Brexit protest: thousands march in London to 'unite for Europe'

[T_i_B]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2017/mar/25/brexit-protest-thousands-march-in-london-to-unite-for-europe-live

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron cemented his growing role as the political leader of the Remain movement with a well-received address to the Unite For Europe march in Parliament Square.

Interestingly he claimed to speak not just for the 48% who voted against Brexit, but also many of those who did. “We are here to show solidarity and respect for those who voted leave. We do not believe they wanted this. [ Theresa May ] does not speak for 52% she barely speaks for 5%.”

He also voiced the mood of many of those in the crowd about their right to be in this place just days after the terrorist attack this week. “We are defiant against those who would seek us to be afraid about last Wednesday,” he said. “We are also defiant because democracy did not end on the 23rd of June,” added Farron.

Earlier the sound of Big Ben striking 145pm marked the end of a minute’s silence among a sombre but determined crowd. “We will never be cowed, we are here to stand for our beliefs,” added Labour MEP Seb Dance.

[Jonny Appleseed]

1. Does anyone still want to to leave the EU over there?

I was under the impression that as soon as the vote happened, people learned what the EU did and were like "why the fuck are we leaving this?"

[T_i_B]

3. Oh yes

A lot of the people who voted for it are pretty fanatical, most of our media is going full on facist on the subject and very few people actually understand the issue.

Also doesn't help that it's the elderly who are most strongly in favour of this, all too often because they think it will affect other people.

[Jonny Appleseed]

4. The elderly? Really? That's surprising, I assumed the opposite.

Especially since their generation is the generation that the EU was designed for, to keep them out of another war like the one their parents (or in some cases with the older ones: themselves) fought and died in from happening again.

[T_i_B]

5. Nope

What you've got instead is a bit of the old "I'm alright Jack" mentality combined with a large dollop of anti-immigrant bigotry, which is most pronounced in areas with an overwhelmingly indigenous white population and very few immigrants.

Plus a total lack of understanding of how the EU keeps the peace, which is going to have devastating consquences in Northern Ireland.

[LeftishBrit]

13. Part of the problem is that there is a lot of propaganda that still implies that the Europaean

countries are the enemy, and that Britain Won the War (on its own?) It doesn't help from that point of view that one of the most prominent countries in the EU is Germany and that some people are conditioned to regard Germany as the permanent Enemy.

Also, a lot of people who have been treated badly by our own governments have been persuaded that the bad treatment came from the EU and/or immigration rather than from our own governments. I even heard of someone who was convinced that the EU had closed the British coal-mines! I can't be too smug about this, however, as years ago people, who used 'new EU laws that would make it easier for people to sue for dismissal after a certain time' as an excuse for making short-term contracts as short-term as possible, did convince me that the EU were harming employees in their ham-handed efforts to help them, and that we would be better off out. I changed my mind in the first instance due to the Blair-Bush collaboration, and feeling that we needed an EU counterbalance to the influence of occasional nutty American presidents (oh, and even more so now!!!), but also found out that almost everything I'd been told was a lie, and these people were referring to British laws.

Both age and relatively limited education seem to correlate with a Leave vote; and they go together to some extent, as education, at least in terms of quantity, has improved over the years. If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, perhaps the battle of the referendum was to some extent lost in the underfunded classrooms of the old secondary modern schools. Which May of course would, in essence, like to re-introduce.

Having said that, there were lots of middle-aged and older people on yesterday's march; perhaps more than young people!

[shraby]

2. I firmly believe that Russia also had a hand in Brexit passing because it's one of the biggest

mistakes the UK has made and it's exactly what Russia wants, a weaker EU

[Denzil_DC]

6. I'm not sure you'll find many of us who live in the UK sharing that belief.

Brexit was a long time a-brewing.

I'm talking insistent, constant picking away at the EU and its shortcomings with often highly misleading propaganda across the vast majority of the media pretty much since the UK joined, and certainly since before Putin came on the scene. (At the moment, if that was Putin's wish, it seems to have backfired to an extent, as many in other EU countries are looking at the chaos that's engulfing us and deciding that, no, that doesn't look like a good idea.)

The UK's quite capable of making catastrophic mistakes without any outside help.

[sharedvalues]

7. Do you blame Murdoch / News Corp?

What groups drove the highly misleading propaganda?

[T_i_B]

8. Not just News Corp

The Daily Mail, Telegraph and Express are just as culpable.

And once you get past stuff owned by Murdoch, Viscount Rothermere, Richard Desmond and the Barclay Brothers there's not a lot left of the British media.

[sharedvalues]

9. Similarly in US: CNN, NBC, etc. all owned by big corps

We are lucky that WaPo and NYT are family owned or closely held by people that care about the truth.

[Denzil_DC]

10. T_i_B's already answered with some of what I would have said.

The Mail is owned by the 4th Viscount Rothermere, an old-money billionaire registered as non-domiciled in the UK for tax purposes. Possibly more significant is the stance of its editor, Paul Dacre, an arch-eurosceptic who's a millionaire because he makes about £1.5 million a year from his post (he also relies on European agricultural subsidies to support his numerous major landholdings in the UK, but that's just one of the ironies in the whole situation).

Murdoch owns the Sun, Sun on Sunday, The Times and The Sunday Times, and part-owns the Press Association.

The Express is owned by porn millionaire Richard Desmond, who runs a really trashy tabloid and is as rabid a supporter of Brexit (and UKIP) as you'll find.

The Telegraph is owned by the weird reclusive twins the Barclay brothers, who're very rightwing, and split their time between Monaco and the private island of Brecqhou, just off the small Channel Island of Sark. They deny being tax exiles, and have claimed they live abroad for "health reasons".

