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Q. Is it true that some students at Brown University get food stamps because they’re smart enough to be attending Brown but are broke?A. Low income students at Brown are offered full scholarships that cover tuition, room and board. Their meal plans are covered by the Brown scholarship. They do not need, nor are they qualified for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Food Stamps. The above statement is not true.What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League school? - The Boston GlobeAlejandro Claudio can eat whenever he wants at the Ratty, the campus dining hall, because his meal plan is covered by his Brown scholarship. During his first semester, friends looked at him like he had five heads when he said he’d never tasted falafel, kebabs, or curry. He had immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic when he was 8. “Growing up in a poor family, we ate the same thing every night: rice, beans, and chicken,” he says.Am I Eligible for SNAP?What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League school? - The Boston GlobeThe son of an MBTA bus driver from Jamaica Plain, Harvard sophomore Ted White helps lead the First Generation Student Union, pushing for a better understanding of challenges financially disadvantaged students face.DINA RUDICK/GLOBE STAFFBy Brooke Lea FosterAPRIL 09, 2015WHEN ANA BARROS first stepped into Harvard Yard as a freshman, she felt so out of place she might as well have had the words “low income” written on her forehead. A girl from Newark doesn’t belong in a place like Harvard, she thought, as she marveled at how green the elms were, how quaint the cobblestone streets. Back home, where her family lives in a modest house bought from Habitat for Humanity, there wasn’t always money for groceries, and the world seemed gray, sirens blaring at all hours. Her parents, who immigrated to the New York area from Colombia before she was born, spoke Spanish at home. It was at school that Barros learned English. A petite 5-foot-2 with high cheekbones and a head of model-worthy hair, Barros found out in an e-mail that she’d been accepted to Harvard — a full scholarship would give her the means to attend. “I knew at that moment that I’d never suffer in the way that my parents did,” she says.She opted for a single her freshman year, because she felt self-conscious about sharing a room with someone from a more privileged background. “All you see are class markers everywhere, from the way you dress to the way you talk,” says Barros, now a junior sociology major, as she sits in a grand, high-ceilinged space off the dining room in her Harvard College dorm. During her freshman and sophomore years, Barros hesitated to speak in class because she often mispronounced words — she knew what they meant from her own reading, but she hadn’t said many aloud before, and if she had, there had been no one to correct her. Friends paired off quickly. “You’d get weeded out of friendships based on what you could afford. If someone said let’s go to the Square for dinner and see a movie, you’d move on,” she says. Barros quickly became close with two other low-income students with whom she seemed to have more in common. She couldn’t relate to her peers who talked about buying $200 shirts or planning exotic spring break vacations. “They weren’t always conscious of how these conversations can make other people feel,” she says. In a recent sociology class, Barros’s instructor asked students to state their social class to spark discussion. “Middle,” said one student. “Upper class,” said another. Although she’d become accustomed to sharing her story with faculty, Barros passed. It made her uncomfortable. “Admitting you’re poor to your peers is sometimes too painful,” she says. “Who wants to be that one student in class speaking for everyone?”For generations, attending an Ivy League college has been practically a birthright for children of the nation’s most elite families. But in 2004, in the hopes of diversifying its student body and giving low-income, high-achieving students a chance at an Ivy League education, Harvard announced a game-changing financial aid campaign: If a student could get in, the school would pick up the tab. (Princeton was the first Ivy to offer poor families the option, in 1998; Yale followed Harvard in 2005.) Families with incomes of less than $40,000 would no longer be expected to contribute to the cost of their student’s education. (In recent years, income eligibility has increased to $65,000, with significant grants awarded to families that make up to $150,000.) Having since been adopted, in one form or another, by all the Ivies, this “zero family contribution” approach opened the gilded doors of top colleges for many of the country’s most disadvantaged students. The number of students awarded a Pell Grant — financial aid of as much as $5,700 given to those with a family income of up to 250 percent of the poverty line, or about $60,000 for a family of four — is considered the best indicator of how many are low-income. At Harvard, where tuition, room, and board is estimated at $58,600, the Pell is a very small part of a student’s financial aid package. Last year, 19.3 percent of eligible Harvard students were awarded a Pell, an 80 percent increase since the admissions policy began 11 years ago. At Brown University, 15 percent of students get a Pell, and at Yale, 14 percent do.But receiving a full scholarship to an Ivy League school, while a transformative experience for the nation’s poorest students, is only the first hurdle. Once on campus, students report feelings of loneliness, alienation, and plummeting self-confidence. Having grant money for tuition and fees and holding down jobs, too, as virtually all of them do, doesn’t translate to having the pocket money to keep up with free-spending peers. And some disadvantaged students feel they don’t have a right to complain to peers or administrators about anything at all; they don’t want to be perceived as ungrateful.“IT’S TOTAL CULTURE SHOCK,” says Ted White, a Harvard sophomore. White grew up working class in Jamaica Plain and graduated as valedictorian (he was one of the only white kids in his senior class) from New Mission High School in Hyde Park; his father is an MBTA bus driver. From the start, the Harvard campus didn’t seem built for a kid from a background like his, he says. Classmates came in freshman year having started businesses or nonprofits (usually with their parents’ resources, he says) that could make even a top student wonder if he belonged. “The starting place for all of us isn’t really the same,” he says. White appreciates, for example, that Harvard gives low-income students free tickets to the freshman formal, but they have to pick up the tickets in a different line from everyone else. “It’s clear who is getting free/reduced tickets and who isn’t,” he says — a situation a Harvard spokesperson says the school is working to remedy. At times, White wondered if he’d made the right choice going to Harvard, even if he saw his matriculation, like many low-income students do, as his one shot at leaving his family’s financial struggles behind for good.RELATED LINKSMaribel Claudio makes the sign of the cross on her son's head before he heads back to Brown.View GalleryPhotos: Class distinctionsRead: How did colleges become country clubs?Stephen Lassonde, dean of student life at Harvard College, says first-generation students have it particularly tough because they’re wrestling with their identities, like all students, while simultaneously trying to transcend