From The Times:
What lay behind last year’s historic vote to leave the EU? As soon as the referendum was over, Brexit advocates began to claim it was all about “freeborn Englishmen and women casting off the EU’s federalising yoke”. No, says Clare Foges. To see the reality, you need only look at the polls that YouGov has been conducting fortnightly since 2010. Immigration was and is the “clincher” issue. Most Leavers didn’t vote for the UK “to take back control” in an abstract sense, but to retake control of its borders and slash immigrant numbers. Problem is, it won’t happen. The Government has long “controlled” non-EU net migration (which exceeds EU net migration), yet has never been able to stem it, any more than it has illegal immigration (reckoned at 250,000 a year). What hope, then, of Theresa May “controlling” the flow of EU arrivals now her party has lost its majority and is under huge pressure to accept freedom of movement as part of a soft Brexit? So after all those promises and all the pain of Brexit, there’ll be “no major reduction of immigration at the end of it”. I fear we’re set to become a nation fuelled by the “greatest sense of betrayal in generations”. (Clare Foges, The Times, re- published in The Week, 22 July 2017)
I don’t at all perceive any sign of rising fury or sense of betrayal – yet. The Brexit referendum vote was met with delight by the Little Englanders and those who believed that £350 million would magically be applied to the National Health Service within weeks, instead of being sent to crafty foreigners in Brussels. The vote was narrow and the Remainers did a dire job at getting over the dangers of Brexit.
Since that referendum, which should have been treated as advisory, pending full research into the implications and into the dozens of complex problems to be sorted out (or not), the Remainers have acted like so many resigned sheep. No agitation at the fecklessness and cluelessness of the government. Seems it’s a done deal, except that it isn’t. Yes, the general election didn’t go well for the Brexiters, but only because, at long last, young people put down their cellphones and voted, but not really for the principle of the EU, real politique and their own futures.
Ms. Foges’s sense of betrayal will come, but far too late. The economy is already stalling. London, for one, is being run day to day by immigrants, and will still be run by immigrants in ten year’s time. Only by then the full horror of what was so casually done will have seeped through, and then it will be too late. The perpetrators of this stupidity will blame someone else, but, nonetheless, it will be the Brexiters who will have visited the greatest historical betrayal in British history upon the population. For the moment the latter are asleep.
Maybe the only way the Brexiters can get rid of the immigrants is when it dawns on the world that China is top dog and Chinese is the language to learn. Then even young foreigners will stop coming to London to hone their English and go to Singapore or Shanghai to learn Chinese. Young immigrants are not in London because of its good bus service.
Comment from the Guardian, :
Total lack of preparation
The government has asked for a report on EU migrants’ contribution to Britain – but it won’t get answers until a few months before Brexit takes place. Amber Rudd is being criticised by the opposition parties for acting “a year too late” to find out the part EU nationals play in the economy. The Migration Advisory Committee is due to deliver its findings in September 2018 – Britain formally exits the EU in March 2019. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, said: “The NHS, businesses and universities that depend on European citizens need answers now, not in another 14 months’ time.” The Confederation of British Industry said the review was a welcome step but both EU workers in Britain and the companies employing them urgently needed certainty.
Sadly, I think a greater sense of betrayal will emerge if immigration fails to come down compared with if the economy goes into decline. This is because most Leave voters are willing to inflict ‘significant damage’ on the economy in order to achieve Brexit. http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/6z56phuq56/InternalResults_170421_BrexitExtremism_W.pdf. If immigration comes down significantly (which I accept is unlikely), the labour shortages we already face in the NHS and social care will become more acute. Remain voters would become angry that the economy and public services have been harmed due to Brexit. But you’re absolutely right that if immigration fails to come down, Leave voters will feel betrayed. Either way, the referendum has entrenched a new and unbridgeable division in the country, where at least half the population will feel disillusioned.
It was a terrible mistake to have the referendum in the first place; the Leave campaigners could make unfulfillable promises, knowing that they wouldn’t be held to account if they won. Far from uniting the country, the referendum has made the electorate, and the Conservative Party in particular, hopelessly divided. We only had the referendum because David Cameron promised one, thinking he wouldn’t win a majority and so wouldn’t have to deliver on his promise. Cameron also saw the referendum as the most effective way of uniting the Conservative Party. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum result, the Conservatives looked united and formidable. Now, they are a laughing stock of a government and Cameron has been proven definitively wrong.