"It is very difficult to be positive": Brexit lost Cycloc 25% of sales, founder reveals

I suspect the slight majority of people voting for it* had something to do with it...

Having a vote at all seems to have been a badly-miscalculated attempt to soothe part of the Conservative party / sweep some divisions under the carpet. (But I haven't read any of the ex-premiers' books...)

* Very much depending on who you want to count as "us", geographically etc. but of course the results depended on "everyone".

Much as I disagree with brexit

The referendum policy was agreed at the party conference

The policy went into the manisfesto

The party won the election

The referendum was held.

Isn't this exactly how party politics is supposed to work? parties agree policies, put them to the electorate, and then enact them if they win?

This wasn't some fringe element of the party that needed to be placated to play nice, it was in fact most of the party, EXCEPT the more reasonable people chosen to lead the party to appeal to the middle ground of UK voters.

Anyone thinking it is only party outliers in favour of brexit is not considering the membership, and only the MPs.

Indeed - I was indeed mistaking the MPs for the "party".  However I'm pretty sure many Conservative MPs weren't thrilled by the eventual result - so it was likely still "we'll run this for the members as we know it will fail":

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-truth-about-david-cameron-and-th...

And yet so many other parts of manifestos get ditched as soon as they can...

Exactly, Brexit probably has more of a democratic mandate than anything else that's ever been done in the UK.

An unashamedly pro Brexit manifesto even won a large majority after the vote, to go with the multiple democratic hoops it had already jumped through.

The idea that the Brexit vote was undemocratic is straight from the Trump/Bolsonaro playbook and, interestingly enough, predates their particular struggles with understanding democracy.

Rich_cb wrote:

Exactly, Brexit probably has more of a democratic mandate than anything else that's ever been done in the UK.

Really, 52/48 is a bigger democratic mandate than the 1975 European Communities membership referendum in which the people voted to join the EEC 67/32? You know, the democratic vote that you and your fellow leavers spent 40 years trying to overturn?

Brexit always brings to mind the (supposed) Churchill remark,

"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter!"

I believe Churchill also said something along the lines of “Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others".

Agree with all that, but it was an advisory referendum that then became immutable after the fact. "brexit" was never defined, and a lot of Pro-Brexit voters are left scratching their heads at what they got. We are now where we are though, can't unwind the dishonesty and stupidity now. Need to get on with whatever Brexit *IS*. (Or in true British style we can wait another 10 years to define it while the economy slumps further...)

Bigfoz wrote:

Agree with all that, but it was an advisory referendum that then became immutable after the fact. "brexit" was never defined, and a lot of Pro-Brexit voters are left scratching their heads at what they got. We are now where we are though, can't unwind the dishonesty and stupidity now. Need to get on with whatever Brexit *IS*. (Or in true British style we can wait another 10 years to define it while the economy slumps further...)

This is a really important point that everyone seems to forget. If they had tried to make it a binding referendum, the referendum itself would never have been agreed in the first place. The ilk in the ERG played an absolute blinder.

That doesn't really explain why 38% of Scottish, 52.5% of Welsh, 44.2% of Northern Irish voters wanted to leave.

It's not as simple as just putthing the blame on the English.  All the votes counted the same everywhere in the UK.

If the 2.2 million leave voters in the other Home Nations had been convinced of the foolishness of Brexit they would have carried the vote.

It was so close that if Vote Leave hadn't broken the spending rules or written lies on the side of Johnson's bus it probably would have saved us too.

That's what's so galling about the whole thing.  You couldn't even bring a union out on a on day strike or change your cycling club's constitution with the tiny majority that Brexit had.  Yet we have to swallow bankrupting the country for it.

lio wrote:

That doesn't really explain why 38% of Scottish, 52.5% of Welsh, 44.2% of Northern Irish voters wanted to leave.

It's not as simple as just putthing the blame on the English.  All the votes counted the same everywhere in the UK.

If the 2.2 million leave voters in the other Home Nations had been convinced of the foolishness of Brexit they would have carried the vote.

It was so close that if Vote Leave hadn't broken the spending rules or written lies on the side of Johnson's bus it probably would have saved us too.

That's what's so galling about the whole thing.  You couldn't even bring a union out on a on day strike or change your cycling club's constitution with the tiny majority that Brexit had.  Yet we have to swallow bankrupting the country for it.

You're forgetting about all the tangible benefits that Brexit has ushered in

Exactly, what would anyone have talked about on social media if we didn't have brexit?

Lincolnshire and the Thames Estuary - Brexit Central. 

Yes the bus persuaded 500,000 people to change their minds...

Possibly the most effective bit of political advertising ever.

What was Blair's share of the vote in 1997? Or Thatcher's in 1979?

They were both considerably under 50% yet ushered in huge societal changes.

https://iamkate.com/data/minority-rule/

The idea that we need more than a majority in this
particular case is simply antidemocratic.

As an aside, even with the 'broken rules' (which amounted to no more than a paperwork error) Remain still vastly outspent Leave (19.3m Vs 13.3m).

In a fair democracy both would have been funded equally so, by your logic, the result would have been even more emphatic.

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/electio...

Rich_cb wrote:

Yes the bus persuaded 500,000 people to change their minds... Possibly the most effective bit of political advertising ever.

