Thread by @shaunjlawson

Seeing as it's being discussed on my timeline, I blame the following people/groups/things for Brexit, in the following order:

1. The Leave campaign

2. The Tories

3. The media, right wing and otherwise

4. The Remain campaign

5. The Lib Dems

6. FPTP

7. Labour

8. New Labour

1. The Leave campaign: which promised all things to everyone. Narnia on thin air. And it broke electoral law and was funded by dark money and even darker interests, some of them foreign.

Its constant lies and gibberish were the principal reason for all the chaos since.

2. The Tories. Cameron called the referendum not to benefit the country - he could never give a damn about that. He called it because of an argument in his own party. Then the whole bloody campaign was Tories v Tories.

The same Tories who'd spent decades lying through their teeth about the EU. The same Tories whose imposition of austerity caused so much powerless and so much despair.

Then on entering office, May wilfully and disgracefully misinterpreted the result.

52-48 actually means "we don't know". It does NOT mean "let's have the most destructive Brexit imaginable" and it certainly does NOT mean "we hate foreigners. It's all their fault".

A Prime Minister remotely interested in the common good would've reached out across Parliament.

May was only interested in her party. And her ridiculous red lines - which were always impossible to meet - set in motion a long period of increasingly poisonous, hateful rhetoric: in which Remain voters and judges were slandered, and our friends across Europe treated as enemies

Then, in came Johnson to finish the job which the criminal Dominic Cummings had started. Even EU leaders were shamefully complicit in Johnson's utter joke of a 'deal': a deal which signed the UK's death warrant. Bye bye Northern Ireland. Bye bye workers protections too.

Bye bye NHS and environmental protections? It's unclear whether Johnson cares either way. We are, though, in the US' pocket now: it can essentially do what it likes with us. That's what happens when you give all sovereignty away by destroying yourself.

3. The media. From Brussels. Johnson's lies about the EU started in The Telegraph decades ago. Other correspondents there were pressured by their editors to match Johnson's 'exclusives', ie. his lies. So a narrative of absolute drivel developed which was swallowed by the public.

The BBC, meanwhile, failed completely in its obligation to educate the public both during and after the referendum campaign: preferring gossip, tittle tattle and personalising everything to informing the British people about anything important. For this, it will pay a heavy price

And its cringeing, pathetic behaviour was matched in different ways by many newspapers. Who continually attacked Labour, not the government; and who themselves failed to inform the public of any of the detail during the campaign itself.

4. A campaign in which Remain embarrassed itself in its negativity, its misery, its scaremongering. And here's the thing: it didn't even scaremonger about the right things!

During the campaign, I realised that Leave were offering the impossible.

I realised that controlling our borders and staying in the single market was impossible (not without ID cards, at least); I realised that the Good Friday Agreement would be imperilled; and I realised that in practice, we'd have no say if we wanted frictionless trade.

Therefore, two days before the vote, I wrote this.

https://twitter.com/shaunjlawson/status/745285603072352256

But I'd had to work that out by myself. It was nothing to do with anything Remain said - because the complete and total idiots running it hadn't talked about it!

Heaven knows how many people voted Leave because they thought we could be like 'Switzerland' or 'Norway' AND control our borders... and Remain didn't even bother to highlight that this was impossible!

Instead, it was money this, money that. Cost of everything, value of nothing.

Purely on a 'which campaign had more vision and was better run' basis, Remain deserved to lose. It deserved to get thrashed. The wonder is that 48% of the electorate still voted for it. It was quite scandalously, shamefully awful.

It had only had 40 years to think of positive reasons to stay. Even something like this, by a friend of mine, would've been a start.

Instead, it was moan moan moan moan. With plenty of middle class condescension thrown in for good measure.

5. The Lib Dems, meanwhile, proved clinically, pathologically incapable of ever looking at themselves in a mirror. It was THEM who betrayed the trust of young people in 2010. It was THEM who brought in catastrophic austerity in exchange for ministerial limos and 5p plastic bags.

It's been THEM who've been Tory enablers for an entire bloody decade. It was THEM who helped force an election because their delusional narcissist of a leader thought she could force a coalition with her Tory pals.

And it was THEM who, for nakedly expedient reasons, spent three and a half years blaming not the government which was in charge, but the opposition which wasn't. Resulting in a kamikaze strategy designed to torpedo Labour Remainers everywhere.

That party is a quite disgusting disgrace. Fake news, political illiteracy, unbridled arrogance... and nothing but nothing learnt about all the underlying causes of Brexit. Because, as I say, that'd involve looking in a mirror. And we just can't have that.

My abiding memory of the 2019 election will always be Sam Gyimah sabotaging Emma Dent-Coad in Kensington... then laughing all the way to some other ludicrously overpaid job, while the Grenfell families had shit kicked in their faces by him and his disgusting, amoral party.