their socioeconomic backgrounds. “As much as we do to try to make them feel included, there are multiple ways that their roommates and peers can put them on the outside without even intending to,” he says.Today, White, a sociology major, is vice president of Harvard’s First Generation Student Union, an advocacy and support network seeking to create positive institutional change for students whose parents never attended a four-year-college; Barros is the president. To hear them talk about it, the union has become a haven for Harvard’s poorest students, even if “first generation” doesn’t always mean poor. Low-income kids claimed the term when they realized how much easier it was to admit they were struggling partly because they were the first in their family to go to college, and not simply because they were poor, says Dan Lobo, who founded the union in 2013. Raised by Cape Verdean immigrant parents in Lynn — his dad cooks and his mom waits tables at hotels near Logan — Lobo spent a few tough years “trying to transition to Harvard.” After having dinner with two classmates in similar circumstances who also felt like an “invisible minority” on campus and struggled to make friends and keep up academically, Lobo decided to “come out” as a low-income, first-generation student and organized the First Generation Student Union. Urging others to talk more openly about how their background influenced their college experience, he sought to create a community that could advocate for change on campus. “At the time, no one was talking about first-gen issues at all,” says Lobo, who has since graduated (with highest honors) and works for a nonprofit that helps students of color get into elite private high schools. “It’s like Harvard was committed to admitting underprivileged kids, but then we got here and they didn’t know what to do with us.”Freshman Alejandro Claudio navigates a different world at Brown. “If I fail, I’m going back to poverty, to working in a factory,” he says.DINA RUDICK/GLOBE STAFFAs at Harvard, low-income students at Yale and Brown have suggested administrators could do more to help them develop a sense of belonging. And they, too, have been organizing — Undergraduate First Generation Low Income Partnership sprang up in 2014 at Yale. At Brown, three students, including a Mexican-American kid from California named Manuel Contreras, started 1vyG, the Inter-Ivy, First Generation College Student Network, in January 2014. Contreras’s group organized a three-day conference this February that brought together students and administrators from other schools to share information and learn from one another. “Brown wasn’t made for students like us,” Contreras, a cognitive science major, often tells fellow members, “but we have to make it ours.”All the groups are seeking greater visibility on campus: a more open dialogue about what it means to be a first-generation student at an Ivy League school, dedicated staff to serve as support, and a list of best practices so Ivies can use their abundant resources to ensure their most disadvantaged students are as equipped to succeed as other students. If the infrastructure at an Ivy League school assumes everyone comes from a certain socioeconomic background, as some first-generation students say, then change needs to come at an institutional level. Dining halls at some schools, for example, close for spring break, though some students can’t afford to leave campus. While tuition, room, and board may be covered. some universities tack on a “student fee” ranging from a few hundred to as much as a thousand dollars, an amount that can be devastating to those trying to figure out how to pay for books.Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College, grew up in Queens as the son of a teacher in the Bronx. “We have to do a better job at making sure every student feels comfortable here,” says Khurana, who recently organized a task force to that end. In December, Harvard appointed two first-generation liaisons — one in the office of financial aid, the other in the office of career services — to help ease the transition for students. In January, Jason Munster, a first-generation low-income graduate student in environmental sciences and engineering from Maine, was named Harvard College’s first “first-generation tutor.” If you’re poor and struggling, Munster is the person you can go to for help. With an undergraduate degree from Harvard, Munster is also the campus liaison for the Harvard First Generation Alumni Network, founded around the same time as the First Generation Student Union.Still, students complain that Harvard worries too much about singling out first-generation students — the administration has been hesitant, for example, to offer them a specialized “bridge” program in the summer before their freshman year. Khurana waves the accusation off, saying that as a college Harvard is still figuring out how best to help. “I told the task force to imagine that we can create the best environment possible for these kids — no constraints,” he says. “What is the ideal? Can we create relationships earlier in their experience rather than later? Can we streamline certain forms of financial aid? It’s our goal to close this gap as quickly as possible.”ON A SUNDAY in mid-January, 18-year-old Alejandro Claudio has just packed up his duffel bag at his family’s first-floor apartment in a run-down triple-decker on Waldo Street in Providence’s West End. A crumbling statue of the Virgin Mary sits on the porch; next door is the Cranston Street Rescue Mission, a soup kitchen. It’s just a 15-minute drive across the city back to school after winter break, but to Claudio, dressed most days in his Brown sweat shirt and Red Sox cap, Brown is worlds away from the neighborhood where he grew up. On campus, his “perfect world up on the hill,” he feels removed from the worries at home — how his mom, a day-care provider, and his dad, a welder, are going to make their rent or keep their lights on. A political science, philosophy, and economics major, Claudio is well aware, though, that he must succeed. “If I fail, I’m going back to poverty, to working in a factory. I need to get good grades and get a job that pays well enough to help feed my family.”Claudio’s bright, windowed dorm room overlooks a grassy quad, and he can eat whenever he wants at the Ratty, the campus dining hall, because his meal plan is covered by his scholarship. During his first semester, friends looked at him like he had five heads when he said he’d never tasted falafel, kebabs, or curry. He had immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic when he was 8. “Growing up in a poor family, we ate the same thing every night: rice, beans, and chicken,” he says.Brown UniversityIt was at Providence’s predominantly Latino Central High School that Claudio, who would go on to be class valedictorian, decided he didn’t want a job in the fish factories where many of his friends’ parents worked. He believed he might actually escape the West End when he met Dakotah Rice, his coach on the debate team and an undergrad low-income student at Brown. They’d get together at a Burger King across from Central to talk about Claudio’s future and his chances of going to Brown. “He understood my background, and we’d talk for hours about how I could get in. He was like, ‘If I can do it, you can too,’ ” says Claudio. Now that he’s on campus, Claudio sees just how big a social gap exists between him and other students. It was easy to mistake other African-American and Latino students as coming from a similar socioeconomic background — but after striking up a