I believe Brexit was the result of three main issues: immigration, the north/south divide in England and the protests of the elderly who have to exist on a basic State pension of £150 (€178) per week.
One Labour MP canvassing for a Remain vote told the BBC: “We tried to convince them by explaining some misconceptions about jobs lost to them and other lies told yet such was their intensity of feeling and belief that immigration will be halted that they always reverted back to their anti-immigrant stance”.
One can thank Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage for the chaos and uncertainties in world markets. I have a good idea what they told the voters but I have a better idea what they did not tell them.
Firstly, David Cameron had squeezed a deal from the EU that workers from the EU in the UK would not get social benefits for four years. Secondly, Britain is not in Schengen, and thirdly, illegal immigrants are liable to criminal prosecution if found working without a permit. Their employer is also prosecuted for taking them on.
Immigrants cannot therefore enjoy any social benefits unless they are legally working and paying taxes and national insurance contributions. As for taking the jobs of the natives, the National Health Service would collapse without these workers.
Farage and Johnson have a lot to answer for. They had no plans in the event of Brexit. Like frightened chickens who find themselves out of their coop, they had no constructive ideas on how to proceed and to obtain their next meal. They offered Britain its ‘independence’, and now the people that took their advice find out that Britain will never be independent – rather the opposite. Britain is a trading nation, always has been and always will be. Ask any commercial enterprise of any size what it depends on for its survival.
I saw Farrage being interviewed on television by a Maltese reporter recently. I was not impressed by his patronising tone or by his arrogant suggestion that Malta should leave the EU. Now he, Johnson and other Brexiters have quickly been discarded by the pragmatic British.
A change of heart towards the EU, however, may be too late after so many years of euroscepticism coming out of the tabloid press and so many British politicians.