The lies started long before the referendum. Cameron promised in his manifesto to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands, when the referendum campaign began, part of the leave argument was that Cameron had failed to deliver on his promise to bring the numbers down, and had blamed EU membership for not being able to fulfil the promise. In fact, it was an impossible promise, and he knew it, but he lied because it was a vote winner in a difficult election campaign, and UKIP were fighting on a promise to exit the EU and regain control of our borders, and this was proving to be very popular. In order to match UKIP, Cameron promised to bring migration down to a net figure in the tens of thousands, but remain in the EU.
The initial loss of control was caused by the UK allowing free movement of the Eastern Europeans almost right away, whereas many other countries took advantage of transitional arrangements that delayed this right. Naturally, this meant that the UK was the only country worth migrating to that would actually let them in, so it should have been obvious that the UK would end up with ALL of the first wave of migrants from these countries, and also obvious that by making the decision not to take advantage of the transitional arrangements, the earlier promise on migration could not possibly be met.
Now, whilst 1% of population is a sustainable figure, it would also require a matching 1% growth in provision of things like housing, schools, healthcare. The failure to match the up to 1% migration rate with anything like this level of expansion of services over decades has lead to the current crisis where voting for Brexit was the only way many people felt their voices would be heard by those in power.
If the government didn't want Brexit, they should have acted to ensure that provision of basic services kept up with the migration rate. The claim that it was impossible to do this without being able to control the numbers is bullshit, they can use decades of past statistics to work out how much the "uncontrolled increase" has been in the past, and as a minimum ensure that provision of basic services catches up with past increases in demand, and hazard a guess that next year will see another 350,000 the year after another 350,000 etc. This would at least ensure that if we did get a higher figure one year, it could be managed.
One problem that we have suffered from is the global obsession with "doing more with less" in the guise of "efficiency". This has lead to the practice of cutting surplus provision such that our services are always "running hot", which is highly efficient as there is no wasted capacity costing money but not being utilised, but this strategy requires very accurate forecasts of future demand. It is this practice of "running hot" in our hospitals, ensuring that the average bed occupancy rate is as high as possible for maximum efficiency, that causes the catastrophic problems when a relatively minor increase in the rate of A&E arrivals quickly brings the system into chaos with queuing ambulances and patients being treated in corridors. Of course when you have lived with this system for much of your life, the LAST thing you want to see is even more people coming along who are entitled to use these same services along with your own family, and you won't care that they are helping the country through working and paying taxes, they could make the difference between you being the last one to fit into A&E and getting treated in the corridor or being the one that dies in the ambulance whilst waiting to be unloaded.
ALL parties campaigned during this referendum on the basis that migration would in future be better managed, and all parties made impossible promises. Stay or leave, net migration will still be around the same level given the same level of activity and demand in the economy. If anything, the shock of Brexit to the markets has made the situation worse, and the only way this can be salvaged in the short term is for new migrants to stay away until things settle back down, and then come back in as before, in the same numbers but under the new post Brexit system.
In the UK the uncomfortable fact is that we can do very little as individuals to tackle the problems ourselves. We can't simply decide that we will solve our own housing problem because the government can't. WE run up against strict planning laws that mean we can only build ourselves a house where the government says we can, and almost all of the places that the government has identified as permitted places to build have been bought up and "banked" by the big developers. These developers are deliberately sitting on large land banks and not building in order to keep house prices high, even though we have a severe housing shortage. If ordinary people could more easily buy single plots and build their own houses the big developer would lose money, so they do their best to prevent us from having this freedom. So far, self build is something of a niche activity, and it's pretty difficult to navigate all the legalities, and this is before you come up against council planners who often block individuals from building a single house, yet will let developers build a thousand, something on the SAME LAND that some years prior they refused individuals permission to build or extend due to "green" issues, and problems with extra traffic.
We can't even build in the wilds, as all of this is owned by someone and classified as "protected green space", so we are restricted to building in already crowded places like cities and towns, or uncomfortably close to existing settlements that invariably object strongly.
The worst is here in the South, where everyone wants to be and where it's so crowded. Further north, it's less crowded and in some places there are even homes sitting empty because no one wants them. Unfortunately, few people want to live up there because there is much less work available, and new investment continues to pour into the South. The communities up north are often poorer as a result, suffering decaying local services and infrastructure, but all those surplus houses are the cheapest place to put migrants, especially those who don't work, or who are not allowed to work. This makes the already inadequate provision of services even worse, and is where we have seen the worst excesses of far right activism.
Even now, politicians are STILL lying about what they will do post Brexit, continuing to focus on the renewed ambition of cutting migration drastically, but they SHOULD be embarking upon an expansion of basic provision to catch up with the migrants who are already here. If they don't, people will still experience severe shortages of the basic services, and will see migrants already here as the solution, as in making them go home as fast as possible so as to release capacity in local housing, schools, and healthcare.
If our services were coping well with the influx of migrants, we would not have voted for Brexit, and many of the tensions between the different communities would not have developed to the extremes we face today.
I bet those countries who are able to sustain a 1% population growth per annum through migration have ensured that housing, schools, and hospitals have largely kept pace. Given that all our politicians agree that migrants benefit the economy and pay taxes, the money should already be there for this provision, unless of course this is yet another lie, and in fact migration really is the huge burden on the nation's finances that the far right claim.
We can't make it compulsory for migrants to "fit in" completely, but we CAN make it very clear that when they are here, they obey our laws, and they won't be getting any special treatment. This is another area of failure by politicians, too much "special treatment" of migrants, even special exemptions from laws that the rest of us must obey such as being allowed to choose not to wear a motorcycle helmet, even though for the rest of us it's not something we can choose, but is dictated by law on "heath and safety grounds" that we must wear one or be fined. Surely if a law is there for a good reason, there can be no exemptions simply because one chooses to wear headgear that isn't compatible with a helmet. There are not many of laws that work like this, but coupled with the disease of political correctness, it has lead to the perception that migrants get special treatment as a matter of course, and this political correctness disease is also behind many of the decisions by officials that lead to "queue jumping" by migrants for things that are in short supply because they worry that telling ethnic minorities to wait their turn in the queue might be perceived as discrimination against them.