conversation, Claudio was shocked to learn many were as moneyed as his white peers. At the first ice cream social, one student mentioned his dad was a lawyer and his mom a doctor, then asked Claudio what his parents did. When he told them his dad was a welder, the conversation ended awkwardly. Later in the semester, Claudio confided in a well-off friend that his mom was asking him for money to help pay bills. “I’m sorry,” the friend said, which made Claudio feel worse. He’s since stopped sharing his background so openly.After parachuting into a culture where many kids seem to have a direct line to prestigious internships through their well-off parents and feel entitled to argue with a professor over a grade, poor kids sense their disadvantage. Even if they’re in the same school as some of the nation’s smartest and best-connected young people, students’ socioeconomic backgrounds seem to dictate how they navigate campus. Research shows, for example, that upper-middle-class kids are better at asking for help at college than low-income ones, in part because they know the resources available to them. Disadvantaged students are accustomed to doing everything on their own because they rarely have parents educated enough to help them with things like homework or college applications, so they may be less likely to go to a writing center or ask a professor for extra help. Yolanda Rome, assistant dean for first-year and sophomore students at Brown, says many disadvantaged students have come to her in tears after getting a C on a paper. When she asks if they met with the instructor, the answer is typically no. “We’re working hard to change the campus culture,” she says, “so these students know that asking for help is not a weakness.”Anthony Jack, a resident tutor at Harvard alongside Jason Munster, is a PhD candidate in sociology studying low-income students at elite colleges. He says low-income students show up at his office every other week looking to vent about frustrations with campus life — or to ask a question they don’t know whom else to ask, like “How do I get a recommendation for a fellowship?” In his research, Jack looks at the experiences of both the “privileged poor,” low-income students who attend an elite, private high school before college, and the “doubly disadvantaged,” or students who aren’t familiar with the expectations and norms of elite colleges. His findings suggest that low-income students’ success on campus may be tied to the social and cultural capital they possess. For example, do they arrive with the same sense of entitlement as their more affluent peers, do they understand the importance of developing one-on-one relationships with professors to earn future recommendations?Brown is just a 15-minute ride from the apartment in Providence’s West End where Alejandro Claudio’s parents, Alejandro and Maribel Claudio, live.DINA RUDICK/GLOBE STAFFJack says that the privileged poor adjust more easily to the campus culture than the doubly disadvantaged. The latter see professors as distant authority figures and feel guarded in approaching them, whereas the privileged poor, like upper-middle-class students, find it easier to cultivate the relationship. “You’re worth a professor’s time,” Jack will tell many of the students he mentors.Does this reluctance to ask for help ultimately impact graduation rates? Perhaps not as much at an Ivy League school as elsewhere. Nationally, the graduation rate for low-income, first-generation students in bachelor’s programs is about 11 percent, but that number increases dramatically at Ivy League schools, where most of the financial burden is lifted from students. According to data collected by I’m First, an online community for first-generation college students funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, at Harvard and Yale, 98 percent of students from minority groups underrepresented in college will graduate with a four-year degree within six years; at Brown, it’s 91 percent.When recent Brown graduate Renata Martin first came to campus, she had no idea how poor her family was back in the Newark area, where her dad works as a pizza delivery driver. “Everyone who lived around us was getting their lights shut off — that was my normal,” she says. She used her campus health insurance to see a therapist for help with her identity struggles, but she couldn’t afford the $15 copays. Martin, who attended Brown on a $90,000 Jack Kent Cooke scholarship, says, “Brown assumes that all students can afford small extras like that, but we can’t.” During lean weeks, she’d stop in to see the campus chaplain to apply for funds to buy a book she couldn’t afford or a bus ticket home. “It’s really hard to ask for help,” she says. “But I had to get used to telling professors my story or I wouldn’t have gotten through Brown.”Beth Breger is the executive director of Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, a nonprofit that helps prepare 100 high-achieving, low-income high school juniors per year for college and the application process. Its students spend seven weeks on Princeton University’s campus to study leadership and attend seminars on things like writing, standardized-test prep, and campus life. They’re introduced to the resources that exist on campus, like the career center, where they can learn how to network and prepare for job interviews. “Our students are very capable of doing the work academically, but we help them with social and cultural aspects of school: why it’s important to meet with their academic adviser and professors, how to access a health center. We don’t want them to feel like taking advantage of these resources is a weakness.” Bridge programs with similar goals exist for incoming freshmen at Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. Says Breger: “There’s a confidence issue with these kids. Many have never met a corporate lawyer or Wall Street trader. They don’t have a parent offering them a lens into the professional world. We try to broaden their perspective.”WHEN JUNIOR Julia Dixon steps inside the small cafeteria at Trumbull College at Yale, the short-order cook flipping hamburgers lights up: “Hi, Ms. Julia, what can I get for you today?” A man stacking crates of clean glasses says to the Southern-born Dixon: “Ms. Julia, it’s too cold for a Georgia peach today, isn’t it?” Wearing black-rimmed glasses and lipstick the color of Japanese eggplant, Dixon may be a long way from her childhood as the second oldest of 11 growing up on food stamps in rural Georgia. But she sees the dining room workers as family. In fact, when her parents rented a car and drove up to visit, they were nervous around Dixon’s friends — but they asked to meet the cafeteria workers. “Can you watch out for my baby girl?” her father asked the short-order cooks. That her parents reached out to dining hall staff on their one visit to campus, rather than a professor or faculty member, gets at the heart of the split identity Dixon has grappled with since her freshman year.She’s come to see herself as “Georgia Julia” and “Yale Julia,” and reconciling the two identities is complicated. Even her parents sense the change. On her second (and most recent) visit home in the three years she’s been at school, her father voiced concern at dinner one night that her education might cause her to drift away from them. “I don’t want you to be ashamed of us,” he said. At first, Dixon wouldn’t talk to her parents about what she was going through at school — a tough class she was taking, how much money she had in her bank account. She’s since realized that the only way to stay connected to them is to talk