Effect of the silence after the Brexit

Severine Seeliger
From Empire to Europe
2 min readAug 13, 2016

Brexit- I have to admit, I kind of “feared” that it would come to this result, but I still hoped that it would have been like in the Scottish referendum, when in public everyone was talking about „Yes “, but the result then turned out to be „No “.

You can say, that the people outside Great Britain were mostly shocked by the result, but not only outside of Great Britain, but within Great Britain itself, expressed in the political silence. It seemed as if the pro Brexit parties were shocked and not prepared for this outcome. Camron did the only thing he could do, to resign as Prime Minister. After that all eyes were even more fixed on the pro Brexit campaign leaders Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage who sat in silence.
The British want to know what is going to happen next, but through the political silence the public feels an insecurity of politics. No wonder people are on the streets demonstrating against the referendum. I can see that they feel betrayed by the remain campaign (referring to their behavior after the referendum) and I can understand their argument that the leave campaign did not explain the consequences of the Brexit (because maybe they don’t know them themselves?!), but does that give the right to backpedal?
The demonstrations mostly take part in London. Here the majority voted for remain which is not surprising, since here the financial sector dominates and jobs rely on the EU. However, we have to keep in mind that the referendum was not set up overnight and there was enough time for the British people to inform themselves of the consequences. But no one can blame the British for feeling insecure of what is going to happen next, after the leading politicians stepped down and no one seems to want to take over responsibility and leadership.

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