South west here, and it was the same here. We got so much EU funding for so many things - for a while we had the fastest broadband in the UK (yes, including London and the south east) because the EU paid for it, not to mention roads, farm subsidies, and a bunch of other âregional development fundâ stuff - and now all that money is gone and the UK government havenât replaced it with anything. Brexit support here was like 60%, because too many people believed the lies.
I think ultimately what most people were really voting for in the referendum was an end to austerity and an end to top-down decisions made by faraway people who donât understand the real lives of people in these regions. The mistake they made (because of lying politicians) was that the problem was the EU, rather than our own government.
I think we should have just renegotiated stuff with the EU on the threat of leaving rather than playing our entire hand
I agree. There were definitely a few things with the EU that werenât working well. The one that stirred up a lot of emotion here was the matter of fishing, because there was a lot of very real tension between local fishermen and the fishing boats from France and Spain. But leaving the EU wasnât the right answer to these problems. Having an adult conversation to find a way of improving things was the right way.