openly about her problems, even if most of what she’s experiencing is foreign to them.Poor students may feel out of place at an Ivy League school, but over time, they may feel as if they don’t belong at home, either. “Often, they come to college thinking that they want to return home to their communities,” says Rome, the Brown official. “But an Ivy League education puts them in a different place — their language is different, their appearance is different, and they don’t fit in at home anymore, either.”Ellie Dupler, a junior global affairs major at Yale with wavy, reddish-brown hair and silver hoop earrings she picked up in Turkey on a Yale-funded trip, lived in a trailer with her single mother in northern Michigan until she was in the sixth grade. In high school, she took a public bus two hours each way to a better public school than the one in her hometown. She’s on a tight budget when we meet at Blue State coffeehouse in New Haven. “I’m waiting for a check from financial aid, so I’ve been skipping some meals,” she says. Even so, Dupler says Yale has given her a false sense of financial security. “Frankly, the longer I’m here, the less that I feel I identify with having a low-income background.”Along with working three jobs, she’s on the school’s ski team — her mom operated the chairlift at a resort near her hometown, and Dupler could ski for free. When she shared her background with some of her teammates, they were surprised. “I would have never have known you were low income,” one told her. Her best friend, who is from a wealthy suburb of New York City, helps her out when she needs it, though Dupler says she’s quick to repay her. Dupler thinks she’s been able to blend in more easily at Yale than some other low-income students because she’s white. “Typically, unless I disclose my background in some way, I’m assumed to be just like most of the other white students who grew up upper middle class in a perfect house in the suburbs,” she says. She likes seeing herself through other students’ eyes. Maybe it’s even convinced her that she can live a different kind of life.Still, graduation looms, and she worries about making it without the security of a Yale scholarship. “I feel like here I’m moving up the socioeconomic ladder. But when I graduate, will I slip back down?” As a result, she says, she’s become obsessed with her career. “My friends joke that my aspirations change weekly.” She’s currently set on getting a graduate degree in law and public policy and eventually a career in international relations.Julia Dixon says she tries not to see money as the most defining element of her identity anymore. Yale has shown her a life where dinner conversations don’t revolve around overdue bills. She’s using the time to think about her future — without worrying about the financial means she needs to get there. “Money is something I’ve learned to disassociate from. Maybe I see these four years as my chance to dream.”Brooke Lea Foster is a writer in New York. Send comments to [email protected] THE NUMBERS38% — Share of undergraduates at four-year schools whose parents did not attend college1 in 10 — Number of people from low-income families who attain a bachelor’s degree by age 25 (half of the people from high-income families do)4.5 million — Number of low-income, first-generation students enrolled in post-secondary education, about 24 percent of the undergraduate populationSources: US Department of Education; Russell Sage Foundation; the Pell InstituteBROWN GROUP BRINGS FIRST-GENS FROM MANY CAMPUSES TOGETHERBy Emeralde Jensen-RobertsEsther Maddox from Princeton, Jasmine Fernandez from Harvard, and Kujegi Camara, also from Princeton, attended an open dialogue session at Brown’s 1vyG conference for first-generation students in February.GRETCHEN ERTLA new group at Brown brings first-gens from many campuses together to agitate for change.On a frosty Saturday morning in February, more than 200 students, some wearing sleek business suits, file in to Brown University’s C.V. Starr auditorium. As they wait for the day’s program to start, they sit in small, chatty packs, picking at blueberry muffins and sipping coffee from paper cups. Some take selfies with friends, later tweeted and hashtagged “1vyG2015.”Hailing from Brown and 15 other schools, some Ivies and some not, the students and more than 20 college administrators are here at the invitation of 1vyG, a first-generation student network launched last year at Brown. 1vyG’s founders, juniors Manuel Contreras, Jessica Brown, and Stanley Stewart, have been studying the obstacles that first-generation students like them face at Brown, and the three-day conference, believed to be the first of its kind, is a natural extension of that. Are students at other schools dealing with the same challenges, and how can they share information to help improve campus life for all?The weekend’s workshops are geared to fostering discussion between first-generation students and administrators and to boosting students’ coping skills on campus and beyond. Sessions include Navigating Class and Culture on Campus, Building a Career as a First-Gen, and Coaching College-Bound Students to Succeed.Contreras comes away from the event determined to repeat it. “At bare minimum, we’re going to be an annual rotating conference,” he says, with different schools playing host. Additional ambitions at Brown include setting up a textbook lending library and establishing a mentorship program to connect incoming students with current first-generation upperclassmen and alumni.The ultimate goal remains constant: keep pushing schools to broaden their view and keep encouraging students to find strength through their shared experience. “I want first-gens to be connected, [to] feel happy and that they belong,” says Contreras. “You may be the first, but you’re not alone.”

I was holding out on answering this for a while, but in the wake of Brexit, I think the time has come to levy my thoughts on this thorny topic.Unfortunately, Brexit was and is a shitshow.Let’s break this answer down into three sections:The motivational factorsThe deal we gotThe overall impactOnce they’re examined, we’ll see the lunacy that’s unfolding!Motivational Factors“Taking back control”A biggie on the negotiating table, and one of the major issues that sparked many Brits into patriotic action. Legal culture became a massive sticking point.“Time to take back our sovereignty!”, the Conservatives peddling Brexit would repeat as if it were a religious mantra, as if we were brave fighters during World War Two landing on enemy soil to do battle with the evil European Communities Act 1972. Forgetting, of course, that we have our sovereignty baked into our membership, considering that we can exercise it at any time to leave. Which Brexit proved in 2016. It was a sovereign choice to join te European Union, it was a sovereign choice to leave, it was a sovereign choice to march up to the other countries and demand all the special treatment we could gorge on (no Euro currency, indexed child benefits, et al).We’ve been exercising that sovereignty from Day Bloody One. Pretty crappy a footing to go on, heralding the return of our sovereignty when we’re literally exercising our sovereignty to reclaim our sovereignty, no?EconomicsLook, I get it.When somebody unveils this:Your first instinct is one of joy.We love our National Health Service!However, in that joy, Brexiteers forgot that the politicians pushing for Brexit had very little power to make that promise into a reality. As such, when it came time to discuss the economic issue, we had to deal with U-turns and backtracking from those who had made promises that they could never keep. Meanwhile, on other industries, Brexiteers love to push the case that we have to let European Union companies compete for our contracts (forgetting that we have the right to compete for their contracts too), the fishing argument (0.1% of our GDP, less than even the iconic Games Workshop!), and that the European Union caused industrial competences to leave Britain (as if we hadn’t had enough time to develop and act accordingly before 2016 rolled around).While I have sympathy for the fishermen, I don’t much care for symbolic victories. Fishing rights were a symbolic tool to be used as a stick to beat sovereignty issues over, and that can barely count as a sound economic case (at 0.1% GDP) where the motivation was simple-minded British nationalism and sovereignty.