The main thing that gets to me is that none of this was necessary.

Leaving was definitely unnecessary, but I think the intuition of a lot of Leavers was more on point than it seems.

Take immigration.

Everyone told them they were being dramatic and then the 2011 census comes out and it turns out in 10 short years some towns are now 10 or 20% immigrants.

We tell them immigrants make them richer and the bank of England says, actually, no, immigration has driven down wages for the poorest.

They're told immigrants pay more in than they take -- but not if you take into account displaced British workers and remove Swiss bankers.

Then we're constantly told that hospitals are overrun and we're not building enough houses. But more and more people are coming. You go to London and nobody there is British but there seem to be lots of jobs for them and lots of obscenely rich English people. You can't even find a pub open in half the towns in the north and you've got people in London opening cereal cafes. It's like the Capitol from Hunger Games.

There are ways to fix this without leaving the EU, but their intuition that nothing will change because it benefits rich Londoners too much is probably right. They are getting left behind and the sad truth is that there isn't much of a logical reason to invest in small ex-mining towns. We're almost better off just paying them to be poor. So if they want to survive or compete they're going to need to be illogical.

/r/unitedkingdom Thread