alt Hacker NewsWell, they would have loved to stop migration and voted in droves for brexit for that. Cant have that though, democracy or not, can vote for any party, but cant have that result they all promise before the vote closes and never deliver once the vote is in.
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The sad thing of course was that the people coming across on boats or clinging to the underside of lorries etc are not EU citizens arriving legally. Plus it's not like EU is the only source of migration (hellow commonwealth).
I think that the Brexit vote landed at a time when there was increasing general alienation within society, a general feeling of growing wealth inequality, of social injustice etc. We saw it with Trump's election, we saw it with Brexit. We'll probably see it with a reform majority in the UK parliament next election too.
There are global trends that the PM of the UK cannot change, but we live in a world of instant gratification so if the current PM can't make things change literally overnight, people are angry and annoyed.
Go read the comments section on any UK newspaper (left or right, tabloid or broadsheet) and the comments are really eye-opening (recommend doing this to at least get a flawed and partial cross section of what the vibe is). People are quick to anger and quick to point fingers. Might explain why we've had so many PMs these past few years.
FWIW, Brexit was never, ever, ever about stopping migration.
It was about right wing elites deciding which migrants they wanted, and at best about regaining control of that policy from the EU. It was sold in a racist and bigoted way.
The reason we have less control over illegal migration is exactly Brexit, which, as people were warned at the time, torpedoed our actually cushioned position with respect to "first safe country" asylum rules, and meant we had no cross-border agreements with France.
The "Brexit" that people thought they were getting was always in their own mind because it had no definition. It was an imaginary victory which only has downsides, just as was pointed out.
Absurd to suggest that anyone voting for Brexit knew what they were voting for - by design of the pro-Brexit shysters.
Almost as if democracy isn't real and all statecraft is driven by intra-elite conflicts.
Not only the Brits. Take a look at this, especially the charts, and compare it to what us Europeans are getting - that's democracy for you.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-05-07/seven-ou...