As this linked article discusses, I am apparently not alone in conflating news stories about immigrants sleeping in London's public parks and trashing its old working-class neighborhoods with the crisis of illegal or refugee immigration, the camps at Calais pushing to get in, backups at the Chunnel and illegals highjacking rides on incoming lorries. Part of the earlier-referenced video dealt with the pressures on public services and the cultural impacts of immigration due to the EU free movement policy, and I recall reading Brexit advocates looking forward to greater controls on immigration; however, many articles on search engines today speculate that illegal immigration to UK will worsen after Brexit.
Among the most alarming aspects to me as an older American (still remembering when our enterprise was a lot more free than recent decades pre-Trump) were the agri and fisheries indentures, for want of a better word, as well as the picayune environmental rules for consumer products. Of course, we have been having these enviro fights with our own overreaching federal, state and local governments.
I'm in no position to forecast how it will all turn out, although I have actually done forecasting in limited sectors of the American market for certain clients. But the cost statistic cited in the opening post just did not strike me as accurate. We truly are living in a time of fake news on both sides of every issue, and on both sides of the Atlantic, as well. One of the often-cited blunders of the anti-Trump forces in the past election is that the vast majority of the predictive polls were wrong, many by a wide margin. Recently, I've seen articles mocking the doomsday claims made about how badly he would perform as President, when now that the facts are in, he has in many of those areas proved his critics either wrong, or dead wrong.
I imagine the same hyperbole in either direction -- benefit or peril -- applies to speculation about the near- and long-term effects of Brexit. My hope is that, whatever the risks, the Brits will rise to the challenges. For starters you've rid yourselves of the opinions of at least one hypocritically "woke" American media darling from your midst over the past few weeks — congratulations!
And I sincerely wish you the very best of times to come.
Gladly reciprocated by another who has lived long enough to know that just when you think you’ve seen every conceivable variety of nonsense in the way your country is run, there’s another just round the corner. I’m an incorrigible optimist, but that’s feeling harder to sustain now than at any time I can remember.