Brexit vote driven by education and income split holds lessons for the rich
Interactions in London leave one puzzled how Brexit could have been chosen in a country that gets so much from the EU and depends so much on hardworking Europeans
London makes Brexit feel like a sad, even absurd, irony. Ask anyone who has travelled there recently and they’ll recall being attended to by Europeans: the Spanish barista who made them their flat-white-to-go, the Italian waitress who served them lunch or the Hungarian Uber driver who fetched them from the airport. These interactions would leave any thinking person puzzled how Brexit could have happened in a country filled with hardworking Europeans that would obviously be poorer without them. Research published in 2014 by University College London showed that European immigrants who arrived in the UK contributed more in taxes from 2001 to 2011 than they received in benefits, “helping to relieve the fiscal burden on UK-born workers and contributing to the financing of public services”. Small wonder that London’s outspoken mayor, Sadiq Khan, called in September for another referendum on Britain’s EU membership, as prime minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party struggles to agree on ...
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