Corbyn to blame for #Brexit? Pull the other one!

Last Updated: June 24, 2016By
Was this man really to blame for Brexit? Of course not. It's time for a reality check.

Was this man really to blame for Brexit? Of course not. It’s time for a reality check.

Okay, Brexit is happening. David Cameron didn’t want it; Jeremy Corbyn didn’t want it – but it’s happening anyway and the UK is self-destructing in the immediate aftermath of the decision. Who’s to blame?

Here’s one point of view:

At whose feet does this lie. Let me begin a bit on that.
One : Media/ right wing. Fuelling dissent and hatreds, i think you know in what areas.
Two: Media: In allowing a non MP of a right wing party to have such a huge platform for so long.
Three: Cameron. And the Conservatives, for pandering to this, and allowing the media to create a populist position to exit. Surmise the reasons yourselves.
Four: Campaign lies from Brexit/ Leave. Two main of their promises can never be fulfilled, namely the NHS spending promise, and the Immigration promise.
Five: Regional Economic Neglect by this Government fuelling a lets kick the establishment focus, rather than a national interest focus, in swages of the population.
Six : relatedly, the failure to address escalating inequality in UK demographics..which, by all reasonable looking at is down to the Conservatives
Seven: Conservative manifesto promise, to have a referendum, laid at Cameron’s door, as leading that election manifesto, presenting it, and further, allowing it to happen.
So I leave this really quite unfinished piece with
This situation CLEARLY isnt anything to do with the Right Honourable Mr Jeremy Corbyn, MP, And Leader of The Labour Party. It may have something, and no doubt it does, with the abject deference by some in the party to blairite principles of new labour, which , the membership had wholehearted rejected by electing Corbyn to Lead the party.

Source: The Virtual Gherkin: Some views on Brexit, by Jules

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20 Comments

  1. NMac June 24, 2016 at 2:26 pm - Reply

    The referendum came about becuase of Tory weakness and internal division. Cameron is weak and ineffective or he would have told his dissenters to shut up. The referendum campaign filled me with disgust – it was nothing more than a right-wing incitement to racial animosity and hatred, designed to appeal to the most basic instincts. The issue of the EU was almost a sideline. The Tory Party was at war with itself and they dragged us all into it. What has appalled me is the numbers of non-Tories who say they voted leave in order to get rid of Cameron. Perhaps they will feel Johnson, Gove, Duncan-Smith and even Farage are much more in touch with the working class.

  2. Rouge Noir (@Jules_Clarke) June 24, 2016 at 2:38 pm - Reply

    Thanks for sharing from my blog, Theres more to that article though and t
    his comment is to say that people should Click on the source , and maybe read all of it?

    • Mike Sivier August 1, 2016 at 11:06 am - Reply

      Yes – that’s why there’s a link to the source article – so people can indeed read the whole thing.

  3. jeffrey davies June 24, 2016 at 2:43 pm - Reply

    Honourable Mr Jeremy Corbyn, MP, And Leader of The Labour Party. It may have something, and no doubt it does, with the abject deference by some in the party to blairite principles of new labour, spot on but two women who sticking the knife in with the help of the rest of the greedie mps who peasants dont want jeff3

  4. Colin Glazebrook June 24, 2016 at 2:45 pm - Reply

    Who’s to blame? How about the 12,000,000 people who couldn’t be arsed to vote?

  5. Lynn Dye June 24, 2016 at 3:03 pm - Reply

    Mike, you may be interested to know that I thought of you and your column when I heard Jeremy Corbyn being blamed for the Brexit vote on BBC.

    Surely you published an article predicting this would happen so that we would know what to expect? ;)

  6. Roy Beiley June 24, 2016 at 3:11 pm - Reply

    Great response! But will Laura Kuessenberg still continue to blame JC!

  7. HomerJS June 24, 2016 at 4:46 pm - Reply

    From day one you could see it coming. Just think, we could have missed out all that dreadful campaigning, saved on holding the referendum, and just gone straight to ‘let’s blame Corbyn’ and have a vote of no confidence. The poor Blairites don’t know whether to criticise him for failing to get a remain vote, or for failing to be on the winning side (being out of touch with the electorate).

