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50 | Zsófia Kollányi Arguments in favour of Brexit focused on two main tracks: a politicalcultural 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 lowerincome countries are net beneficiaries of the EU budget.
