From: Phil Shannon [Email him]

Opposition to immigration was definitively behind the popular revolt which delivered the 2016 referendum vote to end Britain’s entanglement with the European Union, according to the latest British Social Attitudes survey, a sternly statistical analysis of what motivated the Brexit vote, conducted by the National Centre for Social Research, University of Strathclyde.[ Brexit |  Litmus test or lightning rod,

Of all the social issues and socio-economic factors that were put through the statistical wringer of multivariate analysis, only immigration and educational attainment showed any statistically significant correlation with the Leave vote:

• 73% of people who were “worried about immigration” voted to Leave the EU compared to only 36% of those who were not concerned about immigration; and
• Whilst just 22% of graduates voted Leave, 72% of those without any educational qualifications did so.

Although the report notes that, amongst Leave voters, immigration “may be thought to pose an economic challenge, both in terms of its impact on the labour market and on public services”, it was the deleterious effect of immigration on Britons’ sense of a distinctive “national identity and cultural outlook” that primarily moved people to vote Leave.

The report is, for the most part, blessedly free from multiculturalist bias, only becoming judgemental when it groups people based on whether they support social homogeneity or, conversely, diversity, and pejoratively labeling the former as “authoritarians” (wait, wasn’t Hitler one of those?  And Trump, of course!) and admiringly labeling the latter as “libertarians” (liberty—that’s gotta be good!):

• The “authoritarians”, mostly populated by “socially conservative”, older, non-degree-holders, voted 72% to Leave whilst only 21% of the generally younger, more ‘educated’ “libertarians” did so.

When put to a national democratic test, it would seem that, concerning, immigration and its cheap labor job thieves, welfare scroungers, medievalist Muslims and national identity defilers, it is life experience that is far superior to a diversity-obsessed, liberal ‘education’ for the begetting of reality-based wisdom.

Phil Shannon is a veteran socialist, and VDARE.com sympathizer of more recent vintage, in Australia. See a previous letter from him on Australian worker displacement.