leave = brexit consequences ( Archived) (786)

Capricorn143: I have watched a TV crew interviewing people on the street - everyone said the main reason for voting out was immigration from Muslim countries. I am also curious what the UK will do to stop the Muslims - well, not accepting Merkel's ridicuous quota is a start although it is a very little step forwards in terms of numbers.

purr4mance: found this interesting cap...Xenophobia exists in basically every country on Earth. The UK is no exception: Polling data shows high levels of hostility to immigrants going back decades before mass immigration began. But the huge increase in immigration in the past 20 years made this sentiment politically potent, fueling an anti-immigrant backlash.

Over the course of the past 20 years, the percentage of Britons ranking "immigration/race relations" as among the country’s most important issues has gone from near zero percent to about 45 percent. Seventy-seven percent of Brits today believe that immigration levels should be reduced.
As a result, anti-immigrant demagoguery has become politically potent. The UK Independence Party (UKIP), led by a Donald Trump–style populist demagogue named Nigel Farage, began life as an irrelevant anti-EU party in the early '90s. But in the past 10 years, UKIP’s poll numbers have soared: It got 4 million votes in the 2015 election, the third-largest national vote total in the country.
This is probably correct. The EU is by far Britain’s most important trading partner, and losing the privileged access to its markets granted by membership would likely be major shock.

But this framing of the debate — keeping immigrants out versus protecting Britain’s economy — is concerning. It means the question at stake in Brexit isn’t, "Immigration: good or bad?" It’s, "Immigration: is it so scary that it’s worth risking a recession to try to curb it?"

Harsh anti-immigrant sentiment has become normalized and routinized by the Brexit debate, making it simply a fact of British life.

And now Leave has won — proving that xenophobia not only is powerful in modern Britain but actually has the ability to shape the course of the country's entire future.

tomcatwarne: We don't ;like the Americans much either

purr4mance: how you doing cousin..

tomcatwarne: I don't like the people from the Isle of Wight

Capricorn143: Just proves that this issue is more important to people than anything else - I reckon it is a healthy survival instinct that has kicked in.

As for the the words like "xenophobia" and especially "islamophobia", I find them without meaning, like Maher said: how can it be phobia?

purr4mance: so you'd rather be with the people from the island of wong...