<story><title>Petition for London independence signed by thousands after Brexit vote</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36620401</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TorKlingberg</author><text>Not going to happen, but I can see the sentiment.&lt;p&gt;The Brexit vote was basically rural England telling London to shove it. &amp;quot;You wanted to be a cosmopolitan world city, but if us old people in the county don&amp;#x27;t like what we see, you can&amp;#x27;t have it.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;As an analogy, imagine if the people in California that voted for Proposition 8 got really upset about the Supreme Court overruling them, and didn&amp;#x27;t like all the non-native Californians immigrating to SF and LA, so they voted to secede.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>detritus</author><text>Laterally, imagine a city over the horizon somewhere that doesn&amp;#x27;t give a hoot about your existence and is increasingly made up of people not from your own country, yet dictates ever-more fundamentally how you should live your life. Imagine that city is then in turn dictated-to by an even higher echelon of governing who you not only didn&amp;#x27;t empower to have a say in your affairs, but who don&amp;#x27;t even speak your own language or live in your country.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, I live in London, and I didnt vote &amp;#x27;Leave&amp;#x27; but I can fully understand the frustrations of a domestic populace whose voice in their own country is ever increasingly marginalised.&lt;p&gt;Britain isn&amp;#x27;t the US - we&amp;#x27;re not (and I apologise in advance to the indigineous &amp;#x27;Indian&amp;#x27; populations of North America) an &amp;#x27;immigrant country&amp;#x27;, despite what some people might suggest when they mention a few thousand Hugenots popping over for a few decades, hundreds of years ago.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not in our culture so therefore who is right to say it should be?</text></comment>
<story><title>Petition for London independence signed by thousands after Brexit vote</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36620401</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TorKlingberg</author><text>Not going to happen, but I can see the sentiment.&lt;p&gt;The Brexit vote was basically rural England telling London to shove it. &amp;quot;You wanted to be a cosmopolitan world city, but if us old people in the county don&amp;#x27;t like what we see, you can&amp;#x27;t have it.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;As an analogy, imagine if the people in California that voted for Proposition 8 got really upset about the Supreme Court overruling them, and didn&amp;#x27;t like all the non-native Californians immigrating to SF and LA, so they voted to secede.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>howlingfantods</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s hard to fault the blue collar worker, who had dutifully voted Labour for decades, only to see Labour&amp;#x27;s neoliberalism collapse their local economies. This was basically a vote against the status quo.&lt;p&gt;I think before people blame the voters for being misinformed or illogical, it&amp;#x27;s useful to question why our current economic and political system would push people towards fear, nationalism and xenophobia. Wealth inequality is probabaly a big part.</text></comment>