Channel Four ran a long item on Thursday night during the 7:00 pm news. They gathered a group of leave voters together at the Hepworth gallery in Wakefield and asked them what they thought about progress or lack of it in the Brexit negotiations. It was an absolute revelation. There was more disagreement than if they were a 50/50 mix of leave and remain voters.
Daniel Hannan was there as the "intelligent" voice of leave but it only really exposed the huge diversity in the people who voted to leave and the massive problem this leaves for the Brexiteers. How are these leavers ever to be satisfied? It was the jingoistic, the gullible and the misguided being led by the wilfully blind. One man thought the government was dragging its feet and we should leave immediately because we were Great Britain, while another was finally realising how momentous it all was and thought we needed the transition period to get things right without actually saying what he thought "right" was.
The NHS came up several times. One man voted to leave so we could spend more on public services like the NHS, as if the EU prevented this is any way. He didn't seem to realise he was sitting in the same room as a very influential man (Hannan) who regularly slates the NHS on US television and thinks we should have a low tax, low regulation, limited public service, Singapore style economy. A care home manager complained that EU nurses and doctors were leaving the service and quoted recent figures claiming the NHS was now short of 40,000 staff. He wanted to know where the extra money was. Nobody could tell him.
A woman seemed to think we couldn't trade with the rest of the world while we were in the EU and although she looked perfectly normal it was clear she had read or understood nothing about Brexit at all. She was the ideal target for the leave campaign.
They intend to do the same with remainers in the next few days and that should be interesting as well.
