GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

for people who live elsewhere in the country or maybe we should just repeal all

the extensions of the franchise going back to 1832 when you had to have a 40

shilling freehold in order to get the vote. It seemed a very, very strange

argument to me that democracy suggests one person one vote and that there

should be somehow different standards for people who had university degrees

and it also seemed to miss the point completely to me which was that people

vote in what they consider to be their own best interests. In university towns

you can see why they would vote in favour of Remain. Lots of universities gets

lots of money from the European Union, so they would consider that to be a

damned good idea to keep on getting the money. People who voted for Leave

did so because they felt like they had been forgotten and, in my view, they had

been forgotten, so they had very good reasons in many cases for voting for

Leave. In some cases obviously it was because they were racist, but in a very

small number of cases. People did so because they felt their life opportunities,

their job opportunities, their public services, their housing opportunities were

not what they wanted them to be and they blamed the European Union for it.

So that is explanation no. 1 which I think was complete nonsense.

Explanation no. 2 was that it was really just down to miscalculation by Cameron

and Osborne that it was just a question of Project Fear gone wrong. Obviously

Project Fear was a terribly mis-forgotten strategy for winning the Referendum,

but it was kind of understandable really, because Project Fear tends to work.

People on the left know that by and large Project Fear is what the party of the

right, the Conservatives, use in every election. They used Project Fear in the

2015 General Election, they used Project Fear in the Scottish Referendum in

2014, they have used Project Fear in every election I can remember and most

of the time it does work. It did not work on this occasion, I think, partly because

the way in which it was deployed put people’s backs up. People realised that

there was an awful lot of nonsense being talked by both sides on the

campaign, whether it was going to be £300 million extra per week for the NHS,

but I think what happened was that they just went for Project Overkill really, so

every time you got up you had a more lurid explanation for why things were

going to be terrible, George Osborne said there was going to be a £30 billion

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