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50 | Zsófia Kollányi
Arguments in favour of Brexit focused on two main tracks: a political¬
cultural track dominated by concerns about the loss of national sovereignty,
and a track focused on socio-economic guestions - although the latter are
not completely independent of the former. Ihis second track itself has split
into several branches. In addition to the rather macro-level issue of the net
costs of EU membership, the individual-level differences in income have
also emerged in the context of EU membership. The latter phenomenon
is the subject of our chapter: financial tensions within the community, the
individual and political perceptions and interpretations of these tensions, as
well as the potential solutions outlined at the political level.
Many of the issues that frequently came up during the Brexit debate, as
well as in other countries, may involve some inherent contradictions, and
they may also be impossible to resolve within the current framework of the
EU. Addressing internal migration, for instance, faces fundamental obstacles
within the current institutional set-up, as the free movement of labour is one
of the four freedoms on which the Union as an economic community is built
and which is thus inviolable.
On the one hand, some of the problems rooted in individual experiences focus
very strongly on immigration, including intra-EU migration, more specifically
migration from the post-socialist countries to more developed ‘old’ Member
States. Although the real origins of these concerns are the difficulties faced by
the locals in terms of income and employment, this experience is very strongly
linked to immigration - something the Leave supporters emphasised a lot.
The key message of the ‘anti-immigrant’ movement in the UK during the
Brexit debate (Golec de Zavala et al. 2017) was that immigrants take jobs away
from the locals, depress their wages (Little 2016), and - in a self-contradiction
— primarily come to the UK to benefit from the welfare services (Danaj and
Wagner 2021; Schweyher et al. 2019). The perceptions about individual welfare
and well-being are not necessarily false - in the next section we provide an
overview of possible interpretations — but linking economic hardship entirely
to immigration is definitely false (Wadsworth et al. 2016).
Another stream of socio-economically themed arguments in favour of
Brexit concerned the net costs of EU membership. One of the main claims
of the Leave Vote campaign was that the UK supposedly spent an average of
£350 million on the EU each week, which the UK could supposedly spend
on serving the needs of its own people, such as developing and running the
National Health Service (The Guardian 2016).
Although this argument (more precisely the specific amount) was repeatedly
refuted during the campaign, the question of Member States’ contribution to
the EU budget is a relevant one, and also a controversial issue in and of itself.
A significant part of the EU budget is spent on the cohesion and development
goals, and its primary recipients are the relatively underdeveloped regions.
As a result, higher-income countries are typically net contributors and lower¬
income countries are net beneficiaries of the EU budget.