Two items appeared in the newspapers yesterday and I wonder if they are connected. First of all, The Treasury published figures showing we paid £156 million a week to the EU in 2016 (HERE) which is a long way from the £350 million that Vote Leave claimed during the campaign. Of course at the time anybody who was able to think for themselves and look at the official data knew this was false, but many accepted it was true. This is now confirmed.
On the very same day the University of Leicester produced the results of a study they had undertaken to discover why people voted to leave the EU. The fact they thought a study was needed tells us a lot about Brexit. No one studies why people vote Labour, or Conservative or even Liberal Democrat, these are seen as perfectly reasonable choices but Brexit is so totally irrational, a study is needed to see why a majority voted for it.
But leaving that aside, what the researchers found (HERE) was, "the level of higher education in an area was far more important than age, gender, the number of immigrants, or income in predicting the way an area voted," thus confirming what most remain voters knew already. This explains how a huge chunk of the population suspended incredulity for a few weeks and were quite ready to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
We are now the only country in the world prepared to spend huge amounts of time, money and effort over the next few years to the exclusion of virtually everything else that government is supposed to do, in order to make ourselves poorer, weaker, less safe and more unpopular. Unbelievable? No, it is happening.
