GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

because that is obviously the big framing issue of the last 12 months. I do not

know whether any of you have ever seen a film called Trading Places. It is a

film where two elderly commodity traders swap one of their highflying, Harvard-

educated dealers with a kid from the ghetto, Eddie Murphy, and they change

their lives and see whether they can actually put the bloke from the ghetto in

charge of the company and the person in charge of the company into the

ghetto and they do it for a bet of one dollar and, of course, this being Hollywood

the tables are turned and Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd turn the tables on

the two crooks and ruin them at the end of the film. I do not want to spoil it too

much for you if you have not seen it! (Laughter) Anyway, at the end of the film

one of the two old crooks says in a sort of voice of stunned bewilderment, “How

could you do this to us after all we did for you?” and that sense of Trading

Places came a bit to me on the morning after the Brexit Referendum. The

Guardian every morning holds an editorial conference and on the morning after

the Referendum, of course, which the result was unexpected and not at all

what 99% of the Guardian staff wanted, there was the same sort of Trading

Places sense of, “How on earth could the British public do this to us after all we

did for you? After all Europe has done for you, how could you possibly do this

to us?” I lay my cards on the table, I was the 1%, I was one of the people who

voted for Brexit and caused quite a lot of controversy on the paper as a result.

I will come on to why that was and my explanation for it in a minute. Broadly, I

think Brexit could be good for the economy. It could be good for growth, it

could be good for the parts of the economy that have been neglected for too

long, but I will come on to that.

In the aftermath of Brexit there were four or five explanations given for why the

result ended up the way it did. Explanation no. 1 was that people were just too

thick to understand what was in their own best interests and there was a bit of

this actually in the Guardian editorial conference where there were people

saying, “Look, all the university towns voted for Remain, it was only the parts of

Britain that had lots of poor people in that voted for Leave” and I found this a

quite difficult explanation really, because it sort of suggested that maybe we

should just have ten votes for people who live in university seats and one vote

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