General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Greenwald calls-out the dominant Brexit narrative [View all]Human101948
(3,457 posts)What has certainly happened is that decades of globalization, deregulation, and policy changes that favored the wealthy have left Britain a more unequal place, with vast regional disparities. Its the shape of our long lasting and deeply entrenched national geographic inequality that drove differences in voting patterns, Torsten Bell, the director of the Resolution Foundation, a bipartisan think tank, commented on Friday morning. The legacy of increased national inequality in the 1980s, the heavy concentration of those costs in certain areas, and our collective failure to address it has more to say about what happened last night than shorter term considerations from the financial crisis or changed migration flows.
That argument sounds persuasive to me. On Thursday night, it was the early announcement of a huge Leave vote in Sunderland, a depressed city in the Northeast that used to be a big shipbuilding center, that indicated the way the night was headed and caused the pound sterling to plummet in the Asian markets. Meanwhile, the Remain vote was consistently stronger in prosperous areas. Economics matters.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/why-the-remain-campaign-lost-the-brexit-vote?mbid=nl_160625_Daily&CNDID=27694289&spMailingID=9111072&spUserID=MTE0MTYzMzk5ODg3S0&spJobID=942410256&spReportId=OTQyNDEwMjU2S0