“We were told it was just a Common Market…”And we were told that the Tories had an oven-ready deal.We were waiting more or less up to the last second for that deal.Gee, Brexiteers sure picked their bloody moment to start caring about when a politician lies, especially considering the economic and social fallout of this particular lie!Plus, it’s a bit rich for the Brexiteer camp to have demanded that we be told the truth about the European Union from decades past, waxing weary about the betrayal of our trust and our sovereignty and our whatnot, and then lie about their finances that they spent and diverted to get us out of the Union, racking up a hefty fine from the Electoral Commission for flagrantly breaching campaign spending laws…Every politician stretches the truth from time to time, and it sucks that they do that. I genuinely detest career politicians who’d try to sell their own mother for a grape and some leverage. But pride against having been sold one of the thousands upon thousands of stretched truths across all of political history, fuelled by useless nationalism and dreams of former glory (the good old days of being a superpower, Rule Britannia!), has created a political abomination. And all of this being spearheaded by a Prime Minister (and prominent Brexiteer) who was sacked from his job at The Times for fabricating a quote, who has been deemed by Conservative Member of Parliament Rory Stewart as “the most accomplished liar in public life”;Perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister. He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie and the bullshit lie.Let’s undo a lie that’s given us pan-European rights and trade by appealing to the better nature of a known and infamous liar who has a well-documented history of lying to get through his life but trust us, he’s telling the truth now…Wait, what?“We’ve survived worse, we were fine without it!”The European Union’s website says this:The European Union is set up with the aim of ending the frequent and bloody wars between neighbours, which culminated in the Second World War. As of 1950, the European Coal and Steel Community begins to unite European countries economically and politically in order to secure lasting peace.Frankly, no we were not alright without it, if the death toll from World Wars One and Two at 40,000,000 and 75,000,000 respectively is anything to go by. Further integration and unions hold us together in a way that we weren’t before, which is desirable both in terms of political gain and in common humanitarian understandings. Even in an era without world wars (if not an end to wars at all), keeping the peace through agreement and common trade is an essential part to that maintenance. To state that we were “better before” the European project is a ridiculous notion, considering how much we have gained from it and how much we have lost in leaving.The European Union was not established immediately (indeed, its official date was on the 1st November 1993, under the Treaty of Maastrict), but the communities and treaties leading up to it date back to the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. At the same time, we saw the United Nations and the International Court of Justice being founded in 1945, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the Council of Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance in 1949, and the European Convention on Human Rights in 1953. That these dates all more or less immediately follow the Second World War is no accident. The context leading up to the European Union is vitally important, for those little steps led up to the keeping of the peace that we know and enjoy today.Plus, let’s consider the “better before” and “survived worse” rhetoric. It harkens to a mythical era of a land of milk and honey. Take the example of the fishing industry, since the fishermen were all complaining that the Union has shafted them for years (not all sunshine and rainbows for them now, is it?); would they like to go back to the days where nets and hooks and fishing lines weren’t invented, because “we have the olden ways”? Not in the slightest! Technology advanced, rendering the old obsolete! Just like in our technological advances, politics shifts to render old models as incompatible with the current era; the globalised world makes the nation state look quaint.The nation state is fit for a few purposes, owing to cultural heritage and specific modes of legislative implementation in the countries. But alone, European powers ravaged the world through colonialism and wars, and so the nation state without an inter-state accountability mechanism proved to be reckless and harmful. We proved that our nations were not to be trusted acting in isolation from one another, and we continue to mess up even with the European Union. The difference is that, until Brexit, we had twenty-seven other nation states within one web to point out where we had gone wrong. When the time comes for the European Union to be rendered obsolete, the same will happen to it.But we’re not there yet.The world has all changed.It’s globalising.Some say that’s for the best, others for the worst. But the old ways of doing things are gone. Dead in the water, as it were. Fit to be gawked at from a museum, behind a red ribbon, but nothing more. If we want to go back because we’ve “suffered worse”, that just smacks of single-minded British nationalism above all else, and it’s both misguided and foolish to base an argument off of that alone.But hey, if you want to go back to the days of “Keep Calm and Carry On!” as the air raid sirens whine into the night, be my guest!Just don’t drag me down with you.Welfare tourismThis one’s easy to debunk, but it takes a while.I’ll do so the help of researcher Marcus Österman:We found hardly any differences in how EU migration affects the public budget across the different types of welfare states. In four of the five welfare regimes we studied, where the great majority of EU migrants live, the net contribution to the public purse from the average EU migrant household was clearly positive and didn’t differ significantly across the different types of welfare states.