I'm pretty sure in saying that you must be referring to outside of the EU immigration which relates to Norway. If all of s sudden 100K Poles wanted to migrate to Norway they could not stop that. The English electorate seems to have a problem with inner EU migration as well. That would not go away. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't actually know how the figure that she's got it down to is calculated, only that its been widely bandied about and hasn't been disputed, and that she's done it in about 6 months. I'm guessing that she's done it through some hardline exclusion filtering, and reinforced it with what must be akin to 'not welcome' campaigns, as I can't imagine she could have achieved it passively. If Norway has reduced their immigration to something like 200 a month, I'm struggling to believe that Europeans aren't getting caught in this? It seems remarkably low at face value. There might be adminsitrative fudges involved of course concerning accountancy and the issuing of temporary visas as a opposed to residency permits? I don't know
I have little doubt that the immigration issue is three tiered in so far as the public are much more receptive to western Europeans, followed by eastern Europeans, and finally what I'll loosely call non-EU (which is really code for muslim/ islam in the public consciousness). Basically there are degrees of hostility
Polling has now been conducted of course on the cross tabs of why people voted the way they did. 58% of conservative voters, voted to leave, as opposed to 37% of Labour voters. The strongest remain by political party came from Plaid Cymru incidentally, and I'm definitely bemused by the 4% of UKIP voters who supported Remain
By issue it broke down like this
Nearly half (49%) of leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the EU was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”. One third (33%) said the main reason was that leaving “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders.” Just over one in eight (13%) said remaining would mean having no choice “about how the EU expanded its membership or its powers in the years ahead.” Only just over one in twenty (6%) said their main reason was that “when it comes to trade and the economy, the UK would benefit more from being outside the EU than from being part of it.”
If we accept that the best proxy for racism is to be found in the immigration related description of the "chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders.” Then that accounts for 33% of 52% leave voters (about 17% of the overall electorate). It's broadly consistent with the 16% that UKIP polled at before they lost about half of this support in a general election campaign. It's also worth remembering that on the political litmus paper, UKIP isn't a neo-fascist to the same degree that we see in France and Holland, and increasingly Germany with AfD. The UK doesn't really have one ever since the BNP went bankrupt. 17% is still lower than that which is routinely being recorded in continental Europe, and of course, if you're prepared to accept Donald Trump as being cut from a similar cloth, lower than the United States too. Trump's ban on Muslims, polled as a specific policy in isolation, is supported by 50% of Americans now as reported on the Reuters rolling poll
Personally, I'm growing increasingly interested in the developing concept of 'democratic insurgency' which is what we're seeing across the globe. Were it not for Hillary Clinton (who is arguably a unique candidate in the moment of happenstance), the probability is that Bernie Sanders would be fighting an election against Donald Trump right now. Sanders wasn't even a Democrat, and quite who Trump supports is anyone's guess. This would have been remarkable, but the same thing happened only this month in Austria when we saw a Green narrowly beat a neo Fascist, with the two established parties failing to even make the run off for the first time ever. This week Iceland voted in an outsider with no history of public service. I see little prospect that in France, Francois Hollande will make the run off similarly. If they were on FPTP, the strong possibility exists that they'd vote in the FN. Poland and Hungary have both voted for extreme nationalist parties. Greece voted in Tsipras of course, whilst the spectre of Golden Dawn gathers support still. Italy even had to have a technocrat imposed on them (Mario Monti) albeit they've now reverted to their usually merry-go-round with a banking system that could require them to break EU state aid rules any day
If France wanted to demonstrate to the world how strong pro-European sentiment is there, they could always call a referendum of their own and try and face down the 61% who Pew Research discovered described it as "unfavourable". We know they wouldn't dare though. Same with Italy.
Basically whole structures are breaking down, and I think the bigger influence on this is the hangover from the credit crunch. The establishment parties of the west have pedalled the idea of what I'll call a 'data led' recovery. Certain industries in certain geographies have recovered, but others are seeing next to no benefit for close to a decade now. There was some lousy messaging too from Remain. When George Osborne warns of dangers of job losses at JP Morgan does he not realise that if you're on the minimum wage in Middlesborough you're reaction to this is likely to be "good, see how you like it". Basically it isn't happening and people feel it. This is where the push back is coming from, and when that happens vacuums open up and populists emerge.
I think one of the more revealing insights into this, for me at least, came from Margaret Hodge in the wake of Rover's closure of Longbridge. She genuinely told the redundant workers that there was a new Tesco opening (it never did incidentally) and they could all get jobs there. Politicians rarely accord 'income' and 'wages' the importance that they do 'jobs'. Cameron and Osborne have been equally guilty. It blinds them. So far as I can see, there have been new jobs created, but a lot of them are tertiary. We've seen an explosion in commission only sales jobs for instance. We've seen spikes in low paid, low skilled activity which often come with degraded T&C's. Residential care for the elderly (leave voters) is another job growth area, but you'll struggle to build a dynamic exporting economy in these fields.
You can pretend that everything is rosey for only so long before you get a push back. If a populist emerges and says "I can put this right", people are receptive to the hope that they can. Even if they ask "how?", and are met with the answer "I can", they're still prepared to say "oh well, it can't get any worse, lets give it a go"
I saw Joe Scarborough (who you'll doubtless be familiar with) recanting a story recently about how he drove 'outside the bubble' to attend a friends wedding. As he got further away from DC he started to encounter more and more Trump posters. He says how he eventually pulled up (I think he was on his way to PA or OH) and rang Mika and simply said "Trumps going to win". It reminded me of a 'Remain' campaigner (forget who now) who was working Wales, recanting how he came back to London to be met with deluded jubiliation from out of touch campaigners who felt their campaign within the M25 was going really well
Tony Blair on MSNBC earlier this week made a good observation about how the centerists who'd swept the 1990's and first part of the 2000's stopped being pro-active and dynamic, and have instead become the establishment, settling into a modus operendi of administering and defending the gains, rather than pushing new ideas forward. This means they surrender the progressive territory, and when the credit crunch hit, the alternative has been filled by populism. He also made an interesting point about social media has been used to message this. It wasn't the message itself that he said was difficult to combat, but the sheer speed with which it can be deployed and take hold - but that's for another day. I've just checked Ann Coulter's account incidentally, and she has 883K followers
I'm no saying that racism isn't a factor, of course it is, and its a significant one, but there are a lot of moving parts involved to this, it isn't confined to the UK. As a tag I quite like "democratic insurgency", I think it captures it well. The root is in economic tensions, that's one goes in one end of the cranking machinery, what comes out the other - well that's where things are breaking down
