[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by ianch99

Pick you terms carefully. I said a fair number, not a large number. Let's be clear though, a number large enough to make a difference in tight elections. I do agree that the number who might be classed xenophobic is larger.

Assigning precise numbers is difficult due to the complexity and nuance in the competing factors that went into the 2016 decision. Here is an interesting article in Nature on this precise subject: Prejudice and the Brexit vote: a tangled web

I’ve read that article - it is a very bad article, imo.

It lumps all of the ”nuances” of prejudice such as Islamophobia, Homophobia etc into equating prejudice with racism. Clearly this is where you get to use the term “racism”, possibly to emphasise your point but the article on which you rely explains why it does not use the word "racism".

So the first think to debunk is the article’s equivalence of prejudice with racism. We all have prejudices to a certain degree (nuance). For example, people may be prejudiced against Germans because of what happened 80 years ago; even though it’s ridiculous to be prejudiced against all Germans, it can’t be said to be racist, although the article includes that sort of prejudice and classifies this as racist.

We have deliberately tried to avoid using the term ‘racism’ in this paper where possible as we follow Brown’s (2010) belief that the term ‘prejudice’ can be regarded as synonymous in the social psychological perspective with sexism, racism, homophobia, and so on.

Next is the weak argument made at the foot of the quote pasted below. It’s clear to me that the authors are leaning towards nationalism being a racist belief (see text below). The absurdist part of the argument being put forward below is that people voting for sovereignty needn’t have bothered because we had proportional representation on all the EU’s committees; as in being outvoted by others which did happen, as you know.

Finally, the paper falls down on the first sentence of the extract pasted below.

It is difficult to provide a clear narrative on how much prejudice attitudes played a role in the Brexit vote, largely because a multitude of social issues were caught up in a binary referendum question of whether to leave the EU or remain a member. However, there can be no doubt that issues relating to prejudice were paramount in many of the discussions leading up to the vote in 2016 (Berry, 2016; Geddes, 2016; Vasilopoulou, 2016). Those that may appear to be straightforward, such as the focus upon immigration numbers, are tied to additional areas such as availability of jobs or funding of additional services such as in schools and hospitals. Even those issues that do not appear to have a direct link to individuals and groups, such as the argument that leaving the EU would allow the UK to maintain sovereignty and make its own laws, lean towards concepts of nationalism; ‘we’ will not be told what to do by ‘others’ from the continent. Despite having a proportional representation on all EU parliaments and committees, the discourse that ‘they’ are in charge of the EU and would