Well, I shouldn’t have to, but it was getting to the point where I needed to clarify, largely thanks to people making false claims. Perhaps people have forgotten the numerous times I’ve taken people to task for discrimination, here or elsewhere.
This is an issue that people have wanted a say on for a long time, mismanaged by successive governments. Cameron may have dictated the date, but Blair and his cabal largely set the timing. It was always going to blow it up. That it did during a Conservative government, when cuts are widespread and people are all too ready to blame the other, especially when the Tories actively encourage stories of benefit fraud or health tourism, while making promises to cut immigration to “tens of thousands” a year, implicitly saying “it is their fault, see”.
The EU is also to blame for the ill feeling toward it. It has pushed its projects far too quickly and with far too little consideration of how that affects member states. Anyone that has done any sort of experiment knows that you have to break new ground gradually. You try something, see if it works, leave it in if it’s effective, stop doing it if it isn’t. That’s not what the EU does. Wholesale change, all at once. Deal with it.
No British government has really managed to deal with it, so it should be little surprise that the public at large haven’t dealt with it either. The levels of immigration into this country over the past two decades have been unprecedented, and unevenly distributed. The vast majority of intra-EU immigrants end up in one of thirty Northern European urban centres. Some people, I suspect yourself included, probably don’t notice it at all. In other parts of the country, immigration is a dominant issue.
British attitudes surveys show that in thirty years, we’ve become a much more tolerant country. Only around 7%-10% people are genuinely racist, although around 20% of white people would still be perturbed if their kid brought a partner of different racial origin home. We are not there yet, both both those numbers were north of 50% in the 1970s. London is now (and I hate the term) a “majority minority” city, and very few give a fuck. We’ve come a long way, baby.
We haven’t suddenly become a bunch of racists, emboldened as a few hateful simpletons have been post poll. We have made the decision to leave the European Union, we need to start treating the people across the table as opponents and we need to contrive a way to make the best of it. Brexit under the right government would be an opportunity to rebuild the infrastructure we’ve allowed to atrophy so long, pursue an independent foreign policy which has some semblance of international law at the top of its agenda. As @cb-saint pointed out earlier, a vote to Remain was not a vote for the status quo, as @goatboy 's In The Army Now thread should illustrate perfectly.
