[ianch99]

I came across this analysis on Reddit and thought it does a really good job of capturing the reality of our recent experience:

I think it's more complex than that.

Bear with me as this might get in the weeds a bit but there's a coherent point to this.

So immigration is good for the economy, most people understand that, but does that economic boost translate into improvements for normal people?

There was a significant increase in economic migration from eastern europe after the mid 2000's when Poland, Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU.

UK population Growth
You can see on that graph the effect of Poland joining the UK in 2003.

This was good for UK business, it was good for the exchequer too as it meant more tax was being collected. However we can't shy away from the fact that more people in a community means more competition for resources. It means more people needing housing, more people using public transport, more people looking for jobs and more kids in schools. Central government did nothing to invest in infrastructure to accommodate a sharply rising population, in fact they did the exact opposite.

What happened in 2008/9? A financial crisis that led to a Tory government and never ending austerity budgets.

So for local people across the country they experienced 2 distinct changes happening in their communities, they saw a rise in immigration with the accompanying demographic shift. And they saw the slow degradation of their public services. Housing costs kept going up, wages stagnated, schools hospitals and public transport deteriorated. So suddenly there is less to go around and more people to share it with.

What is really going on is that the economic benefits of migration aren't translating into better schools and hospitals or new infrastructure or an increase in affordable housing or any of the things that ordinary people need.

Instead the economic benefits of migration are being used to boost profit margins and to offset the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy. Because when the Tories designed a plan to address the economic impact of the 2008 financial crisis they wanted to shield business and the asset rich, at the expense of the general public.

When people in deprived parts of the country voted for Brexit, it was because they weren't seeing the tangible benefits of the EU, instead they were seeing their lives becoming measurably worse year on year due to austerity and instead of placing the blame on government policy, they were told that it was because that foreigner over there is taking something that belongs to you.

It isn't so simple as saying "people wanted the dossers and scroungers out", instead it's people not being able to square the circle of "migration is good for the economy" with "my living standards are dropping".

The underlying cause of Brexit was that ever since 2008 we've just been papering over the cracks of a broken economic model that has utterly failed a massive portion of the country, and unscrupulous politicians and media have been able to deflect the blame onto the EU.