We have been in London for a little over a week, and the independence issue is just as strong here as it is in the USA.   With Trump axing trade deals such as TPP, and strengthening immigration laws.  The UK and other parts of the EU are participating in similar reforms.  I have spent time interviewing several citizens in the UK, and I have been reading the newspaper daily, and the divisions and conflicts about Brexit are just as strong as they are about Trump and his immigration policies in the USA.

Since arriving on the day that the first vote on Article 50 took place, there have been a lot of new developments in the Brexit move for the UK to leave the European Union.

This is a hot issue, as the UK has been apart of the EU since 1973, and with the vote to leave the EU it has many people stirring and the anxiety is great among UK residents.
While a part of the EU, other Europeans have been able to come and go from the UK freely.  But with the UK leaving the EU, with no solid forecast of how visitors that have not become citizens will be treated after the exit, has people worried about their future.

One major concern in Parliament is the “health tourism” that happens in the UK, where people from around the world take advantage of the UK’s NHS (National Healthcare System).  Recently Parliament has annouced;

From April NHS hospitals will be obliged to charge upfront for non-emergency treatment if the patient is not eligible for free treatment. It is a welcome step towards returning the NHS to what it was set up for and for what most of us cherish it as: a national health service.

This type of move is the same thing that many in the USA have been concerned about and have tried to legislate for years, and is most likely why Trump was even elected despite being very controversial.

The financial comparison of the cost of “health tourism” in the UK, to the illegal immigrant benefit costs in the USA is a huge difference.
In the UK “health tourism”  in 2013 an estimate of the annual cost at between £110million and £280million.
In the USA the welfare/benefit cost of illegal aliens is roughly between 54 billion a year as of 2013 on the lowest end estimate, and over 113 billion on higher end estimates.

In other news in the EU, the Greek debt crisis is no where close to being over and it is possible that Greece will be forced out of the EU, despite years of work to control the debt crisis, and much of the problem in Greece is attributed to bleeding social services as well as immigration.

In other European Union news, the France Presidential front runner Marine Le Pen hails Trump for ‘keeping his promises’ and vows to make France ‘free again’.  She is running on a similar platform as Trump, which also tends to favor a Brexit type of reform for France.

LePen I can make France Great Again

Despite what I was reading in the USA before we left to visit the UK, the EU and the UK is not against Trump or the USA as much as American media pretends that they are.
Another reason why I am shy of American main stream media, their fake news is out of control.