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Comment by arcanus | Hacker News Reader

> made fun of constantly on TV

This. I've heard far too many charges of racism and xenophobia, as if many legitimately believe 52% of England are racists.

Heaven forbid an electorate that has not been a beneficiary of globalism vote against the staus quo!

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In the British Social Attitudes Survey, 30% of the population said that they have "some level of racial prejudice". Given the stigma of those beliefs, I expect the real number could be significantly higher.

Attributing Brexit solely to racism and xenophobia is clearly unreasonable, but it is equally unreasonable to dismiss it entirely as a factor. There are some striking demographic correlations between Leave voters and people who admitted to being racially prejudiced.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/27/-sp-racism-o...

There are some striking demographic correlations between Leave voters and people who admitted to being racially prejudiced.

I think self-assessments on negative habits are wrought with problems, I wouldn't rely on those for anything.

But your comment made me realize something else: if people identify problems that you recognize, and you then see those people vilified as racists, you may start to question your beliefs. But the second and third time this happens, you may start to question the label itself.

I'm not happy with the above phrasing, so I apologize for my runaway train of thought. But I think people are happy to self-assess as racists because they identify with demonized politicians, not necessarily because they are aware of their own racism. It becomes a badge of honour, so to speak.

There's a rather wide chasm, though, between "some level of racial prejudice" and the fantastical "52% of the UK is racist." The first is plausible, the second is not.

I think almost all people are racists if they're coldly honest. Few are. They may recognize the feelings as "wrong" and be ashamed and deny having them, but it's human nature. We are drawn to people who look and act like we do, and we are suspicious of people who look and act differently from our group.

You're confusing thoughts with behavior, a racist is someone who exhibits racist behavior, those who recognize those thoughts as wrong, and don't act on them, are not racist. All people have wrong thoughts constantly, it's whether they act on them or not that matters.

In addition, Labor was against the EU before Blair, recently a Labor leader (Corpyn) who has been historically critical of the influence of the EU was voted in with a landslide (and establishment media called them idealistic young idiots); now the only reason to be against the EU is to be a small-minded racist pensioner.

edit: This is the cry of financial services who were using the UK as an EU tax vehicle, and the uncritical middle-class are following along with their complete blanketing of the media. The only benefit that the EU gave to the left is that British elites on average hate workers more than European elites. This credibility was completely lost by the way Greece was treated.

Well, there were people voting to leave and using "immigration" as their justification. I would never claim it was 52%, or that 52% of the UK are 'racists'.

However, it was a factor for some portion, and it may have been enough of a portion of votes to be part of the few % that gave 'leave' the victory.

Bear in mind the level of immigration to the UK has risen very rapidly over the past 10-15 years and it has not been evenly distributed across the country. There are places where people have seen the racial makeup of their neighbourhoods changed greatly, where once they could reasonably walk down a street and expect to hear conversations in their own language now it won't be unusual for them to not understand half or more of the conversations going on around them. A lot of people find that quite alienating especially considering it's happened so quickly.

When people talk about immigration that's really what they mean, I do genuinely believe that the UK is not a particularly racist place that the huge majority of people even those who cite immigration as an issue believe in "live and let live", but I think they feel that tolerance has been abused by a system that says free movement of people is meant to benefit them but so far as they can see it does not.

That hypothesis doesn't square with the fact that the most populous regions, London in particular where immigrants are much more likely to settle voted overwhelmingly for remaining.

The Guardian has a graph showing how areas with a higher % of immigrants voted to Remain http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2016/jun/...

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