Former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, a leading pro-"Brexit" campaigner, celebrates the results of June's referendum
Leading Off
● United Kingdom – referendum on EU membership (June 23)
What happens to a country when its voters, against almost all advice from both elected officials and a wide range of experts, decide to disregard all of it and vote for a nation-defining change anyway? The United Kingdom, the European Union, and the world are now finding out, after the British people voted by a small but definitive 52-48 margin to leave the European Union, consequences be damned. Britons have set their country on a course to a brave new world and can only hope that in the end, they find a better one than Aldous Huxley imagined. But don't hope too hard.
There are many, many angles to explore when it comes to "Brexit," the ugly portmanteau coined to describe the British exit from the EU, so we'll start at the start: Why did U.K. voters vote the way they did? While the few elite voices supporting Brexit often pointed to diminished British sovereignty as a consequence of EU membership, voters themselves overwhelmingly saw Brexit as the only way to control mass immigration, particularly from Eastern Europe. All members of the European Union are part of a single economic market, of which a key pillar is freedom of movement, just as in the U.S.—itself a single economic market—where goods and people are free to move from state to state without impediment. That means any citizen of an EU country can move to any other EU country with almost as little effort as an American moving from Oklahoma to California.
Starting with the admission of a number of Eastern European countries to the EU in the 2000s, there's been significant migration to the U.K., particularly from Poland. But there's a much greater difference in both GDP levels and culture between EU member nations than there is between states in the U.S., which of course share a single primary language. And with the U.K. government essentially powerless to curb immigration, voters who feared or resented the influx of poorer, non-British immigrants saw Brexit as the only way to control their country's borders—and they took it. (Sound like the backers of any presidential candidates you know?)
Support for "Leave" was widespread across England and Wales, two of the U.K.'s four constituent countries, which both voted 53-47 for Brexit. The cosmopolitan big cities where residents have generally embraced both immigration and a more pan-European identity backed "Remain," but elsewhere, Leave not only prevailed overwhelmingly, it cut across traditional ideological fault-lines, too. Labour heartlands in the north of England voted for Leave, for instance, but they were mostly matched across the swingy Midlands and the Tory south. Indeed, Leave carried every region of England outside of London and also largely won in Wales outside of the capital of Cardiff. Proponents of Remain had banked on fears of economic insecurity driving swing voters back to them in the end, as Leave was widely forecast to significantly hurt the British economy in both the short and long-term, but enough voters either didn't believe that message or didn't care.
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