,
6 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
A long read indeed, and yet somehow nowhere in these thousands of words would readers learn that Labour's electorate is (a) majority remain (b) majority middle class, or that education, national identity and view of migration drove Brexit choices not class or economics
The group which constitutes the majority of the Lab electorate and the overwhelming majority of the Labour membership - left-liberal pro-EU graduates - is portrayed as a faction and the reader is misled into believing that the people mobilised by Corbyn were working class Leavers
Its perfectly fine to make the case for Lexit radicalism as an ideology but it is nonsense to pretend, as this article does, that it was the motivating force of Corbyn's or Labour's support. Lexiteers project their own obscure dogma onto an electorate which doesn't share it
Jones is right to say there's a long standing tradition of radical left Euroscepticism, including in Labour. But he's completely wrong to misleadingly portray such a tradition as a class politics divide or a major driver of support for Labour.
It is ironic that the author, who so steadfastly ignores basic facts about Labour's electoral coalition and the drivers of Brexit, complains about his political opponents "steadfastly ignoring reality".
(and it goes without saying that the article resolutely ignores the now pretty considerable empirical literature examining drivers of Brexit choices and 2017 election choices, selectively linking only to comment pieces and qualitative studies which validate the author's biases)
