- The alienation/distrust of those marginalised by deindustrialisation who have been given the rather derogatory designation of “Left Behinds”
- An interpretation robustly challenged by Danny Dorling and others who correctly pointed out that it was the older, more comfortably-off conservative voters who were Leave enthusiasts
- A 25 year campaign of hostility to the EU by the tabloids – ably assisted by a maverick Daily Telegraph journalist, one BoJo. The resulting Euroscepticism is well mapped in an article “Not European Enough” (2019)
- An interpretation robustly challenged by Danny Dorling and others who correctly pointed out that it was the older, more comfortably-off conservative voters who were Leave enthusiasts
- A 25 year campaign of hostility to the EU by the tabloids – ably assisted by a maverick Daily Telegraph journalist, one BoJo. The resulting Euroscepticism is well mapped in an article “Not European Enough” (2019)
- A dramatic rise
in net immigration to the UK
since 2000 with results mapped in “a
tangled web” 2019
- The silence of the Labour party in the campaign - giving Conservatives the freedom to be active in both the Leave and Remain campaigns
- The unimaginative nature of the Remain campaign –
whose economic threats were seen as counterproductive
The researchers, of course, have been active – but few of their studies
have surfaced in the media most of which have adopted their own particular “narrative”
of the referendum result and are more interested to cover the never-ending
pantomime of Brexit politics. There is, of course, one other “gatekeeper” between
academia and the public namely Think Tanks which,
however, focus on future policies and not on historical research.
So ordinary citizens are left on their own to google key terms and try
to identify readable results of the research on voter motivation in the 2016 referendum.
One of the best of these Brexit
– understanding the socio-economic causes and consequences (2016) – appeared
remarkably quickly
You will notice that some of the research material resulting from that
google search is very recent (2019) but I have just been reading a book which
was written 2 years ago - The
Lure of Greatness – England’s Brexit, America’s Trump; Anthony
Barnett (2017) which I find the best
analysis of the issue.
Written in Barnett’s special style which bursts with
insights and references and therefore comes in at 370 pages - with each of its
34 chapters having an almost self-explanatory title such as “Jailbreak”, “The
four breaches of trust”, “Roll the Dice”, “It was England’s Brexit”, “Big Britishness”,
“The Legitimacy of the EU” and “No Left to Turn To”.
It is one of these rare books that you realise
half-way through that you need to go back and read more closely – not only
underlining (in my case in different colours) but making copious notes about….Indeed,
for the first time ever, I transcribed my first set of comments into a larger
notebook - partly for some of the one line quotes, partly the better to follow
the argument….Barnett was the moving force behind Charter 88 and has a bit of a
hobbyhorse about constitutional issues which I don’t find easy to follow..
Let me, very briefly, try to do justice to his book.
He starts it by suggesting that if there is one symbol to represent the modern
world it is that of the prison - with surveillance everywhere and everyone
“trapped by the way voting and its outcomes are bought, corrupted,
manipulated, spun by the PR industry and calibrations of costly marketing
analytics” and then arguing that
“Brexit (and Trump) are attempts at mass breakout from the marketised
incarceration of contemporary corporate democracy”
The breaches of trust which have sown the dragon seeds
of public distrust and sullen anger in the US and the UK are
- first the 2003 Iraq invasion itself in the face of massive protest (which offended the liberals);
- the subsequent destruction affecting the Middle East as a whole which was ultimately proved to have been a disaster (offending the right - which had been expecting victory and “greatness”)
- first the 2003 Iraq invasion itself in the face of massive protest (which offended the liberals);
- the subsequent destruction affecting the Middle East as a whole which was ultimately proved to have been a disaster (offending the right - which had been expecting victory and “greatness”)
- The global financial meltdown was the third breach of
trust
- and the corporate greed it revealed was the final breach (arfuably started by the parliamentary expenses scandal) .
- and the corporate greed it revealed was the final breach (arfuably started by the parliamentary expenses scandal) .
Many of us thought that the third breach of trust would not only lead to a rethink about globalisation but to the birth of a more balanced model - and it was Colin Crouch’s The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism which alerted us in 2011 that Neoliberalism was still very much alive and kicking…. Barnett puts it very eloquently –
“A democratic warming that began on the left but only became a hurricane capable
of taking power after picking up force in the warm waters of the right”
He goes on to suggest that the attraction of Brexit
was what he calls the “jailbreak factor” – “the experience of democracy being so confining that any offer to escape was
attractive”. It’s noticeable that Remainers
cited mainly economic factors for their vote (75%) whereas Leavers discounted
the economic, having just 2 major concerns – ending EU decision-making and
immigration. Remainers were focused on the future, Leavers on the past…..
Although Barnett was a Remainer, he is pretty savage about
the EC dishonesty around the Lisbon Treaty and has a great quote about the
campaign –
The UK (although he correctly
argued that it was actually England) walked out of Europe on two Big British Eurosceptic boots – one marked
Leave, the other Remain
He later emphasises that both Leave and Remain were
run by right-wing sects – with the Labour party sulking in the undergrowth –
their slogans about the future being indistinguishable, “global Britain” in one
case, “world Britain” in the other….I
kid you not! I’ll finish with one final quote –
“the Brexiteers have abandoned a very ambitious but achievable aim of
growing like Germany within the EU for the fantastical ambition of growing even
faster while outside it”
Brexitannia (2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DzbctACZWY is a far more thoughtful film of an almost sociological depth based on about 200 in-depth interviews the length and breadth of the country and including commentaries. It’s reviewed here by Zero Anthropology
"Inside Europe - 10 years of turmoil" (2019) the BBC documentary referred to in the opening
The argument that the Brexit vote was based upon the votes of people who were somehow Left Behind is a myth as I set out some time ago in my blog post The Left behind Myth. It is a myth that has been perpetrated by Right-wing populist Brexiteers and Left-wing populist Lexiteers alike.
ReplyDeleteBut, the truth is that just as the majority of Trump's vote came from more affluent members of society in the US, so too the vast majority of support for Brexit came from more affluent, elderly Tory voters. There is a much higher preponderance of support for Brexit, and again there is a large overlap between these and elderly, more affluent Tory voters, amongst home owners, compared to those in rented property.
The elderly Tory voters, who have seen the paper value of their homes inflate astronomically in the last 30 years, who also are the ones that have had savings in ISA's etc., and personal pensions that have also inflated astronomically in the last 30 years are from being in any sense left-behind.
By contrast, around 75% of Labour's 2017 voters back Remain, and amongst them the highest preponderance of Remain votes come from the younger sections of society, the people who really have been left behind as a result of the astronomical rise in property prices, which means they cannot buy a house, and the high property prices have likewise inflated rents to unsustainable levels, and at the same time the massive rise in share and bond prices means that the cost of pension provision has become unaffordable - i.e. any monthly pension contribution today buys only a small fraction of the number of shares or binds it did 30 years ago. At the same time, this same process means that deposit rates on savings have been reduced to zero, so that it is no longer possible for them even to save money at interest to generate a deposit for houses etc.
I'm sorry if any reader took that list of "explanations" to imply that I necessarily supported all of them. That was the reasons I put the word in inverted commas.
DeleteI totslly agree with Boffy's comment and both Dorling's and Barnett's books also point out the error in that derogatory designation. To make things absolutely clear I have just added "amongst many others" to the Dorling reference..
I do try to be precise and generally go back to posts the following day to check for possible looseness of language. On this occasion I was beaten to the post by Boffy's eagle eye...Many thanks!