Cable: Brexit voters are elderly and fear migrants

SIR Vince Cable was last night accused of ‘patronising’ Leave voters after mocking their concerns over immigration.

The Liberal Democrat leader-inwaiting said that those who voted to Brexit were ‘overwhelmingly elderly’ people for whom immigration was a ‘massive issue – though they never encountered any’.

He also said that civil servants were briefing that Brexit wouldn’t happen.

Sir Vince, 74, said he had spent the election campaign in church halls in Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire where people were worried about immigration.

‘They were overwhelmingly elderly people who were obsessed by the worry of 80million Turks coming to their village,’ he told journalists at a Westminster lunch.

‘Immigration was a massive issue for them though they never actually encountered any.’

Acknowledging that his comments were ‘slightly facetious’, the former business secretary said: ‘[Among] that age group, which was a very powerful one, mostly Conservative voting, there was a sense of nostalgia.

‘The Britain they had been brought up in and loved and felt comfortable with was no longer there. That was why they voted the way they did.’

Sir Vince, who is expected to be confirmed as the next Lib Dem leader by the end of the month, also caused controversy by describing some cities, including Blackburn, Blackpool and Hartlepool, as the ‘left behind’.

Saying they were not ‘first tier’ like Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne and Sheffield, he said there was a ‘residue of bitterness about economic failure and decline’.

He suggested that the British Indian community in Leicester had voted for Brexit because they had been misled about visas being given to people in India.

Sir Vince, who won back his seat of Twickenham in West London at last month’s general election, also reiterated comments he made last weekend that there was a possibility that Brexit would not happen. ‘More and more people – politicians and civil servants – [are] saying actually this thing isn’t going to happen and it’s based on several things,’ he said.

‘I think the sheer enormous complexity and difficulty, and then something like Euratom [the treaty that governs the movement of nuclear materials] – an issue that nobody had thought about, but we’ve got Euratom times a hundred out there and nobody can see a way through that.’

He said that as a result, many people increasingly thought that Britain would not leave the European Union despite Theresa May’s attempts to form a ‘very British’ Brexit coalition with Labour.

Sir Vince said his party would offer a second referendum on Brexit. ‘It may well be at the end of the day that a majority of people would say Brexit and that would kill the issue forever,’ he said.

‘I am no great fan of referendums. But this particular process has been set in train by a referendum and the only way it could be closed as an issue is if we were to have another one.’

Last night, Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, criticised Sir Vince’s ‘ patronising’ comments.

‘This is the kind of patronising nonsense we have come to expect from out of touch London metropolitan Left-wingers who have a superiority complex, like Cable,’ he said.

‘I am sure this tripe goes down very well at his Guardian-reading seminars and nut cutlet dinner parties in Twickenham. No wonder the Lib Dems are haemorrhaging votes.’

‘It was a massive issue for them’