EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

It's increased during the same time the EU existed because that's also the same time Microsoft Excel was invented, and computing went from niche to saturation, global communications speed went down to milliseconds for huge volumes of data.

We're witnessing, and living through, not the effect of the EU, but the effect of a technological revolution.

We're seeing changes in industry from manufacturing, to services, to redundancies... not because of the EU, but because technology automates and is crawling up the chain of work from manual to intellectual.

This enormous thing is huge, it's impact is across our lifetime and it is hard to see just like it's hard to sit back and watch an oak tree grow. But it is growing, and it really is now huge and overshadowing everything else.

The EU would be where they are regardless, but the things that people are voting on are mostly the direct impact of a technological revolution. You only have to look at the largest multinationals, the list of the top companies is dominated by companies that mostly did not exist several decades ago. All of whom are so efficient at making cash that they have reserves larger than the GDP of countries. All of whom are so efficient that they pay real rates of barely 1-2% globally, and are happy to just leave cash in banks waiting for the next takeover target (when they become more efficient).

Immigration as the single topic of focus is crazy, the 0.5% influx is smaller than a baby boom generation.

The issue is tax, money, how and why the rich and the multinationals get to not be taxed, how countries make that up by taxing their population more or cutting services... it's the economy. It always has been.