Sigh. Here’s the conversation:
The irony being that Trump and Brexit would probably have never happened without the help of Russia , and social media.
It beats the shit out of me how people could be so fucking stupid to not see through it all.
For people to be that susceptible to this nonsense , they have to have those biases in the first place. They are then skilfully exploited but I don’t think we should spend too much time feeling sorry for them.
In your opinion.
I can’t comment on Trump but Euroscepticism predates all that by decades.
Euroscepticism was largely the preserve of a minority within the country , and an even smaller one within the Conservative Party for decades . It wasn’t until the ERG was given wings by Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum that they were able to marshall enough support to actually make Brexit plausible.
[A decision made in the run up to the 2015 GE]
Promising a referendum on European Union membership was a vote winner for a reason.
[It won the 2015 GE for the Conservatives]
To guarantee Cameron’s survival amongst the Tory right maybe. I don’t remember too many others thinking it was such a great idea at the time.
[It being felt that Cameron had to give the Eurosceptic side of the party the offer of a referendum on the EU in the 2015 GE manifesto in order to prevent internal division]
It secured a general election victory.
[The 2015 GE when Cameron was up against Milliband]
Against Jeremy Corbyn. And with a reduced majority.
[This wasn’t Cameron. This was May up against Corbyn in 2017, after the EU referendum had already happened]
Maybe we should take this to a different thread but safe to say that when people still claim Brexit only happened because stupid people were gullible or brainwashed, that there’s been little effort to actually understand it.
Wrong. Against Milliband with an outright majority.
[The 2015 GE]
We were talking about what happened after Cameron announced the referendum in 2016. The next election was in 2017. May beat Corbyn.
Can’t have been. ERG had already got what they wanted by then; see comment that initiated the exchange “It wasn’t until the ERG was given wings by Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum that they were able to marshall enough support to actually make Brexit plausible”, this can only relate to the run up to the 2015 GE.
No, we weren’t. We were talking about the manifesto pledge ahead of the 2015 GE.
You might have been , I was talking about the referendum announcement.
Which was pledged in the 2015 GE conservative manifesto. It cannot have secured support after it had already been held - past consideration is no consideration.
Not entirely sure why I’m shown to have “liked” this post, nor why I’m unable to change it.
As per my follow up response, promising a referendum on EU membership secured Cameron the GE 2015 election victory. It’s why we had the referendum in 2016. Which resulted in the single biggest democratic vote in UK history.
We were obviously talking about different things ; you were referencing his manifesto pledge , I was talking about the announcement.
Regardless , you still maintain that pledge won the 2015 election for Cameron , and I would still beg to differ. Cameron made that pledge to see off a challenge from the Tory right. The election he subsequently won had more to do with Labour parachuting in an uncharismatic , and frankly unelectable, leftist leader in Ed Milliband and the collapse of the Lib Dems …
“Cameron made that pledge to see off a challenge from the Tory right.” (quite, in the run up to the 2015 GE)
Yeah, because the largest turnout in UK political history with 17.5m people voting to leave the EU the very next year doesn’t suggest it would have been a factor…
It was that pledge that was, as you put it
That came ahead of the 2015 GE. The 2017 GE took place AFTER the EU referendum had already happened.
Yeah , and in that election May won with a reduced majority , like I originally said.
She wasn’t elected on the promise of holding a referendum on membership of the EU though, that was 2 years earlier
They could hardly say they were just going to ignore ‘the voice of the people’ could they ?
To back up a bit , your contention was that the referendum was a winning electoral asset for the Tories. In both 2015 and 2017 , I’ve said why I think it wasn’t. (Labour’s shit candidates basically.)
Going further back , my original argument was that without Russian disinformation (this is the Russia thread after all) and support for the Leave Campaign , Brexit might never have even been achieved.
This historic landslide vote that you are touting was actually nothing of the sort.
"As of March 2022, 49 percent of people in Great Britain thought that it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 39 percent who thought it was the right decision. " Brexit poll 2024 | Statista
I had left it but given it was revisited I ought to further point out that I never touted the EU referendum result as a “historic landslide”…
