Quote
Perhaps no promise was more audacious — and mendacious, critics say — than the £350-million-a-week claim. Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London who was the frontman of the Brexit campaign, toured Britain in a bus emblazoned with the slogan: “We send the E.U. £350 million a week, let’s fund our N.H.S. instead,” a reference to the country’s widely revered National Health Service.
Hours after proclaiming “independence day” for Britain, Nigel Farage, the leader of the fiercely anti-European U.K. Independence Party, conceded that the £350 million figure was a “mistake.” Asked by the BBC on Sunday about the spending pledge, Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative Party leader who campaigned for Brexit, said the Leave side had merely promised “to spend the lion’s share of that money” on the health service.
The shift was perhaps unsurprising, since the £350 million “independence dividend” never stood up to scrutiny. It excluded money returned to Britain through rebates and money that Britain spent to subsidize its farmers and poorer regions, according to the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies. The institute put the true figure at about £150 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/world/europe/having-won-some-brexit-campaigners-begin-backpedaling.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
The "leave" voters should be careful what they wish for. Like Kansans, many do not understand what is in their economic interest.
Quote
A Financial Times chart showing that the Leave vote was strongest in the parts of Britain that are the most economically dependent on the European Union was widely circulated online.
Many did not understand what Brexit entailed.
Quote
Google's Trends Twitter account reported an increase of 250 percent in people searching "what happens if we leave the EU," at around midnight British time, two hours after the referendum polls closed.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/24/12022880/google-search-spike-brexit-why-leave-eu