  8. Stu June 24, 2016 at 5:36 pm - Reply

    I interpret the voting pattern as a combination of the Right Wing Press brainwashing and an out-and-out protest vote by people whose voices have been ignored for far too long.
    It appears to be more of a “Labour please help us from Tory oppression” bearing in mind that it was the smaller constuencies with higher austerity cuts that voted 70% +
    in favour of leaving.

    Corbyn’s constituency voted around 70/30 in his favour whereby Cameron’s was around 50/50 which speaks volumes in itself.

  9. Phil Woodford June 24, 2016 at 6:46 pm - Reply

    I think the ball is rolling now and Corbyn will be history, just as surely as Cameron.
    My latest thoughts here: http://bit.ly/292kzaw

  10. casalealex June 24, 2016 at 7:01 pm - Reply

    In a nutshell x

  11. Neilth June 24, 2016 at 10:07 pm - Reply

    Just watching Tritram Hunt, MP for Stoke on Trent, blaming Corbyn for not getting the labour vote out for remain. Hunts constituency was one of the most strong for leave.
    Surely Hunt must bear some responsibility for not engaging and motivating his own party to get the message out.

    Here in Cardiff South and Penarth we have been working bloody hard for the Party for the last 18 months pretty solid to get our MP then our AM elected and then for remain and we are meeting tomorrow to kick off our campaign for the Vale and Town council elections next May our MP is Stephen Doughty, not exactly a corbynite but he has been out with the activists across the constituency working hard for remain as well.

    Can Hunt claim the same? There are many levels of leadership and our Councillors and members should be providing that at branch level and supporting our leadership structure at the different organisational levels. Contrariwise our leaders, Corbyn, shadow cabinet, MPs and party and union organisation should be supporting and campaigning for our elected comrades at all levels. That’s what being a party means.
    Attacking or undermining, sniping and headline grabbing, self publicising saboteurs need to look very hard at what their disloyalty is achieving.

    I would remind the whole party that Corbyn was elected by a huge majority of the membership. For a few Disloyal MPs to brief against that leader shows contempt for the membership and they should examine their motivation and reconsider their membership of the party that got them elected in the first place.

    Sorry for the rant but I’m bitterly disappointed by the result and dread to think how bad the economic decline is going to be. We need to unify and start working as one party.

  12. Zippi June 24, 2016 at 11:44 pm - Reply

    From my perspective, the referendum was a travesty for democracy. Aye, we were promised a referendum, something that people had wanted for decades. We should have had one in ’92, by all accounts but none was forthcoming. How far back does the rot go? At least that far and no doubt, further.
    The truth is that we were being asked to vote on something that most of us know little, or next to nothing, if that, about. how can people be expected to vote on something if they don’t know what that something is? The public should have been taken along with thus Euromachine, since we joined the Common Market but that has not been the case a increasingly, the European project has become something distant, otherworldly and quite frankly, nothing to do with us.
    I have been doing extensive research to enable me to make a meaningful, informed decision about which way to vote. The debates were of no help whatsoever, with each side making outlandish claims of prophecy, hurling nonsensical figures in our direction and telling us what the other side would do, instead of telling us about what it is that we’re voting on; the European Union.
    I started to read the Maastricht treaty and some interesting things came to light, for example, that every citizen has the right to petition the European Parliament. How many people are aware of that? That the treaty is “RESOLVED to continue the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity.” Why do we not know these things?
    Who works in the E.U. and what is our relationship with them? How does it work? What does it do? These are the kinds of questions that should have been asked. Without this knowledge, there is no context and all of the figures, prophecies, hyperbole, conjecture and scare stories are meaningless. People were voting from anywhere but a position of knowledge and this, to me, was the scariest prospect of the entire referendum. Call-Me-Dave brought forward the date of the referendum twice but without arming us with the information that we actually needed. The campaign, on both sides became and ugly, loud competition of sloganing, lies, spin and shouting. It was disengaging, uninformative, uninspiring and all of the televised debates were pretty much the same; the same lies, the same shouting, the same slogans with no explanation, context, or anything to support what was being said.
    Politicians have been closing their ears to the complaints about immigration for so long and during the campaign, the ears were still closed. It is small wonder, therefore, when somebody, anybody, gave an ear, that people looked to that person and failed to hear anything else.
    It i my belief that if people knew what they were voting for, the result would have been different, that said, many of the older generation (those who voted for us to joined the Common Market) would have always voted to leave, because they feel that they were lied to and the evidence suggests that they were. The same arguments that we have heard in this campaign, I was told, were made in 1975.
    All of that is purely academic, now, the decision has been made and we must play the hand that we have been dealt. Who knows, we may yet be able to make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear. Necessity is the Mother of Invention and we Brits have always been good at inventing.

