The vast majority of the city and other business leaders where asleep at the wheel - what they should have done is had a quiet word with Harry Peirce (MI5) at the club about these dangerous subversives.
I have always wondered how true this is. It is certainly a common claim, but anecdotally I know several small business owners who I am fairly sure voted Leave because they didn't agree with EU-style regulation such as the subject of today's discussion. And this is in the Cambridge area, which overall was literally the most pro-Remain place in the entire country. Most of those people did not talk much about their views on Brexit in public because of the peer pressure, which I think was unfortunate. Even if few minds might have been changed in either direction, it would have been better for the issues to have been properly debated.
This is false, because every time it was presented for a vote Leave won. If the majority were Remain, Brexit would necessarily not have happened.
As for the alleged ordinary voters, what did they want out of it and what are they actually getting out of it?
The Conservatives have a majority and are there any Remainers left in that party - I thought most of them had been purged before the last election?
My MP still has posts on her blog about how ardently pro EU she was and how she believed staying in the EU was the best idea. Not long after the referendum and May coming in, she was fully behind Brexit and ready to do whatever it takes. A lot of Tory MPs will just go with the prevailing wind on everything and this is also how they stay in power because being progressive is not a vote winner in a broadly (small c) conservative country.
And the ones that didn't were purged
Interesting guy, my opinion of him changed (for the better) when I found out he presented a regular Jazz show on the radio.
The basic premise of the "it's an establishment stitch up" argument is that Britain will be weaker and poorer, but the establishment will end up with a much, much bigger slice of the smaller pie such that they gain overall. It's not clear to me how that's supposed to work though. How is this pie-grab supposed to work as the pie itself shrinks? Some people might manage to pull it off, but the whole establishment class as a group?
Anyway, this whole premise flies in the face of who we know voted overwhelmingly for Brexit - ordinary British voters, many of them up north and from working backgrounds - even as the actual political parties, majority of MPs and most business leaders were arguing against it. The evidence for an establishment stitch up rests on a few very specific data points, like the fact that Jacob Reese Mog and some of Nigel Farage's hedge fund friends have already and will continue to do quite well out of it. They're hardly "The Establishment" as a whole though. They're just some of the people I was talking about trading on volatility, and hardly representative of the financial sector as a whole that is getting screwed over by losing passporting.