It's a really complicated situation that got us to this point. We're a very old country and some aspects of history we'll never forget, and others we wilfully ignore. Anything that glorifies ourselves in generally celebrated and any of the many, many shameful things in our past are completely ignored and written out of history. As a result, the British psyche is one of pure exceptionalism. British people (as a populace) believe themselves to be better than anyone and everyone else. Furthermore, they position themselves as better than other countries who believe themselves to be the best by talking down anyone who actively says they're the best, calling them arrogant. British people then believe themselves to be the most exceptional because they _secretly_ believe themselves to be exceptional, showing outward modesty, but inward self-regard. We still live in the shadow of the British Empire, when we "ruled the world", and people look back wistfully at a "bygone age", but nobody talks about the brutality and genocide that we perpetrated. It permeates in all parts of British society, where anything that reasserts the idea that Britain is somehow special is unquestioningly supported.
Meanwhile, our terrifyingly powerful tabloid press have been demonising immigrants for years, making people angrier and angrier about something that has been economically beneficial to us, while carefully distracting us from the small number of already rich people who are taking the country's publicly-owned assets, stripping them for parts and storing the bounty in their private offshore bank accounts. Immigrants are routinely discussed in newspaper columns as if they're not even human and nobody even bats an eye anymore.
This year, tabloid newspapers have successfully made people angry enough to murder an MP and several immigrants, and incited a huge spike in hate crimes across the country (except in Scotland, where people are more reasonable). Nobody's willing to speak out against the tabloid newspapers though, because they're too powerful, so our government has taken the easy way out and just joined in with all of the immigrant hate. People just call it "concerns about immigrants", but the "concerns" are just unfounded fears, based on deliberate lies, with no evidence to support them or any basis in reality. Somehow it's perfectly acceptable for these newspapers, which have blatant lies and hate speech on the front pages, to be casually sold in supermarkets like it's no big deal.
So yeah, everything is blamed on immigrants, the immigrants are the EU's fault, and therefore every problem the UK has is somehow the EU's fault. British people are "special" and are entitled to everything they want by birthright, and anyone who wasn't born here who just wants a peaceful life and dignity is a "scrounger" who has come to rob us of all we have.
Never mind that the EU parliament is the closest thing we have to a democracy (a first past the post system, an unelected House of Lords and an actual monarchy in 2016 are celebrated as "sovereign", while the EU is _somehow_ "undemocratic"), and the EU provides UK citizens with countless benefits and protections, we're going to scrap all of that at tremendous cost to ourselves because a few pages of hate speech sold in supermarkets told us to.
