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1) The civil service let us down by not planning for Brexit. I can’t believe the government didn’t have contingency plans for the fact that the Leave campaign didn’t have any. What kind of government leaves important issues like the future of the country to people like us? All we said is that we wanted to leave; why does that make figuring out where to go our job? It was the government’s responsibility to deliver on our promises. If they fail to do so, it can hardly be our fault.
2) No one at the wheel. When we said we wanted to take back control, we obviously meant that figuratively. It didn’t mean we don’t want to delegate.
3) Angry Remain campaigners talked down the country. This panicked us into an economic downturn which would undoubtedly have been avoided if they had not insisted on pointing out news which appeared to suggest they were right. Their selfish inability to admit they were wrong ensured that they were proved right, at great cost to the country.
4) The lefty media. By reporting daily on the sterling sell-off instead of hushing it up, the metropolitan elite in the mainstream media let down the public by telling them things they are better off not knowing. This also alerted currency speculators to things they would not otherwise have noticed. The media failed in its moral duty not to report unwelcome news.
5) George Osborne spooked markets. By not appearing in the first days after the vote to reassure markets, the chancellor let Britain down.
6) Mark Carney spooked markets. By making too many regular appearances designed to calm nerves, the governor of the Bank of England let Britain down. Did we mention he used to work for Goldman Sachs?
7) David Cameron should never have resigned. The Leave campaign always made clear that it wanted him to stay on to lead the exit negotiations even though his last negotiations were a catastrophic failure and in spite of our warnings that he had absolutely no credibility any more.
8) Blame Boris. He left the detailed plans for how to manage Brexit on the bus.
9) Blame Boris some more. We had thought that the lean and hungry sharp-suited Boris Johnson was the man to lead our country but it turned out that we confused him with someone else and that the real Boris Johnson was in fact a large blond bumbler with no idea.
10) Greedy bankers. The ordinary decent citizens of this country were let down by greedy bankers, who put their own welfare ahead of that of people they had never met at the other end of the country. There was no way we could have known they would be seduced abroad by the lure of higher profits and salaries.
11) The French. We thought they’d be more British about this, accept the democratic outcome and work with us to make the best of it. Instead of being British about this; they insisted on being all French and spent the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme plotting ways to steal lucrative business from London.
12) The Germans. We really thought they would help us more this time. We’ve always been able to count on Angela Merkel in the past.
13) Cowardly employers. Craven businesses failed to show faith in the country by continuing to hire people to do jobs they no longer needed.
14) Foreigners let Britain down.Refusing to accept the democratic vote of the British people, foreigners moved their investment elsewhere, thereby failing to all pull together to make the best of it.
15) Immigrants. Are you thinking what we’re thinking?
16) Experts.We needed better experts than those we are fed up listening to.
17) We are all in this together now. So it’s as much their fault as ours.
18) We weren’t supposed to win. It never occurred to us that Remain would be so incompetent. Remain should have run a better campaign.
Full article on Financial Times (subscription required)