General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: ONE LAST TIME: Brexit, for the VAST MAJORITY of Leave voters, was about xenophobia [View all]drray23
(8,568 posts)I was born in France, I am a dual citizen (american-french) and now live in the US. I have observed the same phenomenon in France over the past decade or so. The rise of the right wing. In France, its the le pen 's (was jean-marie, now his daughter marine).
It has slowly seeped into the society. Even some of my own family members have disgusting xenophobic rants on facebook.
I have zero doubts that what auntpurl is saying is correct. I have visited the UK more than once, have friends living there and am following the politics by reading their newspapers online quite often.
This brexit was fueled by Xenophobia. Farage UKIP's party and Johnson (mainly Farage) have managed to blame the economic woes on immigrants and it worked.
The consequences of the brexit will be huge. One simple example that I know very well:
The UK is a member state of the CERN (the research center in france/switzerland). As such, they contribute to its budget. In return they carry out experiments and have scientists posted there. A full 25 % of the entire physics research budget in the UK comes from EU subsidies to the UK research. They can now kiss goodbye to this. There are also significant EU contributions for young british researchers (postdoctoral positions and such) which are going to disappear. The day after the election, I got a phone call from one of my former student, now a postdoc at cambridge asking me if I had a position back in the US for him..
Here is an article in Physics today which summarizes that situation:
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/PT.5.1078;jsessionid=F5P-iZfDsLZgJcXL0YfndD67.x-aip-live-02