Three mistakes that the Federasts made which cost them the vote

The Federasts should have won the referendum, let's be honest about that. They had everything going for them, including the entire political machinery of all the main parties, a big chunk of the media, and the A/B social class who work for that media. They could use fear as their main weapon, and argue that we were offering nothing more than a  step into an uncertain future, which when you think about it is the potent argument that won the Scottish independence referendum for the Unionists in 2014.

They failed partly because of their own hubris, but mainly, I think,  because they did not realise that we were voting for different things than them. The Federasts are mainly social liberals, and they ran slap bang into social conservatism, and the latter won.

There were three factors that made our victory certain, and all of them were handed to us on a plate by the Federasts. The first was using individuals that a lot of people regard as downright weird to front the Federast campaign, the second was the gloating by rich dilettantes at working class people, and the third was the failure to take Brexit seriously. Put them all together and defeat for social liberalism was pretty much certain.

I don't know who had the bright idea to put Eddie Izzard up against Nigel Farage on the BBC's last Question Time before the polls opened, but it had to be worth a few thousand votes to Leave at least. You see, if you are a metrosexual hipster, then Izzard is the post-modernist voice that points to the future, but if you are a normal person then he is a weird bloke in women's clothing. Say what you like about Nigel Farage, but he comes over as being fairly normal, what with his wife, children, beer and fags.

The use of Izzard reminded people that whilst not all Federasts are weird, all weirdos tend to be Federasts.

In any fight between normality and weirdness, then normality can be expected to win because there are just more normal people in the country.

Then we had the site of Bob Geldof and his merry band of wealthy dilettantes mocking the fishermen. It was not only Geldof aboard his floating gin palace, we must also include the people who could afford to take time off work, then hire small dingies to sail in and out of the fishing flotilla. Trust me, the site of the rich flaunting their wealth at hard working men whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the EU and its bureaucracy was worth any number of votes for Leave.

Again, it reminded people that whilst not all rich bastards and their middle class stooges are Federasts, all Federasts come into those two categories. So the vote came down to a contest between the weird and the wealthy against the normal working people people of Britain.

Finally, the Federasts convinced themselves that they were the bright ones and we were the people too stupid to take seriously.

What they did not realise is just how heterogeneous the Brexiteers are. The activist core was made up of old socialists like me who have no interest whatsoever in social policy, but want the 1945 corporatist consensus restored so that everyone can earn a buttie without having to bust a bollock to get it. We were the first Brexiteers because we were the ones who argued in the 1983 General Election that the EEC was a capitalist plot to undermine socialism. We believed as we still do in a transfer of wealth from the wealthy to working people and their families, and accept fully that you cannot make a socialist omelet without cracking a few capitalist eggs. The biggest egg of them all is the European Union, so we have wanted to destroy from its very beginning.

We were joined by the solid, mustn't grumble, get on with life, middle classes of the 1992 Maastricht generation, who had decided that the EU was just not for them. Working together, activists from those two strands set up small anti-EU groups in the early 1990s that studied the EU and took it very, very seriously. Just about every Brexit group in this referendum had at least one activist from the those days who had dedicated his life to understanding the EU and could answer just about any question that was raised by a puzzled member of the public.

Not only that, but we could work in all areas and speak to just about everyone. The socialists could work the council estates and the old Tories could get to work with the provincial middle classes. It sounds as if we were saying different things to different people, but the message was actually pretty much the same because the middle classes are often as happy with railways and utilities that are in public ownership as we are.

The Federasts seem to live in a bubble in all the big cities, and could only speak to other members of that bubble. So they spoke to each other and reinforced each other's existing beliefs, all the while ignoring the wider society which was left entirely to us.

They seemed to have believed that the rest of society would just trot along behind them as they wandered off to the polls, assuming they did, since turnout was so low in the under 34 year age groups.

What they did not realise is that people were voting not just for their country, but against the Federast vision of what the country should be. We don't want to live in a land of wealthy weirdos and we turned out mob handed to make sure that we don't have to.