Sorry for the delay, busy at work. And need to shorten things again (or else I also suffer from quote-and-rebut-itis) > Throughout most of history working clas

Sorry for the delay, busy at work. And need to shorten things again (or else I also suffer from quote-and-rebut-itis) > Throughout most of history working class people have owed their homes. Not true, in the UK at least. And working class people, as you're defining them, have only been around for a couple of centuries anyway. For example, the link below shows that in 1918, 77% of the UK dwellers were renters. Home ownership has increased every decade since, except the current decade. http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/a-century-of-home-ownership-and-renting-in-england-and-wales/short-story-on-housing.html http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/htt... Unless, of course, that wasn't a typo, and you actually did mean 'owed' :) > Up until the 70s in the States Up until the 70s in the States was a very unusual time, and the US itself was abnormally prosperous. It's not a good baseline. It's also not the UK experience. > This will be a minor heresy to you perhaps, but the middle classes actually consume the majority of welfare through indirect subsidization No, no heresy there. The middle-class sometimes wonk on about 'dole bludgers' here in Australia, but try and get them to hand back their tax rebate for whatever and you'll get a story about how somehow someone on the average wage (in a well-off country) is 'doing it tough'. However, welfare cutbacks will still affect everyone who isn't financially independent. I guess it's going to balance out in the UK - if the Leave stalwarts get their way, all the Polish tradesmen will be shipped back home... and the middle-class won't have the money to employ tradies to fix things. Fewer tradesmen, fewer jobs for them anyway :) > Most households also contained a cook in the form of a mother which cut down on living expenses This bit genuinely puzzled me. Earlier you said it was a bad sign of the times that the young couldn't afford shelter. Yet you paint a society of mothers having to live with their kids in some sort of indentured servitude as an example of the good times? That multi-generation families are bad when the kids live with the parents, but good when the parents live with the kids? Odd. Ultimately, the problem is that the referendum was won on lies that were revealed by the liars themselves. On the first day, Farage admitted that the NHS wasn't going to see the money that they advertised (and others have pointed out that the actual funds to the EU were half of the claimed amount). In the following days, Bojo said that immigration wasn't going to see significant reduction. So, the two major heartstrings, "those damned immigrants" and "all that money for ourselves", aren't going to happen anyway. Nor should one forget that a mere dissatisfaction with the government is not the same as wanting to have your country destroyed - far from all Leave voters wanted to dissolve the UK... it doesn't seem that the actual will of the people was to dissolve the UK and upset the apple/egg basket/cart that much.