Sunday, June 26, 2016

Is rural Britain to blame for the Brexit vote?

That's what Roger Cohen of the New York Times suggests in this editorial column a few days after the vote:
London voted overwhelmingly to remain. But the countryside, small towns and hard-hit industrial provincial industrial centers voted overwhelmingly to leave and carried the day. A Britain fissured between a liberal, metropolitan class centered in London and the rest was revealed. 
 A map showing how each area of the country voted is here.

Also, here is a Washington Post story about Cornwall, the far southwestern county in England, which supported Brexit but is now understanding it will lose subsidies from the EU--subsidies based in part on its rurality.  
The county is heavily dependent on the more than 60 million British pounds ($82 million) in E.U. subsidies per year that are transferred to the region and that have helped finance infrastructure projects and education schemes. Now, county officials are panicking — fearing the worst for the county's future and wondering why one of the most E.U.-dependent counties in Britain voted against the E.U. — and its money.
There is certainly an element of "biting the hand that feeds you" going on here.

P.S.  More on who engineered Brexit (elite cosmopolites) is here, and a focus on a more urbanized place that voted to "Leave" is here.

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