[…]In further analysis, we found there wasn’t even a statistically significant difference between the contribution to the public budgets of EU migrants in the less generous Anglo-Saxon “basic security” regime in Ireland, the UK and Malta, and the Nordic “universal” regime.He summarises his findings here (Britain counts as ‘Basic Security’, far less generous than the likes of the Nordic universal welfare model):Moreover, Directive 2004/58/EC has this to say:All Union citizens shall have the right of residence on the territory of another Member State for a period of longer than three months if they:(a) are workers or self-employed persons in the host Member State; or(b) have sufficient resources for themselves and their family members not to become a burden on the social assistance system of the host Member State during their period of residence and have comprehensive sickness insurance cover in the host Member State; or(c) are enrolled at a private or public establishment, accredited or financed by the host Member State on the basis of its legislation or administrative practice, for the principal purpose of following a course of study, including vocational training; and have comprehensive sickness insurance cover in the host Member State and assure the relevant national authority, by means of a declaration or by such equivalent means as they may choose, that they have sufficient resources for themselves and their family members not to become a burden on the social assistance system of the host Member State during their period of residence; or(d) are family members accompanying or joining a Union citizen who satisfies the conditions referred to in points (a), (b) or (c).In each situation, the person wishing to come to the country has to either be earning, or they have to be sufficiently funded so to not become a drain on the Member State that hosts them. So this is not a European issue, it’s a British one, one that’s clearly been within British competence to fix. It’s not like the European Union sets the benefits scheme of every country; if they did, there wouldn’t be five distinct models in Österman’s study to analyse, and Britain would perhaps have a humane system of welfare benefits outwith the total disaster that Universal Credit has turned out to be.We might have had to cater our system to European migrants as they arrived, but the system we created was ours to control.Even the Commons Library acknowledges this:EU law doesn’t require Member States to allow EU migrants unrestricted access to benefits.Indeed, as the site InFacts notes:Why would people uproot themselves to cross Europe to come to a country where benefits aren’t that generous in the first place? If they really wanted to become welfare tourists, they would be better off going to Germany or Scandinavia.And as researcher Rachel Marangozov stated in 2013:Even the Government has conceded that it has no quantitative evidence for its recent claims of ‘welfare tourism’, when asked by the European Commission to provide more evidence on the issue, and their claim that 43 per cent of EU migrants were claiming benefits has already been widely discredited, not least by UK Statistics Authority.Most European migrants come to Britain to work and to contribute to society.The scare tactics are one part misinformation, one part racism.And leading nicely into the last point…Overt racismCuntface-Extraordinaire Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit Party, unveiled this poster aptly-labelled as ‘Breaking Point’. His plan was to vilify migrants and asylum seekers who come to Britain in need of a safe haven, portraying them as a wave of scroungers who will GOBBLE UP YOUR BENEFITS IF THEY’RE ALLOWED IN:Let’s counter him with this: Green World tells us about the refugees who supposedly flock to us for our stingy, ‘basic’ benefits (thank you, Österman!):France received 143,000 asylum applications in 2019, while that same year the UK received under 35,000. These figures have been more or less constant for the past five years, so we can immediately see that the problem is not France shirking its responsibilities and palming asylum seekers off en masse to the UK. Rather, it is the UK that takes on a disproportionately small responsibility for the protection of asylum seekers as compared to our European counterparts.Shut up, Farage.Even if we do accept a higher rate of refugees than France (which we should, it’s called basic decency), it’s still clear that we’re not the prime hotspot here. The rates of acceptance are, once again, within British control.Now, Brexit was not a racially-driven movement, and there are plenty of people who were swayed by the (flimsy) arguments on economic policy rather than the racial ones. Indeed, many of those people are incredibly clever friends of mine, and I would defend them against accusations of racism in the Brexit context with everything I have (unless, of course, they did end up making a racist statement somewhere along the line, which is highly unlikely given my experiences with them!).However, Brexit was to racists as a moth is drawn to a flame. A chance to dunk on the brown doctors who come over here and fix us with medicine! Time to bring back ye olde white supremacy! Eryl Jones of Show Racism the Red Card has noted Brexit as a major influencer of increased tensions and hate crimes, with even the Home Office noting a correlation. Brexit was appropriated as an initially non-racial movement to include racists, to the frustration of Remainers and economic-Brexiteers alike. But the damage has been done, and the damage belongs to the Brexiteers in their victory.On the basis of all of these, we can conclude that the Leave campaign utilised faulty arguments, and that by default there were far more arguments in favour of remaining than there were for leaving the European Union. Minus a few legitimate concerns among some affected industries, the mainstream factors involved in pulling Britain out of the European Union were problematic at best, and their rampant nationalism at the expense of common sense precludes much in the way of any rational discussion.The Deal We GotI’m just gonna leave this here, because fuck me.We lost the Erasmus+ scheme.We lost free movement rights.We lost the Court of Justice safeguards (remember the Snooper’s Charter?)We couldn’t even make the fishermen happy for all of this loss:Mr Deas [chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations] said: This is very far away from the fishing industry expected or indeed was promised, we have surrendered access for the EU fleets to fish in our waters, for a further five years, without securing the quote advantages that we have a right to expect as an independent coastal state under international law.And this is what drivers at Dover have to deal with now:This is as recent as December 2020.I mean, thank fuck we have a deal, but we don’t get to celebrate. Our options were the shit of no-deal or the slightly fragranced shit of the deal we got. We should take it, not because it’s a great deal, but because there’s no other deal on offer. Any delay to this one will sink any hope of a deal at all. Brexiteers are cheering that the deal wasn’t as bad as it could have been, that there are opportunities, but the carnage that these miserable opportunities has been bought with was never worth it in the first place. So we don’t get to celebrate; we get to tuck our tail between our legs, and we get to thank our lucky stars that our shit was at least fragranced.Damage limitation does not make for a good deal.The damage should never have been done.But we get blue passports, at least!Living the dream here!Overall ImpactThere’s more overall factors to consider here:Continued racism: you thought racism was going to end after the Brexit process? Think again. It’s just gonna get worse. This is the Windrush country, the Hostile Environment perpetrators, the “let’s wheel out Priti Patel as our female Asian shield so that we can say what we like about BLM” people. Not to say that the other parties don’t have racists (God knows Labour has anti-Semitism issues), but the Tories are in charge now, and it’s their policies.Scotland: Britain to Scotland be like “oh, please don’t leave, we’re so much better as a