ONE LAST TIME: Brexit, for the VAST MAJORITY of Leave voters, was about xenophobia

[MADem]

221. You might want to tell NPR how much you disapprove, too.

They've got the same POV:

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/06/25/483362200/brexit-whats-race-got-to-do-with-it

The campaign to get the U.K. to leave the EU (also known as the "Leave" campaign) was spearheaded by the right-wing, populist UK Independence Party, or UKIP. The party, led by Member in the European Parliament Nigel Farage, says that the EU "means the end of the UK as an independent, self-governing nation with its own government and its own borders."


For months, UKIP has fought for the United Kingdom's independence from the EU — some say by capitalizing on racially charged animus toward immigrants. In the Washington Post, writer Anyusha Rose points to the Leave campaign as evidence that in the U.K., "racism is no longer racism — it's legitimate opinion."

Areeq Chowdhury, a British writer and the founder of WebRoots Democracy, said last week that it's "important we remember that this is a referendum that has only been made possible due to a long, hard-fought campaign by those on the far-right and political movements ridden with allegations of bigotry, xenophobia, and racism." He continues:

"

Nigel Farage — the UKIP leader who once said that his party 'would never win the n-gger vote,' refers to Chinese takeaways as 'a chinky,' and said people would feel 'concerned' to live next to Romanians — is the man who should take a significant chunk of the credit for us having this referendum. It was his party's success in the European Parliament elections, as well as defections which he brokered from the Conservative Party, which has led us to this point today."

Zack Beauchamp over at Vox writes that the UKIP has spent the past 10 years "focusing, obsessively, on the threat from immigrants, from both inside the EU and out."

Washington Post is saying the same thing:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/25/the-uncomfortable-question-was-the-brexit-vote-based-on-racism/
The uncomfortable question: Was the Brexit vote based on racism?

...In the run up to the E.U. referendum, the official "leave" campaign initially tried to focus on sovereignty and economic issues. However, polls clearly showed that immigration was one of the most, if not the most, important factor for voters. “Immigration is by far the best issue for the ‘Leave’ campaign,” Freddie Sayers, editor in chief of the polling firm YouGov, wrote. “If the coming referendum were only a decision on immigration, the Leave campaign would win by a landslide.”

So gradually, Boris Johnson and other prominent faces in the campaign began to talk more negatively about immigration.

In the heated atmosphere before the election, the lines between anti-immigration rhetoric and pure racism became blurry. Just a week before the election Farage, who was not a member of the official "leave" campaign but ran his own movement, unveiled an advertising campaign that showed a crowd of refugees and migrants. Many critics noted that it resembled propaganda put out by Nazi Germany. To make matters worse, the very next day British member of Parliament Jo Cox was killed. The man alleged to have shot and stabbed Cox, a pro-"remain" campaigner and supporter of refugees, is said to have shouted "Britain first" and had links to U.S. white-supremacy groups.

Despite a backlash to this rhetoric, when voting day came around, more British citizens chose to leave the E.U. than stay. They did so against the advice of the majority of the country's politicians and many experts from around the world, who said the country's political and economic standing would be deeply hurt. Some experts suggest the explanation for that decision has to at least partly be put down to racism and xenophobia.

“There isn’t anything subtle about this sort of campaigning, it’s comparable to Nazi propaganda and just straightforwardly racist,” David Gillborn, a race relations expert at the British University of Birmingham, told the Associated Press of Farage's campaigning. “The fact that people could have voted for this despite the crudest representations of racism is quite astonishing.”.....