Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

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The sad thing of course was that the people coming across on boats or clinging to the underside of lorries etc are not EU citizens arriving legally. Plus it's not like EU is the only source of migration (hellow commonwealth).

I think that the Brexit vote landed at a time when there was increasing general alienation within society, a general feeling of growing wealth inequality, of social injustice etc. We saw it with Trump's election, we saw it with Brexit. We'll probably see it with a reform majority in the UK parliament next election too.

There are global trends that the PM of the UK cannot change, but we live in a world of instant gratification so if the current PM can't make things change literally overnight, people are angry and annoyed.

Go read the comments section on any UK newspaper (left or right, tabloid or broadsheet) and the comments are really eye-opening (recommend doing this to at least get a flawed and partial cross section of what the vibe is). People are quick to anger and quick to point fingers. Might explain why we've had so many PMs these past few years.

> I think that the Brexit vote landed at a time when there was increasing general alienation within society, a general feeling of growing wealth inequality, of social injustice etc

Hmm GDP was growing well, inflation was down, real household income was on the rise, annual wage growth was on the up, it was a long time since the great financial crash, unemployment was crashing in 2013/2014, and things comparatively were quite cheap.

Though I can't recall the general sentiment at the time. Net migration did have an historic spike (part of a longer term rise) for a couple of years. Perhaps the Brexit campaigners capitalised solely on that?

Crazy to imagine that economically things were doing great, by many metrics, but so many people got duped into thinking some foreigners were going to tank everything

(Personally, it was a fantastic period. Wages were good, jobs were good, things were cheap. I know many people who bought their first house during that period)

While the economy may have been doing ok and all that, I think its still a lot to do with the feeling that everyone around you is doing _better_, and the increasingly prevalent need for instant-gratification.

A lot of this probably comes down to cheap-credit. I am by rights in the top 1% of national income in my senior-ish BigCo job, yet I look around at the traffic lights and I am surrounded by Range Rovers, Teslas, Porches SUVs etc. I dont think I could afford one of those (I tend to buy 3 or 4 year old cars outright), yet the stats say I earn more than 99% of people ... either most days I am surrounded by the 0.1% club, or people are spending a lot of their income in PCP etc.

Is it a matter of "keeping up with the jonses"? Are people thinking "Well these people around me are driving nice cars and I am not, so clearly I am getting dicked over here somehow and everyone else is earning boatloads and I am not." Replace nice cars with expensive holidays, house renovations, latest iphone, latest shoes/handbag or whatever. And all amplified and magnified by social media. Its all the same: conspicuous status baubles making people feel like they're on the loser end of the spectrum.

See enough of that over and over (and you will if you use social media) and it'll shift your world views.

I think this observation is true. I'm not nearly as high as you, more close to top 15% but only mid-20s still. But this is something I see with a lot of people my age too that I categorically know are not earning nearly as much as me. They'll have < 3yo BMWs, Mercedes, Audis etc. and you just know most of these are all on PCP finance probably costing upwards of £400pm

You quite often read statistics about how so few people have more than like £3k in savings and, to me, I can never understand how. But when you start to look around you at how many people are living this "buy now, pay later" lifestyle you start to realise that, actually, for many this is just the norm.

My brother's gf is the personification of this. She dropped out of A levels straight away, got accepted onto a nail salon apprenticeship which turned out just to be a way for the owner to get cheap labour, as is common with many of these I understand. So now she just works 3 days a week for a few hours at a time doing nails. But she always has the latest iPhone, always buying shed loads of clothes and other consumerist crap. No idea how she funds it, my parents think my brother's being taken for a ride

There were all of the negative feelings caused by general alienation and wealth inequality, but people don't blame alienation and wealth inequality - they blame immigrants. Because the people causing the alienation and wealth inequality told them immigrants were the real cause.

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