Your editorial “Britain is becoming mean and narrow-minded” (Comment) asked: “What has happened to us?” There are many reasons, of course, but politicians and the media must bear most responsibility.
The coalition’s austerity measures, aimed mostly at the least fortunate, had the backing of the rightwing media that convinced millions that those in need of help were, in fact, “scroungers”. Television programmes that focused on the subject received extra publicity in the tabloids, while the callousness of government policies and the valuable work done by immigrants in the economy were ignored.
Rather than focus on true-to-life drama that might have enlightened viewers, the BBC, frightened by Tory politicians’ threats to its very existence, concentrated its dramatic output on inaccurate historical soap operas, that falsified the view of our past.
Add to this the government’s appalling attitude towards those escaping from wars, torture and extreme poverty, its concentration of investment in the south, the obvious electoral wheeze of Osborne that was the “northern powerhouse”, the policy of selling weapons to dictatorships regardless of their intended use and you get a society where fairness is nonexistent and that looks backwards to a fictitious glorious past.
When a politician emerges who promises change based on ethical policies, and who doesn’t treat the voters like mugs, he is not only attacked by the rightwing media, but by the newspapers leaning to the left, which for some reason see him as too different from the Tories to win an election.
Is it any wonder not only that the lies of politicians led to Brexit, but that Britain is in danger of being “swept along by a dangerous politics of hate”?
Bernie Evans
Liverpool
Your editorial puts its finger on a dangerous pulse, a darkening situation that could easily spiral into something a lot worse. It is a pity therefore that it repeated current rhetorical pieties with the claim that “the referendum resulted in a popular mandate that cannot be ignored”.
If it were true that 52% voted Leave it might have a point. In fact, 37.5% of the electorate voted Leave. This is not by any stretch of a clear mathematical mind a popular mandate.
Leaving aside constitutional matters about the status of referendums, what we have is a minority mandate based on a parody of the first-past-the-post system of our elections to parliament. Surely referendums should determine the popular majority will on a different basis to this, as happened in Scotland in 1979. If the referendum was a union ballot for strike action, the result would be declared invalid under current Tory trade union legislation. In this light, Tory pieties about respecting the will of the people are obviously hypocritical and inconsistent. There is no need to piously respect minority opinion in this way. When will a newspaper editorial be brave enough to follow this logic to its appropriate conclusion?
Peter Seddon
Brighton
The woman who felt the “nasty party” image was electoral poison now sees toxic rhetoric as a winner. The referendum was an electoral ploy intended to enhance David Cameron’s power base and his place in history. Theresa May’s honeymoon blandishments are now exposed as duplicitous and meaningless. By the next election, with the ruinous extent of Brexit damage felt, not just by the few but by the many she publicly courted, she might regret giving full rein to her personal ambitions. Having created a mean-spirited Britain she should expect no mercy.
Carolyn Kirton
Aberdeen