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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

Such a waste. A once great nation dragged into obscurity by OAPs, handout addicted farmers and racists.

The UK has consistently been ranked one of the least racist countries in Europe, both pre and post referendum.

Do you know what stokes division? Demonstrably false narratives and accusing vast swathes of people who hold myriad views on an immensely complicated subject of racism. Whatever makes you feel better, I suppose.

Not wanting to be in the EU makes you a racist how exactly? Are we using the word “racist” in the same way as it was applied in the last four years in America?

I visit UK often because of family ties. The most frequent answer I get when I ask people why they voted to leave is that foreigners come over and take their jobs and put a strain on NHS, vaguely referencing the influx of Polish immigrants they got when Poland entered the EU.

So maybe not racists, but xenophobes for sure.

Does wanting one’s own country to focus on its citizens first make one a xenophobe?

Yes, nationalism and xenophobia go hand in hand.

Short answer yes.

EDIT longer answer:

You live in a society of people, the people that you interact with daily are people just like you. Some of them might be immigrants and some of them might have a foreign citizenship. That does not make them any lesser. They pay taxes to the same government as you, they abide by the same rules as you. If they brake the law, they have to answer for it just like you. The only reason I can think of why they shouldn’t accept the same benefits from your government as you is xenophobia.

Not to mention that all the complaints about "putting strain on NHS" were started by Murdoch's Sun.

From my experience:

1. I have a lot of friends from all over the world, that live in the UK. They have been there since their late 20's, make far more money than the median, and hence contributed a lot of money to NHS

2. I was living in UK during the Polish influx, and what I observed was that British people would prefer to use Polish builders as they were doing better work and got things done faster. My landlord was complaining that she was unable to book her favorite Polish builder for some work in the house.

Not saying that this is always the case and there weren't people who arrived to UK to take advantage of the better social services, but that's what my experience was, and maybe it's because of the specific bubble I live in.

Blaming foreigners for ills they do not cause is essentially, perhaps even literally, what the word “xenophobic” means, and migrants to the UK are collectively blamed for things they do not cause.

Can you define "focus on its own citizens"?

We're relatively lucky in the UK that our problems with racism are generally subtle enough to be missed by Americans - the EU referendum was fought on seriously dodgy grounds (even ignoring the lying)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farag... for example.

With the EU the racism on display is usually against eastern European migrants rather than black people.

That is not to say that even the most hardline Brexiteers are necessarily racists - they're naive and stupid but not racist.

It's complicated. I know some minority ethnic British people who voted for Brexit for entirely xenophobic reasons ... and others who would swear up and down that they were not racist one minute, and then spend the next spouting the most hateful sort of lies. Fear and hatred are powerful emotions, and the flames of discontent have been fanned for years by tabloid propaganda and industrialised hate.

Older South Asians still remember Commonwealth visa free travel and think the EU is racist in favor of white people

I can understand that perspective.

On the other hand, most of the people who I know who voted 'Leave' had poorly disguised (and sometimes completely insane) xenophobic rationale for doing so.

Also - and significantly - racially motivated aggression and hostility toward my (mixed race) family suddenly increased to intolerable levels in the weeks and months following the Brexit vote.

The whole affair has been an undeniable victory for the nastiest sort of hatred, and has demolished the pride I felt in my country as a bastion of reasonableness and tolerance.

In isolation this would be a fair point.

However, in the context of Brexit, Farage proudly stood before “breaking point” posters that showed the same scenes as a literal Nazi propaganda film picturing large streams of Jewish refugees as a threat:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-the-poster...

And it's examples like this which help us to understand Brexit (and the broader resurgence in neofascism globally).

I think you've got it wrong. Being a racist was a motivation for one part of the Brexit movement — to keep out the Poles and Romanians and all those smelly people. That wasn't an attitude they got from voting, rather, they voted (along with the other brexiters) because they already had the attitude.

It’s the opposite; being a racist (and particularly a credulous racist) makes you likely to oppose Europe. Remember this, for instance? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farag...

And also the whole narrative that everyone in Romania and Turkey was going to move to the UK, and so on. Race-baiting was a big, important component of the Brexit campaign.

Obviously not everyone who voted for Brexit was a racist by a long shot, but it’s naive to think that it wasn’t a factor.

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