Brexit: we blamed the wrong people and are now on the wrong track

Today Article 50 is triggered and the UK begins the process of leaving the EU. How and why has this happened?

Last night Nick Clegg could be seen interviewing pro-Brexit voters in Ebbw Vale on BBC2's Newsnight.

These voters said they voted for Brexit because they didn't like the way EU money was spent on ridiculous dragon street sculptures and shiny buildings they didn't want.

What they wanted was their old steel jobs back or proper training and apprenticeships in new trades that were real.

Fair enough. But they blamed the wrong people.

It would have been the great and good in Wales who decided what the EU money was spent on, not Eurocrats.

And the jobs these steel workers lost went to Chinese workers, with whose wages they couldn't compete without subsidies.

It's the same in the US for steel and coal workers. And Trump's response is to repeal Clean Power legislation – as if it could give back those jobs.

But the train is going the other way, towards a clean energy future, and that is where the training of workers should be subsidised by the state if it wants to create real jobs that have a meaning and give back dignity to people and communities.

UKIP has lost its only MP. All the Brexit cheerleaders have vanished, abdicating responsibility for the decision they persuaded the nation was best – with a cocktail of what we now know were untruths.

No one had a plan – or intended to carry one out.

The real task all along behind Cameron's decision to call the referendum was the unification of the Tory Party.

That is now job done with the Tories set to rule forever in England, all opposition wiped out or in disarray.


Never mind the future prosperity of the country.

May is triumphant and although the Tories make mistake after mistake there's no one to call them to order.

I wish we could hold another Brexit referendum. Remain might well win now we know the emperor has no clothes.

But the right wing press, Paul Dacre's Mail, porn baron Richard Desmond's Express and the Barclay Brothers' Telegraph are still too powerful in shaping the flow of skewed facts to suit their warped agenda... to keep the Tories in power so they pay less tax.