed.”

His comments came after the leave camp made voters’ concerns about the impact of immigration on jobs, infrastructure and the NHS a key part of their campaigning.

There had been no suggestions of changing the status of any EU nationals in Britain, Hannan told the BBC, adding that no one had said this might be the case in the event of a leave victory.

“All we are asking for is some control over roughly who comes in and roughly in what numbers.”

This cynical contempt only confirms what I’ve long suspected. Not only did the leaders of the Leave campaign want to leave the E.U, they were quite happy to leave clarity out of the campaign as well.

Neither was it the fault of the majority of leave voters. They voted leave for a variety of reasons to be sure, but if those reasons weren’t challenged, whose fault is that? Theirs? If I was living in a poor, deprived town in the North of England, where my children had no future other than debt and death, where I survived on increasingly meagre benefits and everyone I knew was in the same boat, then I’d vote leave. I’d think that the economic benefits of being in the E.U hadn’t reached me. If I found it hard to get a doctors appointment, or my child’s class size was so big that it had a detrimental effect on their education or when my local council’s spending priorities had become targeted in area’s I instinctively considered a waste of money, then I wouldn’t be in favour of increased migration. Not if it meant putting additional strain on an infrastructure already finding it difficult to cope. Their concerns weren’t racist, they were real. They weren’t bigoted, they felt blighted.

If their vote was a misguided one, if they wanted to express their anger at the Westminster elites without realizing they’ll hardest hit by voting to leave Europe, again, is it their fault? Or those who didn’t spell out the very real and very immediate – and unforeseen consequences?

No the real villains were those who didn’t vote. There was a turnout of 72.2%. Which means that 27.8% didn’t vote. How that figure is calculated I don’t know. I mean is it people who were registered to vote but didn’t, or those that weren’t registered in the first place? Either way, the result is the same. I hope that what they had to do instead of voting was more important than deciding our countries future.

I hope they’re happy because I’m not.