Unscrupulous Claims Win UK Referendum

Rudyard Kipling, in Epitaph for a Dead Statesman, wrote:

I could not dig: I dared not rob: 
Therefore I lied to please the mob. 
Now all my lies are proved untrue 
And I must face the men I slew. 
What tale shall serve me here among 
Mine angry and defrauded young?

This might, instead, have been penned for Nigel Farage, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson et al who defrauded the UK's voters last Thursday by promising to cut immigration, strengthen the economy and pump an additional ￡350 million a week into the National Health Service. By Friday, when the result of the referendum was known, Johnson and the Eurosceptic, Dan Hannon, admitted that, in all probability, immigration would not fall; the pound's value had sunk to a thirty year low; and, regarding the extra money for the NHS, by Friday there were "no guarantees".

As Nick Cohen (no relation) wrote in The Guardian, "If you believed Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the Brexit vote was a moment of national liberation, a day that Nigel Farage said our grateful children would celebrate with an annual bank holiday." 

During a bitter campaign, the electorate was misled by the radical right of the Conservative Party while the Labour leadership was largely absent and the voices of the Liberal Democrats and Greens struggled to be heard. There can be little doubt that Edmund Burke hit the nail on the head when he said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Although, in this instance, it was more a question of not being heard to say anything. What resulted was a Prime Minister and a Chancellor attempting to defend the status quo while the radical right queued up to promise the electorate what it wanted but which they knew they could never deliver.

The Leave camp simply have no plan - other than to seize power at any cost, including workers' rights, environmental protection and respect for the truth.