Understanding Brexit: "View from Wales: Town showered with EU cash votes to leave EU" [View all]

[auntpurl]

I strongly urge anyone who is still laboring under the misapprehension that there was organised, rational, considered thought behind the majority of Leave voters' decision to read this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/25/view-wales-town-showered-eu-cash-votes-leave-ebbw-vale?CMP=fb_gu

“What’s the EU ever done for us?” Zak Kelly, 21, asks me this standing next to a brand new complex of buildings and facilities that wouldn’t look out of place in Canary Wharf. It’s not Canary Wharf, though, it’s Ebbw Vale, a former steel town of 18,000 people in the heart of the Welsh valleys, where 62% of the population – the highest proportion in Wales – voted Leave.

To go there – along a new dual carriageway – and stand next to the town’s new sixth form and training college, a glass and steel architectural showpiece next to its new leisure centre, a few hundred yards away from a new train station, is to stare into the abyss of the UK’s failed Remain campaign.

Even Kelly, who has just finished a training session on a brand new football pitch, backtracks slightly after asking that question. “Well, I know … they built all this,” he says, and motions his head at the impressive facilities that are all around us. “But we put in more money than we get out, don’t we?”

snip

“There was only one word people had on their mind: immigration. They didn’t look at the facts at all.”

Are there any immigrants in Ebbw Vale? “No! Hardly any. And the ones there are are all working, all contributing. It’s just … illogical. I just don’t think people looked at the facts at all.”

It’s a town with almost no immigrants that voted to get the immigrants out. A town that has been showered with EU cash that no longer wants to be part of the EU. A town that holds some of the clues, perhaps, in understanding quite how spectacularly the Remain message failed to land. There’s a sense of injustice that is far greater than the sum of the facts, and the political landscape has fractured and split. Zak Kelly says that many of his friends, in what is Nye Bevan’s old constituency, voted Ukip.

Adding definitions for Americans:
dual carriageway: highway
sixth form: high school, basically
training college: like a vocational college
football: soccer
UKIP: fascists