You may well ask where the 4% who think Brexit is going 'very well' live, presumably it’s in a barrel - or they get their news from The Daily Express. I think the truth is 53% have realised Brexit is a disaster and the rest haven’t yet done so but will shortly. It's just a matter of time - and that time may be nigh.
To reinforce the sense that public opinion is really starting to shift, Twitter was full of comments yesterday about the BBC programme Question Time from Thursday night, chaired as usual by Fiona Bruce. She let slip that a majority of the audience had voted to leave in 2016, accidentally revealing the amount of vetting that goes on. It came from Aldershot, a strong leave voting area. This is what she actually said:
“The majority of you voted for Brexit. We selected this audience very carefully”
But several members of the audience attacked Brexit and Boris Johnson, with very little reaction apparently from others around them. Nothing like you might have expected a year ago. I should add that I didn’t watch it myself since it doesn’t help my blood pressure.
In an hour long show, in a leave voting area with a hand-picked leave voting Conservative majority studio audience, there was apparently nobody prepared to defend Brexit. Nadhim Zahawi, the new education Secretary, was the government’s man on the panel and even he had difficulty.
I have never thought having ministers answer questions from ordinary people is helpful when the questioner doesn’t know the answer and can’t follow up after being given a lot of waffly rubbish. And it’s even worse when celebrities are asked questions on subjects they know nothing about. What is the point?
The BBC charter (see point 5) says:
"The Mission of the BBC is to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain."
So, Question Time might entertain some people but it doesn't inform or educate and arguably does the opposite. It diminishes the role of experts and leads viewers to think opinion is as good as facts or analysis by men and women who know what they're talking about. Hard truths are lost in a fog of ignorance.
I lifted a few clips that you might like to watch below. They are all short but quite interesting. There is a bit of repetition in that the chap in the third clip appears again at the end of the fifth, but the exchange is so delicious it's worth hearing twice! Enjoy:
In recent days I noticed one tweet about someone's leave voting neighbour apologising for it and another with a family member who “couldn’t remember” which way they voted in 2016. I am sure we’ll be hearing plenty of this in the next few months.
It’s said you couldn’t find anyone in Germany in 1945 who admitted voting for Adolph Hitler in Germany. I think we will see that a lot about Brexit in the future.
Is the tide starting to turn? One lady in the QT audience says it is. I have said this a few times before and been wrong, but finally I think it might be. And it is what you should expect. When Brexit was all theoretical and half the population believed the liars and the lies, any shift was bound to be flaky but now the results are being seen and experienced by more and more people, the tide should indeed be turning.
Let us hope that at last it is.
