Re:UK votes to leave EU
by soundwave106 on Friday June 24, 2016 @10:07AM
(#11969831)
The comment about the youth being easily manipulated was also frankly cartoonish and insulting.
If anything I see the reverse. Immigrant fears was the driving factor for the Leave vote. Given that UK tabloids have been doing quite a good job exploiting immigrant fears of late, who's being manipulated here?
The Donald Trump phenomenon has very similar parallels (build a wall!), demographics (white, leans no college education, leans elderly), and root cause (largely cultural discomfort). The rise of other far-right parties in Europe shows similar concerns.
This vote to me smacks of the decades of American Southerners (and others in similar areas) voting against their own economic interests in order to protect a race-based pecking order. As in the American South, now England. It probably won't be the last vote like this, either.
Britain has been in the EU for 43 years, 65 year olds were kids themselves when it joined. Everyone in Britain has been in the EU their whole lives. Couldn't it possibly be to do with anything more recent?