The bus slogan was a very visible cherry on top of a cake that was built mostly on lies. Poisonous lies that had been propagated for years through much of the media and ones that many people were very happy to repeat ad nauseam so that in the end they seemed to become facts. Alt facts, you could call them. Racism and xenophobia have flourished, like history repeating itself.

Meanwhile, whatever the pattern of voting and the statistics of the outcome of the referendum, Brexit has undoubtedly been the biggest, most monumental and avoidable fuck-up / self-harm exercise by a British government in living memory. Possibly longer. Sadly some people find it far more important to deny that and pretend that the vote was some kind of 'fair fight' and ignore the vast array of serious negative consequences, which will be felt for many years.

Meanwhile, everything Remain said was absolutely true...

Politicians lie, Remain lied just as much as Leave.

If you think some relatively minor trade disruption is the biggest political disaster in living memory I'd suggest you pick up a history book.

Rich_cb wrote:

Meanwhile, everything Remain said was absolutely true... Politicians lie, Remain lied just as much as Leave. If you think some relatively minor trade disruption is the biggest political disaster in living memory I'd suggest you pick up a history book.

Which particular Remain lie was as bad as the lie on the bus?

I'm not trying to say that there weren't exaggerations by Remain, but I can't think of any outright lies.

The bus slogan took the gross EU contributions figure instead of the net figure after the rebate. Would the slogan have been less effective with £200m as the figure? I doubt it, it's still an unfathomable sum for most people.

The biggest lies Remain told were about house prices and interest rates.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/20/eu-referendum-george-os...

The Treasury 'analysis' that produced those wildly inaccurate prediction was deliberately skewed in order to produce a politically useful figure for the Remain
campaign.

I would argue that utilising a supposedly neutral government department to produce engineered predictions in an attempt to influence a democratic vote is quite a lot worse than any bus slogan, however ambiguous.

Rich_cb wrote:

The bus slogan took the gross EU contributions figure instead of the net figure after the rebate. Would the slogan have been less effective with £200m as the figure? I doubt it, it's still an unfathomable sum for most people. The biggest lies Remain told were about house prices and interest rates. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/20/eu-referendum-george-os... The Treasury 'analysis' that produced those wildly inaccurate prediction was deliberately skewed in order to produce a politically useful figure for the Remain campaign. I would argue that utilising a supposedly neutral government department to produce engineered predictions in an attempt to influence a democratic vote is quite a lot worse than any bus slogan, however ambiguous.

I don't remember seeing that particular forecast - I'd take it as a plus if house prices were to be reduced (and I do own my own house).

I'd say that the bus slogan was more than just ambiguous - it was even denied to ever exist according to at least one person that was photographed alongside the same bus.

"Let's fund our NHS instead" is a classically ambiguous political statement.

It's deliberately not a promise or even a definite course of action.

In the context of a freestanding referendum it was perfect as the winners of the referendum would not necessarily be in government to make such decisions.

The bus slogan was incredibly clever in that regard.

It enraged Remainers and thus ensured it had enormous press coverage. Those desperately correcting the £350m figure were unwittingly helping the Leave cause by highlighting quite how much money we actually 'sent'.

I would tend to agree that house prices need to come down but I think we are very much in the minority, for most voters the prospect of a near 20% drop in house prices was terrifying. It was a huge story at the time, I'm surprised you missed it. The fact it was a deliberately false figure produced by a government department shows the extent of dishonesty throughout both campaigns.

Rich_cb wrote:

I would tend to agree that house prices need to come down but I think we are very much in the minority, for most voters property owners the prospect of a near 20% drop in house prices was terrifying.

FTFY

I wonder when or if we'll reach the point where youngsters that have little hope of owning their own home will out-number the property owners.

The interesting point will occur when remote working is fully established (I think we're pretty much there now tbh) and populations start falling rapidly in other nearby countries.

Why pay through the nose for a property in the UK when Italy, Portugal, Latvia etc will be crying out for people to come and live there. (All are projected for a 10-20% population decrease over the next 20-30years or so.)

Think they have been for years, no?

https://www.idealista.com/en/news/lifestyle-spain/2022/11/30/7292-towns-...

Pretty sure most people will stay put.  After all, they could have done exactly that kind of thing when we were a member of the EU!

I suspect for most personal ties / family / cultural familiarity / the UK's often proudly monolingual culture will keep things much as they are.

Whether we see more people headed in the opposite direction because of war / no water / famine / their country flooding is another thing entirely.  I suspect that for all kinds of reasons (yes - economic too, we're still looking good from Albania) we'll still be trying to "take back control of our borders" for decades!

There's been an urbanisation trend for a long time but we're on the cusp of something quite unprecedented.

Eastern Europe will see populations fall by nearly 40% peak to trough by 2050. Southern Europe won't be too far behind. Supply and demand being what it is we should see property prices plummeting in these areas so the pull factor will be far greater than it was in the past.

Further afield Japan's population is already decreasing rapidly and China's has just started to decline.

The sheer shortage of workers this will produce globally means countries are more likely to be competing for immigrants rather than putting up barriers to them.

Rich_cb wrote:

There's been an urbanisation trend for a long time but we're on the cusp of something quite unprecedented.

The collapse of modern civilisation?

Perhaps.

Most of those countries won't be able to afford anything like the welfare state in its current form once their working populations collapse.

Rich_cb wrote:

... some relatively minor trade disruption...