Blair and Major need to stay quite, they are unpopular personalties who don't have the credibility anymore to speak to the matter. The remain supporters really have lacked credible personalties during the whole thing and those two don't help.
From my perspective, like
@Stanley Road I'm a British citizen living abroad, in the Basque region of Spain so am one of those significantly impacted with this decision. The unfortunate reality is the absolute nonsense that gets printed in the popular media in the UK is what drives elections nowadays.
Having lived here for over 5 years it is interesting to see what a warped view the British and the Spanish have of each other. The British believe in general the Spanish are a bunch of fat waiters with everything happening mañana. The Spanish believe in general the British are a bunch of uncultured drunken football hooligans who live on an island divorced from reality.
Neither is true, but the strength of the media (in particular the Mail and the Sun) is able to push people to believing one extreme or the other. What I can say is that Spain is a greatly divided nation, with areas of high unemployment and other areas of great economic strength. Where I live near Bilbao is one of the industrial, financial and agricultural pillars of the country with the average wage equivalent to in Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_lists_of_Spanish_autonomous_communities#By_economy
Problem is most British have this image that Spain don't produce anything and live purely of tourism, but that conveniently forgets the many enormous Spanish companies (some of whom have a presence in the UK) like Santander, Inditex (Zara), Telefonica and the biggest Co-operative in world (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation). Most British people go to Benidorm or Malaga and that is the extent of what they see. Unsurprisingly whilst they are there they get served by a local waiter.
Lets take Zara for example, they have 68 stores in the UK (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zara_(retailer)) I bet many of them employ Spanish nationals as well as British nationals. This is classified as "immigration". The amount that Zara contributes to the UK economy in terms of taxes both in VAT and employment taxes is significant. But of course, all Spanish are waiters.
In terms of the problems, the unemployment is indeed high, in particular amongst young people. What is staggering though is that if the UK had 40% youth unemployment there would be riots on the streets, high levels of crime and a complete breakdown of social and political structures. Here families are very close and those people still live with their parents so crime remains low. In the UK when you turn 18 parents kick you out the door.
As for the UK, the UK has improved immeasurably over the last 30 years in so many aspects due to integration with Europe. The food for example, in the early 90s was absolutely appalling. People typically cooking with lard, canned goods etc. It was hard to even find olive oil. Since then the influence of european production has had a significant impact in improving that aspect, things that now people take for granted.
There has been a significant improvement in the quality of living and the standard of living, but people only see the negatives without seeing all of the positives that Europe brought to the UK. It is sad to see all of this unravel based on a campaign founded on untruths, it does seem that the country is going backwards. I hope gaining control of the borders for immigration from Europe is worth the economic impact that is coming to the country, what is clear is that it isn't going to pretty and the only ones who are going to better off are the ones who are already well off in the first place.