Of the rest of the media, the BBC's supposed impartiality has been stretched over the years. It would be unfair to label it "Eurosceptic", but it's given loads of airtime to Nigel Farage and the crackpot ideas he spouts, out of all proportion to UKIP's political support in the country. The other broadcast media have played a similar role.

The problem's been that the EU's been a handy scapegoat/distraction for all sorts of UK national ills over the years in just about all the media - lots of stupid myths have gained currency, from the infamous (non-existent) edict on the acceptable degree of straightness of bananas downward. That's one way our current Foreign Secretary (roughly equivalent to the US Secretary of State) Boris Johnson made his name when he was a journalist supposedly covering the EU. This was what an ex-colleague of his, Martin Fletcher, wrote when Johnson was on the Remain side (before he opportunistically turned coat because he saw that - and being on the heroically losing Leave side, as was expected at the time - as his best chance of becoming Prime Minister):

Johnson, sacked by The Times in 1988 for fabricating a quote, made his mark in Brussels not through fair and balanced reporting, but through extreme euro-scepticism. He seized every chance to mock or denigrate the EU, filing stories that were undoubtedly colourful but also grotesquely exaggerated or completely untrue.

The Telegraph loved it. So did the Tory Right. Johnson later confessed: 'Everything I wrote from Brussels, I found was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this I suppose rather weird sense of power.'

Johnson’s reports also had an amazing, explosive effect on the rest of Fleet Street. They were much more fun than the usual dry and rather complex Brussels fare. News editors on other papers, particularly but not exclusively the tabloids, started pressing their own correspondents to match them. By the time I arrived in Brussels editors only wanted stories about faceless Brussels eurocrats imposing absurd rules on Britain, or scheming Europeans ganging up on us, or British prime ministers fighting plucky rearguard actions against a hostile continent.

Much of Fleet Street seemed unable to view the EU through any other prism. It was the only narrative it was interested in. Stories that did not bash Brussels, stories that acknowledged the EU’s many achievements, stories that recognised that Britain had many natural allies in Europe and often won important arguments, almost invariably ended up on the spike.

https://www.indy100.com/article/a-journalist-has-shared-a-story-about-boris-johnson-that-completely-undermines-his-authority-on-the-eu--bkoHJPBuVZ

I've seen other reports that his colleagues in the European press lobby saw Johnson as a total buffoon, and competed with each other to feed him crazy (fictitious) scoops, which he duly reported without bothering to check, and then became firm urban myths.

European elections traditionally don't have great turnout in the UK, which opened the door to the likes of UKIP to build a power base of sorts there - one (along with a major source of funding, some of which it's currently facing major lawsuits about) it will lose on Brexit, which is another irony.

In the face of all this, a facile case for Leave wasn't hard to make, and the positive case (even realistically guarded - the EU's not perfect, of course) struggled to gain traction.

Couple that with the fact that it's evident that a lot of the Leave vote in certain areas was driven by anti-Establishment sentiments, plus there was little expectation that Leave would win, and the stage was set for a classic protest vote.

The last nail in the coffin was the stupidly simple-minded framing of the ballot paper and no setting of a threshold proportion of the vote for enactment (it was supposedly only an advisory referendum, though to scare voters with the importance of their vote, Cameron included a statement on the paper that the government would go along with whatever was decided). People could tick a bald Leave or Remain, that's it.

That's left it open for politicians on the Leave side to claim a mandate for whatever they want ("The people have spoken&quot , including a hard Brexit (i.e. no trade deals with the EU, a complete severing), whereas the Leave pundits all along scoffed publicly at any idea that the UK would leave the Single Market and called it scaremongering.

And here we are.

[sharedvalues]

11. Thanks for this

Nice, I learned something reading this.

It sounds like the Johnson-media effect is similar to a big problem in the US press: chasing ratings for profits. I'd probably put profit-seeking infotainment media as the biggest disinformation problem we face, followed closely by conservative hate radio and Fox NC.

CNN was facing a huge downturn, and constantly discussing Trump got them out of it (CBS CEO said "Trump is bad for the country but great for CBS! Keep the good times rolling.&quot . CNN is probably as much to blame for Trump as any other single entity.

peace.

[Denzil_DC]

12. You're welcome,

and yes, I think there are a number of parallels between our two countries' situations: Off the top of my head, long-term badmouthing of the EU might be comparable to long-term badmouthing of the federal bureaucracy and DC; Trump (and the Tea Party before him) was promoted by the media in a similar way to Farage (and UKIP); nobody expected Trump to win/nobody expected Leave to win, opening the way for a "safe"/couldn't care less/nothing to lose anyway protest vote etc. etc.

[LeftishBrit]

14. Very good summary

One of the scariest things about the current situation- and there's a lot that's scary!- is the promotion of the idea that you have one vote and That's It; that once the vote has been made it is set in stone for all time, and it is anti-democratic to seek to reverse it, and anyone who seeks to do so is an 'enemy of the people'. This is fundamentally very anti-democratic. Especially as it was a vote by a narrow majority, that would not be considered sufficient for a constitutional change in most countries (especially without a majority of constituent states); that the EU citizens in the UK were excluded from the vote (though Commonwealth citizens were not); that UK citizens living in other EU countries for more than 15 years were also excluded. And that not all Leave voters wanted this sort of ultra-hard Brexit.

[LeftishBrit]

15. Putin might have tried to influence it, but I don't think that was a big factor here

There has been a sizeable group of people with a tendency to use the EU as a scapegoat ever since we entered. It includes groups on both the far right and far left, but the far right have been much more influential.

Add to that that austerity has created a lot of unhappy people ripe for being presented with a scapegoat, and a lot of politicians wanting people to use anything other than themselves as a scapegoat. And that there are always a lot of older people nostalgic for their youth, and just enough of them were persuaded to associate that with the time before we joined the EU.