union!” and then be like to Europe “please let us leave, we’re so much worse as a union!”, saying both with a straight face. We Scots rejected independence partly for Europe, and we got swindled on the Smith Commission and now on the Union membership that we wanted. You’ll understand, I hope, that Scotland is not exactly filled with happy bunnies right now.Ireland and America: the Irish border was a sticking point, and the situation we’ve got pleases nobody. That’s what you get when England asserts itself over everyone to drag us out of the European Union: can we rename the United Kingdom to “England and Friends” yet? Plus, treating Ireland with kid gloves is a must for a good relationship with the new President-Elect Biden, and as we know, England has such a wonderful history of doing just that.Boris Johnson’s administration: we could have had a great deal, and it would still have only mitigated the impact. Brexit now has to be dealt with by the donkeys currently in charge. These are the folks who can’t even get ventilators because the invitation email went to an unchecked spam folder, who got their asses handed to them by Dr June Raine when they tried to claim that they got their vaccine approved due to Brexit. Utter titheads.Reduction of trust in experts: with twelve devastating words, “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts”, questionable human Michael Gove tarnished the reputations of every expert in their field. Doesn’t matter that researchers debunked the welfare myth, or that there’s a new COVID vaccine, or that the world’s not flat: they’re the global elite! How can we survive when the academics sit around reading Michel Foucault!Economic priorities: between excessive defence spending mid-pandemic (the largest increase since Thatcher’s leadership at £16,500,000, after refusing to fund school meals and cutting foreign aid) to a great big Brexit festival planned at £120,000,000, we’re sinking money into trash. At least fund the NHS like your bus promised, instead of clapping like seals every Thursday! Our priorities are inane; no wonder we had to scapegoat Europe.Disaffected youth voters: the 18–24 year olds voted 73–27 to Remain. 25–34 year olds went 62–38 to Remain. 35–44 went 52–48 to Remain. The ages 45 and above voted to take us out of Europe, and my generation have to deal with the fallout. The 65+ year olds went 60–40 to Leave; we're already faced with Millennials vs Boomers socially, and these optics hurt reconciliation. It's funny how our elders get to order for the entire restaurant before leaving themselves!Yes, I know, not all 65+ year olds, but statistics don’t lie.Mistrust in politicians overall: from David Cameron’s miscalculations, to his successors’ ineptitude, to Leave.EU failing to report their spending resulting in a fine of £66,000, to Remain groups being fined (at lower rates owing to the severity of the breaches), to lies about Turkey joining the Union (Britain has a veto, people!), politicians suck. But Leave.EU outshone all other breaches of electoral law; very bad optics for the alleged defenders of British sovereignty.The COVID-19 response: England had the "longest continuous period of excess mortality” across the European Union between January and June, so said the Office for National Statistics. Economic upheaval in conjunction with one of the worst crises in our twenty-first century lives? Yes please, why not? Thank you! It’s not like we wanted an easy time of it, we might as well throw in some plot twists to keep 2021 as spicy as humanly possible!Human rights: this doesn’t end with the European Union. The Lisbon Treaty aimed to keep members in the European Convention of Human Rights (the one that Theresa May wanted to scrap), and now we’re fully unchecked. Sovereignty is a hop and a skip away from ignoring the Convention outright. The United Nations already lacks the teeth to enforce human rights issues, so now it’s onto the days of the Snooper’s Charter once again.Spike in British nationalism: we had this in spades before, in no small part drummed up by Nigel Farage and his shitty little lackeys, but prepare for the overdrive. Case on point: instead of accepting an offer to remain in the Erasmus+ scheme for students to go to foreign European universities as part of their development, Britain snubbed the offer and decided to make their own program. A lot of grandstanding from the spam email administration.Regardless of the economic benefits that might come about (sparsely and slowly), we’re left facing a social backlash that will never recover. We’ve burnt so many bridges, we’re viewed with mistrust and contempt almost everywhere we go. England even faces hatred from Scotland, so we’re barely stable internally!Whatever deals we make, whatever economic ups or downs we have, Brexiteers still have to account for the social harm that Brexit has wrought. There is no remedy that can be paid off for this kind of thing. Britain was already fairly arrogant as a country (I’m British/Scottish, I know what I’m talking about!), but now it’s on full display. Make a million new economic deals, but the social fallout has crippled British goodwill and our standing throughout the world, leaving us very vulnerable at an already very vulnerable time. We need to rebuild that goodwill quickly.And we have a Prime Minister who quoted Kipling in Myanmar.We’re so very fucked.If it isn’t clear enough by now, I’m foul angry at those who dragged Britain out of the European Union. My generation, and those who come after, will have to deal with the fallout for years to come, while the older populaces who voted overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit will get to clap themselves on the backs for the next ten years before they become too infirm to vote any more.The United Kingdom is in tatters, our economics are a joke, we’re cravenly bowing to any country that offers us a trade deal, our NHS and human rights are edging close to the chopping block, and we’re reliant on limited international goodwill after our historic and present shenanigans.These were issues that existed well before Brexit.The NHS blood plasma supplier was privatised and sold to Bain Capital in 2013 (who sold it off to a Chinese buyer for £820,000,000 three years later), Alex Salmond wanted to take Scotland out of the United Kingdom in 2014, and Theresa May wanted to take Britain out of the European Convention of Human Rights in 2016. God knows that racists were abound in the United Kingdom before the Brexit vote was on the horizon. These are all pre-existing issues within our ‘great’ British society.But they’ve been well and truly exacerbated.I care little for the European Union as a body. I won’t be rushing to embrace Guy Verhofstadt if I ever meet him. I won’t be praising Ursula von der Leyen if we ever cross paths. I don’t hold leaders or organisations in any form of reverence; to do so is culty, and if there’s one thing I detest, it’s a cult. However, I’m still very sad to see the advantages that we had disappearing, all for negligible economic returns, brazen and unmerited nationalism, and social devastation in return for our troubles.And do you want to know the real kicker in all of this?"What is the EU?" is the second top UK question on the EU since the #EURefResults were officially announced pic.twitter.com/1q4VAX3qcm— GoogleTrends (@GoogleTrends) June 24, 2016Well done, British exceptionalism.Born, bred, and created to be as stupid as possible.I hope it was worth it.

