Britain has the fewest robots in manufacturing, but Brexit might change that

It’s 5pm on a wet Wednesday afternoon in the Lincolnshire market town of Spalding and Simon Bradshaw and his partner, Sharna, are taking their daughter to see a new statue commemorating 19th-century hiring fairs for farmers and shepherds.
Their visit says less about a keen interest in agrarian history and more about the Britain of today in the most ardently pro-Brexit region. They say the bronze structure is being vandalised by people from eastern Europe. Sharna, a stay-at-home carer, complains that immigrants have made the town dangerous and overcrowded. They’ve no respect, she says.
From Donald Trump’s America to Italy and Hungary, the vilification of immigrants is hardly new. But the flipside to the resentment in the UK is that for people who saw Brexit as a defensive wall against incomers, the threat isn’t human; it’s robot.