BELFAST, Northern Ireland (CN) — Meet Michael Grubb, a mild-mannered 59-year-old retired computer consultant, the embodiment of the Brexit voter and Democratic Unionist Party supporter. Meet the reason Brexit is such a political mess.
Grubb, a pro-Brexit Protestant from Belfast, is just the kind of voter causing British Prime Minister Theresa May so many problems and throwing the United Kingdom into an existential crisis.
“I voted Brexit and I would vote for it again,” he said on a recent morning on his way home, pausing to discuss Brexit and the future of Northern Ireland with a Courthouse News reporter.
His way of seeing Brexit reflects that of the Democratic Unionist Party, Northern Ireland's radical right-wing and dominant Protestant party whose 10 members in the House of Commons in London have, by virtue of political events, become decisive in Brexit negotiations. Until now, they have helped block May’s deal.
For Grubb, backing Brexit was the chance to get things right in a nation that he, like so many others, feels is becoming unrecognizable and losing its identity.
He was frank. He wants to stop Muslim immigration, shut off the spigot of cheap labor from Eastern European nations in the European Union, free the UK from one-size-fits-all EU dictates and regain control of Northern Ireland.
In his mind, Brexit was about making the United Kingdom better and more unified. His views were echoed by other Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, supporters across Belfast who spoke to Courthouse News.
But he’s not happy — not at all — because he sees the British government reneging on Brexit.
Like many others in this tough working-class city defined by its violent past of sectarian conflict, Grubb is intensely political. He closely follows the daily political drama of Brexit, and he’s disappointed.
“I am very angry. I feel like the British government has denied the Leave voters the right,” he said. “They have betrayed democracy.”
His anger is legitimate. In the 2016 referendum, he was among 17.4 million UK voters who chose to exit the EU — the Leave voters. In a shocking and unexpected victory, they won by a margin of about 4 percent: 52 percent to 48 percent.
Yet nearly three years later, the House of Commons is deadlocked over whether to carry out Brexit at all, because it is viewed as harmful to the economy, undermining liberal causes and radically altering Britain's geopolitical direction. Brexit is often called the UK’s most decisive moment since World War II.
Grubb shook his head in exasperation. For him, politicians, political activists, left-wing pressure groups and urban elites are undoing the referendum results.
“We now live in a world where a small number of people can enforce their world on the majority. That’s not democracy. That’s dictatorship,” he said.
The referendum was not legally binding, nor did it spell out how the exit was to take place. In part, these ambiguities help explain why the disagreements over how to carry out Brexit could become so deep.
Still, for voters like Grubb it was as clear as could be: The people voted to leave the EU.
“They were given a simple mandate,” he said of politicians.
“People voted for Brexit for two reasons: Immigration and how broken NHS is,” he said. NHS is the National Health Service, the UK’s generously funded national healthcare system.
He claimed the healthcare system was failing because it was overburdened by immigrants. “I've seen it change to where I couldn’t get an appointment for two-and-half to three weeks,” he said, describing a recent medical experience he had while living in Leeds in the north of England. “When I did go in, it was full of foreign people — all of them who couldn't speak English.”
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