But the poor and disenfranchised aren't going to benefit from Brexit. There's not a shred of evidence for that hope or claim. On the contrary they are going to pay a disproportionate price, comapred, dare I even say it? people like me and almost everyone I know.
Bad as things are, I think the evidence is that they would have been worse outside the European Union. Blaming the EU for the negative aspects of internal UK class politics, is, I think, a dangerous illusion. The British, as this whole irrelevant political farce, illustrates, are perfectly capable of ####ing things up by themselves without any help from the EU! For many on the left and the nationalist right, the EU is a convenient scapegoat. Also it often seems that people's views on the EU, their cirtainties and animosity are in inverse proportion to their actual knowlegde of how the EU functions. For me it smacks of too much utopianism, dogma and quasi-religious faith.
I think the role the EU played in bringing peace and stability to Northern Ireland is a big positive. Once there were fifty thousand British troops in Northern Ireland. Once their were mindless atrocities being committed and terrorism, working class people being blown to shreds in pubs, for nothing, but ghastly sectarian dogmas. To risk a return to that carnage and madness, for the dubious benefits of Brexit, seems, to me, alone, a price not worth paying.
Have any of you even been to Northern Ireland? There are still rings of steel around the city centres of Londonderry and Belfast. Fences, walls, barriers and gates that are locked at night. One gude I talked to had lived with helicopters circling the skies virtually his entire life. Then, suddenly, one day they were gone because of the peace process and carbombs weren't going off, the snipers were silent.
There are people here, on this site, who deny the significance of all of this and instead prefer to rant about primative labels and trite slogans, the ####ing 'working class' 'liberals' 'filth' 'scum' 'fascists'... It's pathetic.