[EndShell]

> Plus it was never about immigration,

It was partly about immigration. According to these surveys 43% of people that voted leave think immigration should be reduced.

https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE9?:...

> it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.

Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow? Considering there is data that partially contradicts your belief that it wasn't about immigration, maybe your assessment about their level of understanding of the issues involved is also incorrect.

[dijksterhuis]

> Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow?

politicians sometimes lie…?

the £350 million a day bus springs to mind as one example. the amazing trade deals which will unleash our new economy were another.

like, those things sound great. people wanted those promises to become real and believed the people who were saying those things could implement them.

turns out implementation is sometimes a lot harder than waving your hands and making a bunch of promises.

edit —

especially when the advertised numbers are factually wrong, and people know they are wrong — i.e. they lied.

> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus

[robertlagrant]

> politicians sometimes lie…?

That isn't a big enough reason to assume everyone's been fooled. Or at least, the people who disagree with you have been fooled. That's possible, but it's also possible you've been fooled. So bringing it up one-sided is a bit grating.

[dijksterhuis]

i’m going to post the quote above again, with more context from another quote, because you’ve avoided quoting the bit which actually demonstrates that this is a big enough reason to assume that enough people were fooled.

> On 27 May, the UK Statistics Authority chair Andrew Dilnot made a stronger statement against Vote Leave, stating that the continued use of the figure was "misleading and undermine[d] trust in official statistics".

misleading is politics speak for “lying with statistics”.

> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.

two years later, after the claim was repeatedly denounced as being misleading and false multiple times, 42% of people surveyed still thought it was true.

that’s a significant representative proportion of the population, given 52% of people voted to leave.

it’s no wonder that 7 years later “brexit remorse” among leave voters is sitting pretty at around 60% or so (cba to source this, i think it was a yougov poll reported in the independent).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus

> bringing it up one-sided is a bit grating.

i find people who lie, and people who defend liars, grating.

we don’t get to pick our reality. we just have to live in it.

[robertlagrant]

> i find people who lie, and people who defend liars, grating.

Who here is defending liars?

[EndShell]

> politicians sometimes lie…?

Most people are quite aware that politicians lie. It is a common trope in movies, tv and media generally. Politicians are quite disliked in the UK generally. So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.

> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.

So? People frequently cherry pick information to justify their decisions after they have already made them. I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.

People seem to forget that a good portion of the Media and Parliament (including the Prime Minister at the time who won with a majority) were in favour of Remain. What is often ignored is that if you look at UKIP voter percentage before the referendum. It had risen from 3.1% to 12.6%. That was rising well before the bus campaign was a thing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results

The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine. I also don't believe Dominic Cummings on how effective it was btw.

But in any event this will probably be my last comment on anything political on here because you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.

[dijksterhuis]

i find your comment weird. hopefully my reply clarifies why i find it weird. probably not. i’ve drunk too much coffee today.

> I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.

64% Con/65% Lab leave supporters versus 32% Con/20% Lab remain supporters. so, 65%-ish (hand wavy representative stat) of leave supporters believed the claim, which was misleading / false.

65% x 52% = 34% of all leave voters (very back of a napkin maths here). that’s a sizeable chunk of people who believed the lie. enough people to possibly swing the vote, given there was only 2% in it. that’s enough to swing it if there was no bus claim.

> The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine.

i completely agree.

but the bus is a great example of how people get lied to by politicians, who then potentially get their 34% of people convinced. which was the point i was trying to make. politicians lying has a significant impact on the outcome. it’s not solely responsible, but it has an impact. they bear some responsibility for the shit show we currently have now.

interestingly, the ipsos mori / KCL study confirms this somewhat

> you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.

1) commenting about the voting on comments is something we try to avoid doing here. have a read of the site guidelines to understand why (you’re a new user so i don’t know if you’ve seen them before or not)

2) people on HN generally speaking tend to be pedantic nerds like me who are probably somewhat on the spectrum somewhere and when they see a claim will call people out on it when it is wrong.

