I wasn’t surprised to wake-up this morning to an email from my regular “hater” Rick. Back when I lived in Austin I’d regularly get anonymous letters, sometimes just pages from magazines with words highlighted to make messages. Much more often than that though, I’d get emails from Rick.

Today’s email Rick said:

As I’ve told you before, you should get off your high horse and stop blogging; you are just conflating two things to suit your own agenda, I just wish you’d go away, no one cares about your opinion.

While the Iraq war might seem to have little to do with the BREXIT vote, it actually has everything to do with it. Last nights Panorama, where reporter Adrian Chiles goes home to the West Midlands to meet Leave voters. [Currently(Rick) you can watch it here and here on youtube, but neither are official and both likely to be taken down].

Listen for the causes for the justification to vote LEAVEs, lack of jobs, lack of school places, problems with Doctors and Medical, Pensions and more. All of those things have been hit by the austerity required to attempt to address the debt occurred from the British involvement in recents wars. Rather than discuss wars, the blame is squarely put on the EU and the open borders, thus the immigrants.

Typical of the people interviewed is Tracy, she says she isn’t racist and that a few racist people are giving the leave voters a bad name.

It’s got nothing to do with race, I mean, immigration is what makes the world go around, it’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. To me that’s how the world should work.

I feel like this country is falling apart, I voted leave because I don’t feel like the government isn’t putting enough back into the community, our councils, our housing situation. We are helping everybody else yet we are forgetting here.

For the record, I totally believe Tracy when she says she isn’t racist, but what she is confused about are the causes of her anger and frustration, and simplistic reasons for believing LEAVE will solve her problems.

It isn’t that the immigrants have been taking what’s “theirs”, it’s that along with an overall decline,  it’s that with the increased cost of war, the British Government cannot afford to invest to keep up with demand, and hence even maintaining levels of spending leads to austerity.

As a follow-on from my post of yesterday, Blairs willful denial of the true cost of Iraq, I went to look for the cost to Britain of some of the recent wars and on defense spending.

• Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a ‘failure’ costing £29bn – This 2014 article in the Telegraph calls out £35bn of spending on wars.
• UK government spent 13 times more bombing Libya than on rebuilding post war – This 2015 article highlights the £320m spent on the UN Bombing campaign in Libya, initiated by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2011, which has failed to prevent Libya from sliding into chaos as feuding militias battle for control.

So while Britain now spends 3% annually of GDP on defence spending, and notionally the UK will now no longer have to pay and annual £12.9Bn to the EU, that is less than half defense and war spending. The UK though has the 3rd largest defence budget, larger than Russia, Germany, France, India and everyone except the USA and China.

The British Pound has now fallen below the Argentinian Peso as the worst performing currency, and the consequences of this, plus the other financial issues, will mean that the LEAVE voters will have to get used to things getting worse with little outlook for them getting better. OK Rick?