The day we voted Brexit
I’m not proud to be British
This day marks the two year anniversary since our country decided to leave the EU. I had never been more disappointed in my country than I had on this day. I was, and to an extent still am, ashamed to be British. I believe the day we voted to leave the EU was the day we let racism and xenophobia win. Now I know what people are going to say, “Not everyone who voted to leave the EU is racist,” and of course you are right. But I do believe that the majority of people who voted to leave did so with prejudice in their minds.
The events leading up with Brexit were downright disgraceful to say the least. The entirety of the Brexit campaign was led with targeting immigrants as the root cause to every single problem our country was dealing with. House prices too high? Immigrants are buying them all. NHS at breaking point? Too many immigrants means waiting times are increasing. Not enough school places? Immigrant children are taking them all. We can see this story being fed from various outlets, like The Sun and The Telegraph. Sure, these outlets are hardly reputable, but words were fed to the general public time and again and, unless the public did some of their own research, they were bound to believe it.
This hate campaign was spearheaded by UKIP and their leader, Nigel Farage. The Telegraph article linked above is actually written by him. And this was a major part of the problem. Many media outlets gave Nigel Farage a platform from which to inject these points of views about immigration into the general public. Now, you may say that it’s fair they give him a platform on which to speak, that he is a leader of a political party and we should welcome all views in the vein of freedom of speech. Well, this always brings me to the comic below:
No platforming, which is denying a person a platform from which to speak on, is not actually denying their freedom of speech. Freedom of speech means that a person cannot be incarcerated for their viewpoint. No platforming is used when you are aware of someone’s point of view and believe that it is harmful to let their rhetoric be spread any further, therefore you deny them the ability to spread it to your community.
No platforming is extremely important. When there are people like Nigel Farage who seek to use their power to spread a message of hate and racist attitudes, it is important to not let this message be spread. However, this is not what occurred. Farage was allowed to consistently present misinformation to the public in order to draw false correlations that fit his world view. The Telegraph article above is a good example of this and they weren’t alone in this. Even the BBC gave a lot of air time to Farage and his views. You may claim that the BBC has a duty to give airtime to UKIP, in an effort to be unbiased. However, it has been shown that the BBC gave more airtime to Nigel Farage and UKIP than they ever deserved.
It was frustrating as he constantly cited immigrants as the issue without ever showing the full picture. Public services were undergoing cuts due to the austerity measures implemented by the Tory Government in order to reduce our debt, yet this was never mentioned. What about the number of EU migrants that worked in the NHS or teaching, that helped provide our essential services? EU migrants were shown to be a net contributor to our economy, but these facts were never shown or overshadowed by the negativity.
This path of misinformation and harmful rhetoric was not only taken by Farage, but the official Vote Leave campaign. Many of us will remember this:
The Vote Leave campaign used this bus to spread misinformation to the general public. The fact that more was not done to stop them from using such a tactic was outrageous. The figure, the one we pay to the EU, did not take into account the amount of money we receive back in kind. It was clear that this was a promise that could not be kept, so much so that MP Dr Sarah Wollaston, a former GP and chairman of the health committee, left the Vote Leave campaign because of it.
Unfortunately, this didn’t help. According to Michael Gove, the people have had enough of “experts” and it has sure started to feel that way. No matter how many reputable organisations came forward to reiterate the damage that leaving the EU would cause to our economy, their words went unheeded.
Many people bought into the negativity of immigration. Even my own Dad, who is an immigrant himself, thought the numbers were now too high and said we should leave. This is despite the fact that he was born in India and Indian born citizens in the UK are the second most common non-UK country of birth for UK residents. The fact that he couldn’t see through the lies in the campaign was frustrating, as he surely experienced plenty of this hatred himself when he came to this country.
The only thing that stopped my Dad from voting leave was the Jo Cox incident. The shooting of Jo Cox during the campaign was a very tragic affair. This was very clearly an act of terrorism, with the shooter shouting “Britain First” when he performed the act. My Dad decided to vote remain after this, saying he “Doesn’t want to be associated with those voting leave if that’s what they stood for.” The leave campaign didn’t stand for shooting innocent people, of course, but it was clear that the hatred in the campaign was getting out of hand.
A lot of people were shocked when the UK voted to leave the EU, but I wasn’t in the slightest. If you look back to the 2015 General Election you will see that, despite only getting a single seat, UKIP got 12.6% of the vote. UKIP are pretty much a one policy party, which is present in their name UK Independence Party. And nearly 4 million people aligned with their point of view, that immigrants were the root cause of all of our issues and we should be an independent nation.
The fall out after Brexit was deeply upsetting. On Facebook, an album of images went round. These images showed the attacks on minorities that had occurred in the wake of the results. Minorities were being shouted at to “go back home” and were being dealt racist slurs, a Polish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith was graffitied, race related crime rose heavily. The vote to leave had legitimised people’s racist attitudes, to these people they were now in the majority. Even if not everyone had voted for racist or xenophobic reasons, that didn’t matter. The campaign’s main tenet was that foreigners are a detriment to our society and, in their eyes, over 17 million people agreed with them. Attitudes such as this were rife:
This also made it clear that many people didn’t understand what leaving the EU actually meant. The man at the beginning of this video is clearly a racist, who somehow believes that voting for the EU will get these people of colour out of the country. He’s perfectly fine with EU citizens living here though, despite the fact that that is the very thing he has voted against.
In fact, there seemed to be quite a bit of regret in the way the vote went. Some sources said that if we had a second vote the result would have been remain, because the Brexit regret was that high. Just searching for “Bregret” brings up various ideas why. In the wake of the results a lot of the truth came out, such as the NHS bus being all lies, and this fuelled a lot of the regret. There are people who voted leave as a sign of protest, thinking we would safely remain, only to realise we wouldn’t. The future of the UK also looked uncertain, which worried people.
Scotland, as well as Northern Ireland, voted to remain in the EU but were now being dragged out against their will. Scotland’s want to remain in the EU was, in fact, stronger than their want to remain in the UK. Staying part of the EU was one of the biggest selling points for Scotland not becoming independent, and now that that incentive was gone a second independence referendum for Scotland seemed like an inevitable. Northern Ireland was even tricker as the border between NI and Republic of Ireland now had to be figured out. There is still some concern that a border will be erected in the event of a hard Brexit.
Divisions could clearly be seen in the UK. Despite the fact that politicians were constantly referring to Brexit as “a majority”, it was clear the results were just too close. By politicians sticking hard to the result, claiming “the people have spoken”, they were ignoring nearly half of all the people who had voted. More than that, they were ignoring the younger generation who had leaned very heavily to remain. Young people felt like their voices weren’t being heard and that the older generation had destroyed their future. This was causing a fracture in the political landscape in the UK.
The snap election showed this. In a bid to strengthen her majority, May called for a general election. However, all she did was weaken her position and waste precious time in negotiating with the EU. We still don’t have a clear vision of where Brexit is taking us and the relationship we will have with the EU. I fear that we could end up leaving the EU with no deal at all. The last two years, in my opinion, have been nothing short of a mess and I have very little faith that it will get any better. I personally think it is quite a shame, as I always saw the EU as a force for good. The EU had legislature and directives to help protect equality, human rights and the environment, and I believe we benefitted a lot from being a part of it. I will miss the EU dearly when we leave and wish, more than anything, that we could stay.
