The Lohan Effect.

Possibly the most bizarre thing about last night's European Union (EU) refendum results is that they were being live Tweeted. By US actress Lindsey Lohan.

Lohan is actually a long term resident of the UK. So long term in fact I suspect that she is trying to qualify for British citizenship in order to take advantage of the EU's free movement of people. As such it should come as little surprise that Lohan was very pro-Remain.

However it seems that she has not been resident in the UK long enough to realise that the entire country is slightly smaller that the US state of Oregon. As such unlike in the US we don't actually start counting votes let alone announcing results until every polling station in the country is closed. This means that by the time the first results start to emerge it is already several hours to late to try to influence the outcome.

With Britian's entire political/media class spending last night staring at Lindsey Lohan's Twitter feed collectively going; "What the actual f*ck" I got involved when Ms Lohan was reacting to the results from Sunderland.

This was considered one of the key bellweather consituencies in the referendum. Partly because it has a record for being one of the faster areas to complete the vote count making it one of the earliest to declare its result.

Sunderland is also a traditional white, working class heartland for the Labour Party. However unlike areas such as Yorkshire it doesn't have much of an immigrant - particularly Muslim - population. This means that Labour's seeming suicide quest to abandon white working class voters in favour of Muslim immigrants has really hurt them in areas like Sunderland with the pro-Leave UK Independence Party (UKIP) picking up a lot of votes.

As such we always knew that Sunderland was going to vote to Leave. The question though was by how much. Although we're talking rough guesstimates rather than precise calculations 10% was considered the magic number. If Sunderland voted to Leave by less then 10% then Remain would win nationally but if Sunderland voted to leave by more than 10% Leave would in nationally.

As it turned out Sunderland voted to Leave by 22%. Although voting had barely even started in parts of the country that made it seem extremely unlikely that Remain would win nationally.

Immediately prior to the Sunderland result the British Pound was worth 150 US cents. In the three seconds after the Sunderland result it lost 5 cents in value plunging to 145 cents per Pound. It was one of those situations where if a trader sneezed at the wrong second they would lose a fortune.

The other interesting thing about Sunderland is that the main employer in the area is the car giant Nissan. They're located there so they can access the EU's single market due to Britain's EU membership. Nissan itself has publicly warned voters not to support the Leave campaign.

Immediately after the Sunderland result Lindsey Lohan and a lot of others started really having a go at voters in Sunderland for wrecking the UK economy. Some even went so far as to mock Nissan employees to costing themselves their jobs.

What they seem to have failed to realise is that currency plunge could actually be a good thing for Nissan workers securing their jobs. A weak pound means that exports to the Eurozone become more profitable. This shifting margin might be enough to cancel out the cost of any potential export tariffs encouraging Nissan to remain in the UK. After all shifting entire factories and supply chains between nations is a major and expensive hassle.

Two of the first British economists to argue about the role of foreign currency exchange in export policy were Gerard de Malynes and Thomas Mun way back in the 16th Century. However the financial system they were discussing - based on actual gold and silver - is so far removed from the modern one as to be utterly irrelevent. It was interesting though to see who on TV such as Vince Cable immediately got that very old and obscure reference and who suddenly had to rush to Google.

The argument over whether Nissan workers in Sunderland have lost or secured their jobs by voting to Leave explains why the financial markets are in such turmoil at the moment. There is so much uncertainty that it's a bit like chucking a file of papers up in the air and trying to predict in which order they're going to land.

This is why I think that everybody needs to take a step back for a few days to let the news settle in. Sadly the EU has different ideas calling for Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty to be immediately invoked and negotiations on the UK exit to begin.

This actually helps highlight why people are now getting so p*ssed off with the EU. In their arrogance it never occured to EU leaders that Britain would vote to Leave. So for next week they've scheduled this big summit of the migrant deal and in particular Turkey's visa-free access.

Now Britain has voted to Leave this has thrown them into an absolute panic. So when they say they want Article 50 invoked urgently what they mean is they want an urgent leaders meeting to establish the EU's position before the Turkey summit. The problem being that its not even clear if the UK has a leader at the moment let alone whether they'll be able to participate in the summit.

Personally I would recommend not only cancelling the Turkey summit but the entire migrant deal. After all as I've been saying for years unless the EU is prepared to do things properly the whole thing is going to blow up in its face.

Also anthor thing that Lindsey Lohan may not be aware of is that the British people are very good at and take great pride in swearing. So much pride in fact they developed the "Profanisaurs" that lists various unusual swear words and terms of abuse.

My favourite is "Whore from Fife." This is considered a double insult. It suggests that you have sex with people for money. And that you come from Fife.

15:10 on 24/6/16 (UK date).