PM aide Dominic Cummings blames 'rich Remainers' in Brexit snap at TV reporter [View all]

[Denzil_DC]

Privately-schooled Dominic Cummings, whose baronet father-in-law owns a haunted castle, had a characteristically blunt response while leaving his £1.6m townhouse
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The senior No10 advisor told a TV reporter: "You guys should get outside London and go to talk to people who are not rich remainers."
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The son of an oil rig manager and teacher, who has repeatedly portrayed himself as the scourge of the civil service establishment, was educated at the fee-paying Durham School and Oxford University.

He and his wife Mary Wakefield - whose father, Sir Humphrey, owns 'Britain's most haunted castle' Chillingham Castle in Northumberland - bought their Islington townhouse for £1.65m in 2013 and later applied to extend it.

The luxurious home features a separate 'Tapestry Room', 'Reading Room' and 'Formal Living Room' spread across two floors.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/pm-aide-dominic-cummings-blames-19928675

I don't know about anybody else, but I'm heartily sick of Cummings and other patronizing shady overprivileged wealthy useless conniving wannabe class warriors co-opting "the working class" and "northerners" as a stick to beat anyone who's not as barkingly bonkers in favour of plummeting out of the EU with no safety net or parachute as they are, as if either of those blocs is monolithic.

From 2017, by LSE researchers:

Brexit was not the voice of the working class nor of the uneducated – it was of the squeezed middle

Over the past year or so, Brexit has been interpreted as the symbol of a historical shift to anti-establishment politics, kicking off a surge in the ‘outsider’ vote across Europe and the United States. In line with this narrative, initial interpretations of the vote depicted Leave voters as marginalised segments of the population – both educationally and economically – who had channelled their discontent through the referendum.

Another popular view that emerged is that Brexit was the unified response of the working class which finally found its long-lost voice. Yet subsequent, rigorous analysis showed that the profile of Brexit voters is more heterogeneous than initially thought, and that it includes voters with high education and ‘middle class’ jobs. If Brexit is really connected to socio-economic factors, how do we make sense of this apparent contradiction?
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The left-out argument has been constructed around voters whose low levels of education render them unable to compete with those with a university degree in the globalised economy. Academic research has already argued against this. For example, Goodwin and Heath show that voters with A-level education from low skilled communities had similar pro-Leave voting profiles to those with no education.

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Our findings confirm a negative relationship between education and voting Leave: the higher the level of one’s education, the lower the likelihood of them voting Leave. Our findings, however, reject the dichotomous view of the low-educated Brexiter vs the high-educated Remainer, by showing that two groups with intermediate levels of education (voters with good GSCEs and A-levels) were more pro-Leave than the low-educated (those with no formal education and with low GSCE grades).

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/brexit-and-the-squeezed-middle/

From last May:

It has become commonplace to ascribe the leave victory in 2016 to the votes of working-class Labour supporters. This is misleading. Most leave voters live in Conservative constituencies. The Tory shires mattered more than Labour’s industrial heartlands.

A YouGov analysis of more than 25,000 voters suggests the following division of leave voters in the referendum, linked to the 2017 election result.

• Middle-class leave voters: Conservative 5.6 million; Labour 1.6 million.

• Working-class leave voters: Conservative 4.4 million; Labour 2.2 million. (A few of the remaining 3.6 million leave voters supported smaller parties; most did not vote in 2017.)

So the largest block of leave voters were middle-class Conservatives, followed by working-class Conservatives. Just one in eight leave voters was a working-class Labour supporter. To be sure, had even half of these 2.2 million voters backed remain, the result of the referendum would be different. But to suggest that the referendum’s 17.4 million leave voters were dominated by working-class Labour supporters is simply wrong.

From last March:

8 reasons we should stop assuming “northern” means “pro-Brexit”

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1) Many regions within the North were majority Remain – and many down South were majority Leave
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2) Everywhere has large numbers of Leave and Remain voters
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3) The North has an awful lot of people – but not necessarily enough to stop Brexit alone
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4) Differences aren’t as big as percentages make it look
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5) Non-voters narrow the margins further
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6) Opinion polls show Remain gaining ground in the North
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7) Referendums don’t work like elections anyway
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8) In general, stereotyping is just a bad idea
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https://www.citymetric.com/politics/8-reasons-we-should-stop-assuming-northern-means-pro-brexit-4513

Cummings isn't a subtle person. The battle lines he wants to draw up for an upcoming election are obvious: people versus parliament; rich Remainers versus - well, who the hell knows, hard done by? - Leavers; his nihilistic world view, dubious motives and ultra-wealthy backers versus what passes for reality nowadays, the national good and those of us who aren't rich by any means, just collateral damage in his machinations.