[gejjaxxita]

I am an EU citizen living in the UK for 11 years (my whole adult life) so this is from my perspective. The campaign and reasons given for leaving were extremely xenophobic. There was a lot of talk of EU citizens "clogging up" the healthcare system and emigrating to the UK to claim benefits instead of working. Almost none of this was based on fact but it almost certainly swung the vote.

Other reasons such as sovereignty were also given but most polls indicate that unhappiness with immigration was the main reason people voted to leave the EU. This in itself isn't necessarily xenophobic, but given the enormous economic benefits of immigration into the UK it's difficult to conclude otherwise.

[ZenoArrow]

> "Other reasons such as sovereignty were also given but most polls indicate that unhappiness with immigration was the main reason people voted to leave the EU. This in itself isn't necessarily xenophobic, but given the enormous economic benefits of immigration into the UK it's difficult to conclude otherwise."

UK newspapers have been lying about immigration for years, drastically underplaying the economic benefits. The lies aren't even coherent, on one hand you're told that immigrants are coming to the UK to sponge off the system, on the other hand you're told they're very hard working and prepared to work for lower wages than the locals.

I would be highly surprised if a majority of those who voted on the grounds of immigration would also understand the economic benefits of immigration.

The UK news media had a large part to play in the negative aspects of the Brexit vote. For those who are unfamiliar with the quality of UK news media, it's quite hard to get across how bad they are, but here's just one example (totally unrelated to Brexit) that hopefully starts to build a picture of what passes for news coverage in the UK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWqvWFUj51k

[Tech-Noir]

Both campaigns were guilty of misinformation but the most blatant outrage was the UK government itself spending £9 ($12) million of the British people's money producing and delivering one-sided pro-EU propaganda to every address in the UK.

Edit: For people downvoting the above factual post:

Government's £9m EU 'propaganda' leaflet has left public LESS well informed, study shows:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/governments-9m-eu-propa...

EU referendum: PM 'makes no apology' for £9m EU leaflets:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-35984991

The propaganda itself:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

[ZenoArrow]

I don't know why you're being downvoted. The lack of impartiality in the public debate was pretty obvious, there was almost nobody in the public sphere that was openly exploring all the issues. Would it have been hard to actually listen to each other and get beyond the surface level shouting match that constituted the pre-Brexit debates?

[tom_mellior]

> 'propaganda' leaflet has left public LESS well informed, study shows

Two polls at different points in time, without any information about methods and sampling error, gave slightly differing results (23% vs. 21%). This leaflet campaign took place between them. This isn't a very good argument: Weak correlation in noisy data does not mean causation.

(Not saying the government was right to do this this way. But calling the thing misinformation that confused voters based on this comparison of polls is a bit exaggerated.)

[7952]

The funny thing is that it back fired. People were sick of these kind of expert opinions and interference. This pamphlet probably turned people over to the leave side.

I think it would have been better to make an emotional argument instead of relying on facts. People don't vote objectively. This is rubbish propaganda.