If the Liberal Democrats were any kind of serious party - any kind of force for change - their leader wouldn't have held private talks with Johnson, Leaver-in-Chief; they'd have reached out to Labour; and they'd have punched right, not left.

They wouldn't have allowed nonsenses such as Gmiyah in Kensington or Luciana Berger in Finchley and Golders Green. The latter's TL is full of woe at us leaving the EU. In her conduct, she proved how far down her list of priorities it was: behind herself, herself and herself.

That entire shower thought keeping Corbyn out of government - even as a caretaker government! - was more important than stopping the most catastrophic, far-reaching, generational decision Britain's made since the war.

And given Berger constantly cited antisemitism, here's a message to her from a fellow British Jew. You helped consign British Jews to greater poverty and greater misery and a divided, angry society which endangers all of us. Shame on you, forever.

6. The reason I described the Lib Dems as politically illiterate? FPTP. In 2011, they sold out on proportional representation for a generation; and what resulted was a rigged, corrupt electoral system which does not reflect reality in any way.

They KNEW this; they KNEW that they would split Remain across the country under this rotten system. They went ahead and did it anyway... and spent years attacking Labour for the crime of it actually understanding FPTP and what it would do.

So many high-profile People's Vote supporters totally ignored this. "Lalala fingers in ears we're not listening it's all Corbyn's fault". Utter idiots, the lot of 'em.

And by being so wildly unrepresentative, FPTP itself helped cause Brexit in the first place.

7. Which brings me to... New Labour. Which could've brought in PR - but preferred tribalism and short term expediency. Which thought its own power was more important than fair votes and genuine democracy.

And which also:

- Lost millions of working class voters, who were effectively abandoned

- Allowed people from accession countries to live and work in the UK with no checks, unlike most EU member states

Those working class voters noted the latter and, combined with their communities being ignored, were rather less than impressed. All they wanted was to be cared about, to be prioritised. They never were. And the long process to a reckoning began.

New Labour also denied the public a vote on the EU constitution; called those who were unhappy about this 'racists'; and at no point did it ever provide positive reasons for why EU membership was such a good thing. Only focus groups counted to it. Cowards and bottlers.

It'd be nice if figures from that time - Blair, Campbell, even Alan Johnson, the MP for television - could acknowledge their own contributions to this disaster. But no no: it's all Corbyn's fault! Pronounces Johnson from his comfy sofa.

8. Labour. But that's not to say that Labour and Corbyn bear no responsibility at all. We do. We all do. Corbyn's leadership on this was effective in the Commons but miserably weak outside it. His communication was a total disaster, and won nobody over.

The morning after the referendum, his comments about triggering Article 50 - which he was given an immediate chance to clarify, yet doubled down on and failed to clarify for an entire month - were utterly ridiculous and an insult.

He went on to face enemies in the PLP much more interested in bringing him down than doing anything right by the country. Yet only by accepting Brexit could he force a hung Parliament in the first place.

That's entirely the fault of FPTP. But too often, he also failed to stand on the right side of history - and the massive irony was in his equivocation and triangulation, he resembled New Labour on so many things. He resembled the politics we elected him to move on from.

I will always sympathise with him on this because I think his position was impossible. A government and media of rank bad faith. MPs in his own party of the most despicable venality and cynicism. A Liberal Democrat party completely obsessed with attacking him constantly.

And a voting system which would punish a Remain stance. The only way there'd ever have been a chance of a united Remain platform at the election is if he'd stood down... and even then, I can quite easily imagine the Lib Dems demanding we concede to them, not the other way round.

Jeremy Corbyn was a red rose surrounded by a bunch of pri... ahem, I mean thorns. Damned if he did, damned if he didn't; but it was also a time which called for immense courage and strength of purpose. And he really didn't show much of it.

It's just that, in that, he was very far from first among equals.

All of which means that we are where we are. There's many other structural causes which I've not even mentioned here. The entire British political system completely failed in every conceivable way.

Now it's up to whoever the next Labour leader is to:

- Hold Johnson's feet firmly to the fire each and every day

- Focus on the root causes of Brexit; which incredibly, nobody's even done until now

- Campaign to change our infernal electoral system

- Put power back into the hands of people and communities by decentralising, devolving, and transforming our constitutional and political system

- And by fighting the toughest rearguard action of this party's entire existence to protect workers' rights and various protections.

It won't be easy. In fact, it'll be the fight of our lives. But we HAVE to win that fight. The consequences if we don't are, believe you me, unimaginably awful.

Ha, I seem to have switched numbers 7 and 8 around there! And I call other people numerically illiterate! 😂

But that's not critical. Both New Labour and Labour bear some responsibility. It's just that many others bear far, far more of it.

PS. There's one other thing I should've mentioned re: Labour and Corbyn but didn't. The illegality and criminality surrounding the referendum were barely touched upon by the opposition. That isn't acceptable. It's actually disgraceful.