Quote Originally Posted by Burney View Post
London was a - indeed the - centre of banking long before the EU and will continue to be long after, so don't worry your pretty little head about that. Your suggestion that without the EU we couldn't have been rather gives the lie to any suggestion that you have any historical understanding whatsoever, though.

You seem to have picked up the utterly bullshît received idea that we left the EU because racism. I'm guessing maybe you read one -maybe two - op-eds in The Guardian or the Washington Post to get that impression. If that is the level of your understanding, I don't have the time or the inclination to disabuse you of your idiotic notion. Try actually finding something out about the EU, how it works and why levels of support for it are currently as low as they are among its citizens and then come back to me.
There's a parallel conversation about Trump. People point to the rust belt -- Michigan, failing factories, etc. And I agree that Obama could be annoyingly effete. He couldn't hang with some dudes in Detroit or Ohio. But Trump *was elected because people had allowed themselves to believe a lot of b*ll**** about Obama and "liberals." The fact of Obama being a colored fella meant that racism played a huge role. Well, look, you don't really have nonwhite politicians, at least not from what I've seen. So that's different. On the other hand, the threat of the alien is much more proximate. They're pretty damn close to you, all those Middle Easterners. It's just a couple pieces of the puzzle but I don't doubt seriously that racism played a massive part.

You have some disagreements with the EU, but none so great, I'm sure, that you had to blow the whole thing up. You just let it happen, slipsliding away...

Don't get me wrong, I like England. It's my background, come to that. But I prefer the England of Donne to what you have now.