Here's a great email floating around from 50 Things You Didn't Know About Montana1.) Montana has more bookstores, birdwatchers, firearms, people who hunt, and people who fish per capita than any other state.2.) Montana is larger than Japan, the United Kingdom, and Italy. If Montana were to secede from the union (and there have been numerous calls to do so) it would be the 62nd largest country in the world.3.) Tweets originating from inside the state of Montana are longer than those from any other state−averaging just more than 43 out of 140 possible characters in length.4.) A Montana Yogo Sapphire is the only North American gem included in the Crown Jewels of England.5.) By law it is a felony in Montana for a wife to open her husband’s mail.6.) Montana is the only state bordering three Canadian provinces; Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.7.) When Great Falls High School was built in 1896, a herd of sheep was used to compact earth around the foundation.8.) Jordan, Montana, the county seat for Garfield County, is 175 miles from the nearest airport, 85 miles from the nearest bus line, and 115 miles from the nearest train.9.) It is perfectly legal in Montana to ride your horse home if you are drunk.10.) Montana is the only state to allow double proxy weddings. In other words, both the bride and groom can have stand-ins exchange matrimonial vows on their behalf. Double proxy divorces, unfortunately, do not exist.11.) Montana is the only state with rivers that drain into three different oceans; the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, and Arctic Ocean (by virtue of its drainage into Canada's Hudson Bay).12.) Montana has more residents (8.529 per 10,000 people) serving in the United States military than any other state...yet it is the only state without a modern naval ship named in its honor.13.) An earthquake in 1959 caused Hebgen Lake in Gallatin County, Montana to recede 22 feet, leaving a wide gravel beach along its lakefront.14.) In 1903 the library in Bozeman, Montana was intentionally built across the street from the city's red-light district and opium dens.15.) Montana is the only state in the U.S. that does not have any statewide ban on texting behind the wheel.16.) The Montana state constitution mandates that all students must learn American Indian history, culture, and heritage.17.) A cowboy once insisted on riding his horse to his room in the Grand Union Hotel in Fort Benton, Montana. When the manager objected, the two exchanged gunfire. The cowboy was killed before he and his horse made it to the top of the stairs. Fourteen slugs were later removed from his body.18.) A Gideon bible was first placed inside a hotel room in Montana.19.) The bed of bison bones at First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park in Montana is 13 feet deep.20.) Fort Peck Dam is the largest earth-filled dam in the world and a photo of it was the first photo to grace the cover of Life magazine on November 23, 1936.21.) It is illegal to operate a vehicle with ice picks attached to the wheels within the city limits of Whitehall, Montana.22.) 46 out of Montana's 56 counties are still considered "frontier counties" with fewer than 6 residents per square mile.23.) Mary Fields, who was born into slavery in 1832 and who would later became known as “Stagecoach Mary,” was one of the toughest women in the Montana Territory. She was described as a "tart-tongued, gun-toting, hard-drinking, cigar-and-pipe smoking, 6 foot tall, 200 pound black woman who was tough enough to take on any two men." She arrived in Montana to help establish mission schools on the Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfoot and Fort Belknap Indian Reservations.24.) Montana permits urinating along the side of the road (so as long as he or she attempts to be modest and does not bother anyone else in the process).25.) Montana has more one-room schools−around 90−than any other state in the country.26.) Montana has more than 29,000 family farms and ranches covering 66 percent of the state's land mass.27.) In 1993 the town of Ismay, Montana unofficially changed its name to Joe, Montana as part of a well organized publicity stunt by the Kansas City Chiefs to honor quarterback Joe Montana.28.) The only place where you can cross the Canada-United States border without having to show any form of ID or documentation is when you are on a cruise from Waterton, Alberta to Goat Haunt, Montana on Waterton Lake.29.) Cattle rustling in Montana is still punishable by hanging.30.) There are 77 mountain ranges in Montana and 2,991 mountain peaks with names...none of which are among the 50 tallest in the United States.31.) During a smallpox epidemic in the early 1800s two Crow Indian boys rode a white horse over a cliff to sacrifice their lives to save their tribe from the disease. The exact location of that cliff is believed to be along the Yellowstone River near Billings, Montana.32.) According to the folklore of the Crow Nation, the Little People of Montana's Pryor Mountains were dwarves so violent and fearsome they could tear the heart out of an enemy's horse.33.) Montana was the first state to elect a woman to Congress in 1916.34.) The Roe River near Great Falls, Montana is only 201 feet long and is considered the world's shortest river.35.) In 1960 late Senator Ted Kennedy rode a bucking bronco named Skyrocket at a rodeo in Miles City, Montana while stumping for his brother John for President.36.) It is illegal in Montana for a married women to go fishing alone on Sundays. It is also illegal for unmarried women to fish alone at all.37.) Stars who call Montana home (at least part of the year) include Michael Keaton (Big Timber), David Letterman (Choteau), Huey Lewis (Stevensville), Dennis Quaid (Livingston), Bill Pullman (Whitehall), Howie Long (Flathead Lake), John Mayer (Bozeman), Tom Brokaw (Livingston), and Ted Turner (Gallatin Gateway).38.) Montana has fewer acres of wetlands than any other state.39.) Montana has almost three times as many cows than it has people.40.) Thomas Francis Meagher was an Irish revolutionary convicted of treason and exiled to a penal colony in Tasmania before he served as Montana's territorial secretary and governor.41.) Nearly one fourth of Montana−22.4 million acres−is forested. And the most common tree in the state of Montana is the Ponderosa pine, which was formally adopted as the state tree in 1949 at the urging of the Montana Federation of Garden Clubs.42.) In 1867 the United States Congress annulled all legislation passed by the second and third assemblies of the Montana territory; an unprecedented act in American history.43.) Montana was the first state to adopt a State Lullaby.44.) Montana has more species of mammals (108) than any other U.S. state.45.) Montana was the last state to establish an age limit for buying cigarettes.46.) The first federal census in 1870 showed only 20,595 people living in the Montana Territory.47.) The population of Petroleum County, Montana is just 494 people despite being larger than the state of Rhode Island.48.) Before being named the Montana Territory, Congress considered naming the state "Shoshone" to honor the Indians who lived in the state and "Jefferson" to honor the former President who commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition.49.) For over 100 years no one knew the name of the person who sculpted the bronze sculpture of a woman that sits atop Montana's Capitol dome or where it came from.50.) Roy, Montana (pop. 108) owes its name to a spelling mistake. When Walter H. Peck established a post office on his ranch in 1892 he requested the name Ray in honor of a relative. However, someone in Washington D.C. misread the application and returned it with the name Roy instead.