Fantastically moving reaction by Financial Times reader to Brexit.

The above words of alleged wisdom from a Financial Times reader have gone viral on Twitter. “Wisdom” is an unduly flattering description of those words I think, but let’s examine them. (I’ve interspersed the passage – in green italics - with my comments)

“They have merely swapped one distant and unreachable elite for another.”

Wrong. Under rule from London, the supreme political authority, i.e. democratically elected politicians, can be voted out at the next election. That’s not true of the EU. MEPs can of course be voted out, but they don’t have much real political power. I.e. a large amount of political power rests with unelected bureaucrats.

As regards “distant”, a look at a map will confirm that London is about three times nearer the home of the average Brit than Brussels.

“Secondly, the younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries.”

Wrong. People have simply lost the AUTOMATIC right to live and work in other countries.

“We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied.”
 
So you live in a country with about 50 million people (the UK), where you can travel from one end of the country to the other very easily. Plus you can communicate at the speed of light with any of those people. And you don’t have an adequate choice of friendships and marriage partners? Complete BS. What must it have been like in the average village in the middle ages where people had a choice of about two marriage partners? Was everyone miserable because of that? If so, I don’t remember reading anything about that when I did history at school.

Moreover, after the Brexit process is complete, Brits will not stop visiting mainland Europe, nor will mainland Europeans stop coming to Britain for whatever reason.

Conclusion: lost friendships and marriages my arse, if you’ll forgive my French.

“Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors”.
 
Wrong. I travelled round Europe before the EU existed. Passport checks at frontiers too about fifteen seconds.
 
"Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel. When Michael Gove said, ‘The British people are sick of experts,’ he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has led to anything other than bigotry?”
 
Well can you blame the plebs for taking a jaundiced view of those “professional economists”, “experts” and “intellectuals”?

First there were the plonkers who failed to regulate banks properly prior to 2007/8, which resulted in the bank crisis.

Second, the so called experts then spent far longer getting us out of the subsequent recession than we spent fighting WWII.

Third, at the height of the crisis two groups of so called experts the IMF and OECD were advocating consolidation / austerity: the exact opposite of what was needed.

Fourth, several economics professors at Harvard (e.g. Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart) vigorously backed the above IMF/OECD call for austerity.

Fifth, there’s the small matter of catastrophic youth unemployment in Greece and Spain.

Of course the average pleb would not be able to reel off all the above examples of stupidity by “intellectuals”. But plebs probably WILL HAVE read about each of the latter five groups of plonkers at some point, and firmly fixed in the subconscious of the average pleb will be the impression that many self-styled intellectuals are nothing of the sort: many of them are actually pseudo intellectuals, charlatans and poseurs.

The plebs thus decided to rely largely on their own common sense, flawed as they would doubtless admit that to be.