Why did traditional British Labour voters in working class areas vote for Britain to leave the EU? How could they?

I lived in Britain for 10 years, and like any curious international who lived anywhere out of London, I can tell you the answers are obvious, and economic.

Britain has deregulated its labour market more than Australia has. The central tenets of Thatcherism were not reversed by Labour successor, Tony Blair. Others have explained:

Blair’s programme for the 1997 election confirmed all Mrs Thatcher’s free-market reforms of a deregulated, non-planned, largely privatised economy with a flexible labour market, marginalising the trade unions and local authorities.

The manufacturing industries Thatcher smashed were not revived. Low-paid service industry jobs proliferate, minimum wage is shockingly low, staff protections are tiny.Zero-hours-contracts – where you are not guaranteed work but you must turn up to work whenever your boss calls you in or lose your job – are everywhere.

And compounding the misery of work is a society stripped of its most basic infrastructure. “Austerity” just means cutting funding to things that conservatives do not like: universal healthcare, welfare, public education and all other means to equalise society. British prime minister, David Cameron, has made plenty of economic excuses to slash funding to these services for the past six years and everything fromlibraries, to community centres, to homeless shelters even to covered markets, have been stripped, sold off or shut.

What’s been done to run down health, education, welfare and community development have left entire communities of exploited, low paid or unemployed workers to fend for themselves.

read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/labor-has-a-detailed-strategy-to-fight-for-fairness-this-matters

A number of women have contacted the ABC to say Liberal Party election campaign material sent to their home addresses has changed their surnames to match the man they live with.

Some of the women were married, some were not — all said they had never been registered anywhere under that name.

Kelly Tall said she was married but had never changed her surname, and said she was surprised when she got home yesterday and found a letter addressed incorrectly to her from Federal Liberal MP Nick Varvaris.

"We're married, but we got married in America, so I don't even think that Births, Deaths and Marriages knows about it — we never registered it here," she said.

Ms Tall said she was not pleased by the surname change.

"It's so 1950s that the assumption would be that a man and woman living together would share the same surname … it felt very presumptive," she said.

Melissa Ran said she was also shocked by the letter she and her husband received from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Liberal candidate Geoffrey Winters.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-28/election-campaign-letters-make-gendered-gaffe/7550354