> Leave voters are least likely to answer correctly (16%) and most likely to wrongly think that European immigrants contribute less than they take out (42%).

> Leave voters are most likely to hold these incorrect beliefs: European immigration has increased crime; decreased quality of healthcare services; increases unemployment among low-skilled workers.

^ ipsos mori/KCL study

there’s your problem. you’re aligned politically with people who are, to put it plainly, more wrong about this subject than they are right. so when you try and defend your position on here, you are going to get significant pushback on claims because, frankly, a lot of the claims made by other people who voted the way you did are either wrong or misleading when they make their claims.

3) i wasn’t on the site in 2016 (did HN exist then? who knows). imagine what it would have been like back then!

4) i hope you stick around. compared to some commentators, you’re doing a bang up job with actually reading studies (which meant i’ve gone and read the study and learned something now! thanks!).

> So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.

bonus round. most people don’t believe politicians. they do, however, vote based on who the sun newspaper tells them to vote for (well, until recently).

[youngtaff]

> It was partly about immigration

My view is it’s actually about people being racist

[EndShell]

Well there is no evidence to back that up. In fact there is plenty that indicates the opposite.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk...

There is in the section entitled "Preferences for different types of migrant: origin, similarity, skill level". (There doesn't seem to be a way to directly reference it in a document).

> Country of origin is not the only factor that people take into account when considering preferences on immigration. In the European Social Survey 2014, British respondents reported how many immigrants should be allowed based on a question that specified both the country of origin (Poland or India) and the skill level (professional or unskilled labourer). The results revealed that when migrants are professionals, opposition is low, and when migrants are unskilled, opposition is high (Figure 5). Research has shown that people’s general preference for high-skilled over low-skilled migrants is mainly driven by perceptions of their higher economic contribution

> The preference among the British public for highly skilled migrants aligns with previous research indicating that, when questioned about the criteria for incoming migrants, skills are considered more important than other factors such as race/ethnicity and religion.

Direct link to the stats:

https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE5?:...

[the_third_wave]

My view is there needs to be a version of Godwin's law related to client of supposed 'racism', i.e. the one who claims ${issue} is caused by/related to 'racism' thereby loses the argument unless he comes with solid proof.

I see no proof, spurious claims of 'racism' do not count as such so it actually was about immigration.

[lurk2]

It's disingenuous to pretend Brexit wasn't at least partially motivated by in-group preference. Almost as disingenuous as implying that there's anything wrong with having said preference. I don't open up my house to people I don't know regardless of their potential to contribute to it economically. Why is this treated as immoral when the same reasoning is applied to the immigration system?

[EndShell]

I am not pretending anything. I've showed some actual evidence to back to back up my view point.

Moreover, time after time the British public are surveyed about their views on immigration and ethnic background is not something that is important to a large portion of the people taking part.

Are there some people that do care? Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.

[lurk2]

> Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.

From your own data, 25% of respondents agreed with the statement: Allow none/only a few immigrants of a different race/ethnicity to come and live in [the UK]. This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.

[EndShell]

You have to read the analysis below as well as look at the charts. From the articles I linked

> As a further way of characterising countries, we include a second measure based on the percentage of people saying that immigration ‘makes the country a worse place to live’ On this measure, the UK maintains a similar rank position as one of the more positive countries in the sample, and similar to Switzerland at 18%.

> These two measures can be thought of as capturing opinions on future migration flows and current population stocks. In most of these 13 countries, it appears that people are more negative towards the idea of continuing flows than about the immigrants already present. Finland, for example, is a country where 42% of the public would prefer few/no immigrants of another race coming to live there, whilst, at the same time, just 19% think immigrants make the country a worse place to live.

It is still much better than many other countries in Europe.

> This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.

Ok sure. I probably shouldn't have said minority. Yeah of course the distribution isn't going to be equal. However people pretend it was all about racism when it clearly wasn't.