>>211674004>>211674121>>211674185>>211674907>>211682372Brexit was a red herring. The Conservatives won in 2010 by promising to cut net immigration by 2/3rds and then immediately backtracked on it after they won and spent years claiming "We'd like to cut it but the EU controls immigration policy so we can't do anything about it, sorry"
This wasn't true, the EU does force you to take in Europeans but all the Nigerians, Pakistanis, Afro-Caribbeans, etc. coming in were controlable via domestic policy, and yet people fell for it anyways. Unfortunately for the Tories, the people who had voted for them expecting a cut to immigration were so mad about this that they flocked to the UKIP, which was a single-issue pro-Brexit party. The resulting split of the vote meant they'd probably lose the next election, so they came up with the genius strategy of: "Vote for us and if we win we'll have a referendum on EU membership"
This worked, the UKIP vote share fell to almost nothing and the Tories were re-elected. But if you read between the lines of their statements from when they promised the referendum to when it actually happened you can tell they figured that Remain would easily win and the whole issue would finally be settled. When Leave won, they were shocked, the PM resigned, and they spent the next four years debating how to handle it instead of addressing anything else. Immigration was creeping up during this time, but only because they were still in the EU they argued, and the whole thing would work itself out once Brexit was complete.
Instead, because the Tories are dissolute globalists, they looked at the "muh GDP" numbers that were projected to get battered once they left and decided to effectively double immigration to give the figures a boost. This has destroyed them as a party, they got wiped out by the left at the last election, who seem to be more anti-immigration than they are, and the largest party in Britain is now a broader-focus reincarnation of UKIP.