Brexit : The Human approach to data

At Gyana, data is alive, it is not just an inorganic mass of numbers but alive and breathing, generated by real people. So when we wanted to understand Brexit from a central London perspective- we not only used inorganic numbers, we actually went out on the streets, roamed in the rain and spoke to people to affirm, deny or challenge the data.

We analysed Brexit voices and the results were surprising…..see them for yourself here www.gyana.uk

We went around the streets of Central London asking people “ How has Brexit impacted you ? “ and we actually recorded them. The only constraint we gave them was — “ please keep it to 30 seconds !”

We found majority of people in central London voted “remain”. In our sample size we found only 6.2% “leave” supporters — so,no surprise there.

However, we found that the major emotion connected with the responses of “remain” camp , was not anger, but “shame” — in a way they feel very humiliated, especially the ones who were immigrants, their sense of insult was deep. One woman said to me “I now look down when I walk on the streets — but for 15 years I ran a business, I employed both EU and UK people, I lived with pride, I created jobs, I shared love- its all over today”.This is quite sad — we are making rightful citizens aka humans lose dignity. This cannot surely be the best way to conduct a democracy ?

Also, we found that most immigrants in Central London were not on benefits- they said they ran businesses, worked hard and barely went to NHS — so they do not understand why they paid taxes only to be called “freeloaders”.

so they do not understand why they paid taxes only to be called “freeloaders”.

The “leave side” of the camp were not just old ones, as we thought- we found a few young ones as well ( themselves second or third generation immigrants ) fearful of sharing their resources ‘on an island’. It seemed the fear was not so much about “jobs than about losing identity”.

To me it seemed like a loud siren telling London to wake up and stop dreaming that it lives in a vacuum, all its capital gains go outside — all the views are trapped in our own echo chambers- we forgot to connect to the rest of the country and in the end organic mistakes rise slow but cost heavy…All the hedge funds and investment banks and media houses and fashion headquarters and the tech giants could not save themselves because millions of people live “outside London” and we forgot that a country is attached to the city borders- we need to reach out to them and share with them and include them in our folds… In the end it bit us hard.

a loud siren telling London to wake up and stop dreaming that it lives in a vacuum

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