UK Brexit - should the UK leave the EU?

I am slowly starting to understand that this has really happened (like many, I did not expect it to really happen) and I am wondering if we will be looking back at this moment in 20 years time and say "This was the beginning of the end" :-(

I am reasonably sure that in my home country Austria (the one that narrowly averted getting a right-wing president some weeks ago) the right-wing party also had been clamoring for years to leave the EU, but so far, nobody had been taking them seriously, as this was just an impossible thing to happen.

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Indian Summer said:
Opposition to immigration is not the same as xenophobia, especially not in the UK which already has a very diverse population. It's about jobs, housing, pressure on infrastructure because of a rapid population increase.
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I was surprised and delighted that the No vote won.
 
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Well, it is more the legal immigration politics that the "Leave" camp does not agree with, is my impression....
 
A little light-headedness from the other side of the Atlantic ... at least until November ...

British Lose Right to Claim That Americans Are Dumber - The New Yorker

And it seems that some are already regretting their votes ...

'I really regret my vote': The Brexit voters who wish they'd voted In

The Article said:
One voter, named only as Adam from Manchester, told the BBC: “I didn’t think that was going to happen.

“My vote – I didn’t think was going to matter too much because I thought we were just going to remain.
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Andy_T said:
I am slowly starting to understand that this has really happened (like many, I did not expect it to really happen) and I am wondering if we will be looking back at this moment in 20 years time and say "This was the beginning of the end" :-(

I am reasonably sure that in my home country Austria (the one that narrowly averted getting a right-wing president some weeks ago) the right-wing party also had been clamoring for years to leave the EU, but so far, nobody had been taking them seriously, as this was just an impossible thing to happen.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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I was listening to NPR today. At one point, they asked a historian what the view of yesterday's events would be 50 years rom now, and he said: "That it was the greatest voluntary harm a nation had inflicted on itself to date in modern history."
 
At this point in history, I think Germany is much more likely to be a peacemaker than an aggressor. They set out to learn from their history, and damned if they didn't succeed.
 
EU referendum: How the results compare to the UK's educated, old and immigrant populations

The results show that university graduates were the most likely people to want to remain in the EU - while those with a GCSE or equivalent as their highest qualification were more likely to back Brexit. No surprise there.

Mischief said:
It's really sad that the older generation of Brits decided to play with the future of the younger generations in such a reckless way.
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Yes, it's very selfish.

shyvas said:
I was surprised and delighted that the No vote won. I`m sick and tired of those that call people that don`t agree with the illegal immigration policy, racists.
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Leave voters might be upset anyway as the immigration levels may well be unchanged. Leave campaign rows back on key immigration and NHS pledges | Politics | The Guardian
 
shyvas said:
I was surprised and delighted that the No vote won. I`m sick and tired of those that call people that don`t agree with the illegal immigration policy, racists.
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The UK already had special circumstances EU membership, which allowed it to choose whether or not to adopt each of the EU's rules on immigration, visas, and asylum. So even if a voter here opposed our immigration policies, that would be to do with the government that chose to adopt them, not the EU itself.

We will likely still have to abide by the EU laws once we have left, but we will now have no say over the creation and implementation of those laws.

And there was definitely a racist element to the way those leading the charge on Brexit used false immigration information to gain support. There's definitely a general atmosphere of right-wing racism in certain parts of the UK - people who look or are known to be foreign are gleefully being told to "go home" and "you're next". The Brexit debate has made Britain more racist

Not everybody who voted leave did so for racist reasons. Not everyone who has issues with the immigration policies of this country and the EU is racist. But there is racism in this country, some of the rationale for voting leave was racist, and voting leave for immigration reasons was ineffective at best and damaging at worst.
 
I typed a response out before, but then deleted it, but I thought I may as well share my personal experience!

The London boroughs I grew up in were very ethnically diverse and they had a very strong Remain result. However, now I live in a borough of London that voted to Leave and I feel really gutted about it. I didn't grow up or go to school or college here, but I moved here because of my husband.

The amount of racism and xenophobia I've seen since I've lived here has been staggering. I remember being called a n*gger-lover when I was young because I had black boyfriends (this was the late 1980s) and I hadn't heard that expression again until I moved here. I've heard n*gger and p*ki spoken quite openly by people on the streets, in shops, in the workplace! My in-laws voted Leave and they are flat out racist and freely admit that they would prefer to live in areas with only white people. The Leave campaign hasn't been that blatant, but IMO the language and tone has often been a watered down version in some ways.

My grandparents moved to London from Ireland and faced discrimination and prejudice so I suppose that is another reason why hostility to immigrants really infuriates and sickens me. Immigrants come here to work and have families, just like other human beings who were born here do.

As I said before, not all Leave people are racist, but to deny that some of them are is a joke.
 
I knew about the upcoming vote, but I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't know that much about the issues driving it. I was familiar with some (very possibly racist) concerns about immigration, and also some concerns about a gradual loss of UK independence if the EU held too much power over its member nations, but I hadn't come to a conclusion of my own.

I wasn't surprised about how close the vote was.
 
There appears to be considerable concern as to how this will affect the still tenuous political and social stability in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland received quite a lot of economic support from the EU, and unless GB can (and actually does) replace that, the situation may destabilize.

I think that those who voted to leave weren't well informed (or didn't care to think about) the many, many ways GB's economy is intertwined with that of the EU generally. So many things need to be sorted out, from separating out fishing rights in different areas, to what happens to the millions of Brits living on the continent. It's going to be a massive undertaking.

I would suspect that the big international banks are already starting to plan how to move as much of their operations to the continent as possible. The Asian and other companies that have built manufacturing facilities in GB aren't going to move their current operations, but I would think that there will be a strong incentive to build future facilities on the continent; it is, after all, a much, much larger market than GB is by itself.
 
Indian Summer said:
My heart bleeds for those stock traders. Not.
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It's not the traders who lose money when the market tanks, you do realize that?

It's people's pension funds, investments, retirement funds. Commodities took a hit, which means farmers take a hit.

Large drops in stock markets can affect nations' economies as a whole. The people who suffer from that the most are the people at the bottom of the economic pile.

So, revel in Schadenfreude if you must, but at least be aware that you're celebrating the losses of people other than "stock traders."




It continues to surprise me, how little educated (?) people comprehend about who and what is affected by the various threads that are interwoven in our rather complex society.
 
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Mischief said:
It's not the traders who lose money when the market tanks, you do realize that?

It's people's pension funds, investments, retirement funds. Commodities took a hit, which means farmers take a hit.




It continues to surprise me, how little educated (?) people comprehend about who and what is affected by the various threads that are interwoven in our rather complex society.
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Lol, you beat me to the punch. Exactly, I completely agree with you.
 
My friend is one of them it affected. She checked her 401k and it lost a lot of money.

For the non-US people who don't know, a 401k is a retirement account that you deposit part of your paycheck into and your employer contributes to, and the taxes on it are deferred until you retire and take money out. A plan administrator for the company invests the 401k money into stocks.
 
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