  13. Kenneth Billis June 25, 2016 at 12:26 am - Reply

    If we forget who should have done what and when, and the lies and scaremongering, this catastrophe is all down to one person – Cameron. And he has damaged the futures of millions of people, and made highly likely the complete break-up of the UK for the most appalling reason: to protect the Tory Party. To think that all this damage is going to occur purely from his intention of keeping together a motley collection of some of the most corrupt and self-serving politicians this country has ever seen.

    And the Blairites want to blame Jeremy Corbyn!

    I’m waiting for the day the Labour Party finally rids itself of these characters and how long it takes them to do a Reg Prentice.

  14. mohandeer June 25, 2016 at 12:40 am - Reply

    The mainstream media have led and fuelled the outrageous lies of the Brexit campaign and Tories could hardly admit that most of the problems being blamed on immigration were in fact of their own making. Some of those problems date back to Blair’s leadership ie; immigration, loss of industry, lack of housing etc. Where exactly does Corbyn fit in?

  15. lawrencesroberts June 25, 2016 at 2:00 am - Reply

    Brexit probably wont happen. As usual The British Ruling Class have cocked it up.
    4% is really only 2% and too close to call.

  16. Jill June 25, 2016 at 6:36 am - Reply

    Here’s what the normally supportive Polly Toynbee thinks, Mike.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/jeremy-corbyn-referedum-campaign

    Do you disagree with her assessment?

    • Mike Sivier July 5, 2016 at 3:45 pm - Reply

      I certainly do disagree.
      Jeremy Corbyn delivered more voters for ‘Remain’ than any other political party leader.
      Where they did not support his call, they did so for their own reasons. For example, Ms Toynbee cannot accuse Corbyn of forcing people out to UKIP when that has been the result of Labour policy under the Blairites/right-wingers for a considerable number of years. Ms Toynbee herself seems to be gravitating that way.
      The article tries to make a hero of Margaret Hodge, but the fact between the lines is that she failed to bring in ‘Remain’ voters while Corbyn succeeded. In her constituency of Barking, only 37 per cent of voters supported ‘Remain’. In Corbyn’s Islington, 76 per cent wanted to stay in the EU. The figures speak for themselves and it seems the local MP is at fault.

      • casalealex July 5, 2016 at 8:22 pm - Reply

        “The figures speak for themselves and it seems the local MP is at fault.” Exactly!

        Jeremy Corbyn toured the country speaking to the people on the ground. But should he be blamed for the results in those Labour constituencies who did not vote to remain?

        How effective were the Labour MPs in those constituencies? They should have been doing what some say Corbyn did not! They should have been disgorging the bile of the propagandist media and politicians, and explaining the misinformation and downright lies to the people who had put them in the position to represent them.

  17. Neilth July 5, 2016 at 7:38 pm - Reply

    There was also an apparent trend where constituencies in England and Wales with real experience of immigration and multiculturalism and integration were much more relaxed about free movement and voted in while constituencies with little or no experience of immigration were strongest for out. Project fear indeed.

    I’m told for example that the Vale of Glamorgan would have voted out if not for Penarth (which is part of Cardiff South and Penarth Parliamentary constituency) voted strongly in and swung it.

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