UK split two years after vote

Brexit creates ‘leavers and remainers’

LONDON, June 23, (AP): It’s been two years since the shoppers and traders of London’s Romford market voted by a wide margin for their country to leave the European Union.

Enthusiasm for Brexit in this workingclass district on the British capital’s eastern edge hasn’t dimmed. But with Britain still not out the EU exit door and negotiations slowed to a crawl, impatience is growing.

“I think most people are just fed up,” said fishmonger Dave Crosbie. “It seems that you take two steps forward and all of a sudden you’ve got to take a step back.”

A mere 20 miles (32 kms) away in the center of London — yet on the other side of the Brexit divide — Tahmid Chowdhury also worries about the way things are going.

The law graduate was surprised and disappointed when Britain voted by a margin of 52 to 48 percent to leave the EU on June 23, 2016. It was unwelcome evidence that the pro-European views of his London friends and acquaintances were not universally shared. “The problem with the referendum is it divided people — divided families, divided communities — just because of the hostile nature of how the arguments were made,” he said.

The divisions opened up by the referendum have not healed but hardened. Once, many Britons would have defined themselves as right-wing or left-wing, Conservative or Labour.

Brexit has created two new and mutually uncomprehending camps in Britain: leavers and remainers.

Leavers — concentrated in small towns and post-industrial cities across England — are eager to cut Brussels red tape, reassert British sovereignty and take control of immigration. Remainers, who most often live in big cities and university towns, would rather stay in an alliance that has eased the flow of goods, services and people across 28 nations with half a billion inhabitants.