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Comment by demonshalo | Hacker News Reader

I am unable to read this on mobile. Can anyone tl;dr plz?

Londoners voted against Brexit, yet Brexit happened. London will be in ruins now as a world capital, surely.

That's quite literally the summary, if you normalize for all the musings and feel-good details.

A careful reading of this article will show that the authore made absolutely zero objective, measurable predictions. e.g. the author doesn't say that the banking system will fail, or the stock market will crash, or that average incomes will fall relative to their continental counterparts.

Oh yeah, definitely agreed, which is why I added "surely" at the end. It wasn't anything objective that the author claimed that he expects to fail, like banking, or stock market, or anything else, just his vague abstract notion of failure.

However, the mood of the piece accurately captured my ambivalence about continuing to live in London.

I bought a house just before the election, but I'm finding it extremely hard to justify investing much in it because I can't really see a future for me in this country, if it continues to trend.

It's not about plummeting stock markets or failing banking systems. It's about living with the uncertainty as to whether I'll still be welcome as a non-citizen. The moment the UK state starts to vary treatment on important things like entitlements or tax rates, I'm out of here - I'm not like some cow to be milked for the benefit of the natives.

I reckon I'm 6 to 18 months away from leaving for someplace else.

London voted overwhelmingly against Brexit, but will this change as Brexit continues.

Quite a lot about how it feels different, about how London is a multicultural hub, about how migrants are thinking about leaving, about how London will change.

It's a mood piece, but a fairly accurate one from my point of view (lived in London for 20 yrs)

It's an opinion piece that celebrates the many languages, cultures and peoples that make up London today that came about in the last two decades and speculates that Brexit came about because of the divide between cosmopolitan Londoners and rural voters. This difference it posits was exploited by conservative media to inflame residents of rural and less urban areas to vote for Brexit, giving examples of opinion writers claiming Trump as their model and Obama'izing as the problem. It wonders but does not answer if London can continue to succeed as a cosmopolitan financial center of Europe after Brexit.

In other words the age old "champagne left" explanation for everything. Ignoring the massive class divide involved in the vote. A class divide that can be traced back to Thatcher and Reagan going union busing.

I'm in the middle of reading "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class" which is rather interesting - although it is from 2012 the attitudes is described are clearly what eventually led to the Brexit vote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavs:_The_Demonization_of_the...

> Thatcher and Reagan going union busing

What exactly do you mean by that if you don't mind me asking?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners'_strike_%281984%E2%8...

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