Gary Younge - Brexit: The price of dishonesty

Brexit is the price Britain is paying for the failure to hold an honest discussion about immigration, multiculturalism and Empire... Today, three-quarters of Britons think immigration should reduced. But then they also think migrants comprise 31% of the national population, when the actual number is 13%

I want to concentrate on three things that apply to the situation in Britain and Brexit, which I think apply to a lesser degree elsewhere in Europe, and then pull back briefly to grasp the context in which they came together to make Brexit possible. But if there is a broad theme here it is dishonesty – a false narrative about who we Britons are and who we might be and how the debts finally came due for that dishonesty.

The first is immigration. Britain has always been a home to immigrants, but immediately after the Second World War there was a significant surge. Some immigrants came from former colonies – particularly in the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa, Africa and Asia – though initially more came from elsewhere in Europe – Ireland, Italy, Cyprus, Poland, the Baltic States. Throughout the post-war period the British political establishment refused to engage intelligently with the issue. 

For decades the issue of race – the colour of people – was generally interchangeable with place – the movement of people. Even when more than half of all Black people in Britain were born there they were still understood as immigrants. The right would stoke prejudice because they knew that’s how they get votes; the Left would indulge it because they knew that’s how they would lose them. The upshot was that precious few in the UK understood what immigration is for, what drives it, or who benefits from it and why.

We did not talk about the wars, trade deals, arms sales, environmental devastation – in which we are complicit – that made people move. Nor did we discuss the needs of an ageing population, or the low wage economy with a creaking welfare state that made immigration so necessary. To provide just one example: the National Health Service made Britons more proud to be British than the monarchy. But without immigrants, the NHS would not be possible. In 1971, 12% of British nurses were Irish nationals; by the turn of the century 73% of family doctors in the Rhondda valley in Wales were south Asian.... 
https://www.eurozine.com/the-price-of-dishonesty/