Brexit: When did people get so angry?

Reading my Facebook news feed before the 2015 General Election, you would have thought that Labour would have smashed a landslide victory. Reading my newsfeed before the Referendum, you would have thought that the only possible outcome could be victory for Remain. Yet, after the Referendum, my newsfeed was this time filled with aggrieved Remain supporters — the reoccuring words in the statuses were shock, sadness and shame. The majority of my friends- lawyers, accountants, consultants and bankers- could not believe that the UK had voted to leave the EU.

Having a look through these statuses — something became quite obvious to me — we don’t really know why people voted to Leave. A lot of the debate focused around misleading statistics and claims about immigration. The Leave campaign was able to appeal to people’s growing dissatisfaction and anger with how things are — nicely captured in the common Leave phrase: ‘something’s gotta change.’ The question I’ve been thinking about it is, why are people so angry?

The easy response is to blame a Leave victory on a campaign of scare-mongering, uneducated voters and bigotry. Actually, it could be that the problems are much larger than that and reflect a growing dysfunction in our country. People are not angry at immigrants because immigrants have stolen their jobs. They are angry because they’re unemployed. People are not frustrated with the EU taking our sovereignty; they’re frustrated with political system that leaves them impotent to influence change. People are not upset with 350mil being sent to the EU; they’re upset because they experience a struggling NHS. We shouldn’t view this as a snap decision, but instead the unfortunate manifestation of years of neglect, inequality and policy failures.

I see this as a clear signal that something is fundamentally wrong with how things are working in this country at the moment. It’s also clear that we- the well-educated, well-employed youth of London- are really distanced from what is going on in the rest of the country. To be able to resolve some of these issues, I think we need to first take some time to undergo a proper investigation of what the real underlying problems could be. Now, more than ever, we need to emphathise with those whose views we disagree with so that we can look at what’s happened and try to identify how we have failed one another over the past decade. Once we have done that, then maybe we can look at policy to try and fix these issues. So yes, maybe I am ashamed at what has happened. But we should feel shame at the fact that we live in a country where food bank usage is surging, the national health service is crumbling, buying a house in London is almost impossible, that my sister will have to pay 3x what I did to go to university, that welfare has been reduced to those most vulnerable in our society — and that a large part of our population feel angry and let-down — not that we voted to leave the EU.