Love in the time of Brexit

The 2016 Brexit referendum divided Britain along class lines. Why? Two novels on Brexit, class and the dynamics of division 

Who voted for Brexit and who opposed it? Not long after the vote, Matthew Goodwin and Oliver Heath looked at the polling data in a report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. “Put simply, older, white and more economically insecure people with low levels of educational attainment were consistently more likely to vote for Brexit,” they say (Brexit vote explained: poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities, August 31 2016). Other researchers agree. Leave voters did share some important traits that do not correlate directly with income or education – more on that later. Neither did lower-income people necessarily vote for Brexit, especially if they were young. Still, broadly speaking, if you were poorer and lower-skilled, you voted Leave. 

But this is the group that is  the first to suffer in any downturn , and is therefore likely to be hurt most by Brexit in the end. So why vote for it?

Researchers like Goodwin and Heath can uncover a great deal from data. But to really drill down, you  need a novelist. Several have now written novels that are, to a greater or lesser extent, a response to Brexit, and try to put it in context. I have just read two of them; I liked them both, but they don’t tell quite the same story.

First, Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut.

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Cairo Jukes is from Dudley in the West Midlands. He’s an ex-boxer in early middle age, scraping a living as part of a team of labourers digging up abandoned factories and other sites, clearing up the mess and recovering what they can that’s useful. When we meet him, he’s working in an abandoned abattoir. In his off hours he lives with his parents and his own daughter and her baby. 

Grace is a London film-maker who has worked in the Balkans and won an award. Now it’s 2016 and the EU referendum is coming. She’s making a documentary about the referendum, and wants to find out why people might vote for Brexit. She decides to film in Dudley – and meets Cairo. What follows is an ill-starred romance. In The Cut, Author Cartwright uses this encounter as a vehicle to show the gulf between those who voted for either side, and tries to show us why. This approach isn’t an accident; Cartwright was commissioned (by the Peirene Press) to write this novella as a response to the Brexit vote. 

That might make one expect the worst sort of didactic novel, the sort that Orwell warned  against in Inside the Whale. But Cartwright does not fall into that trap at all. Cairo Jukes is a working man who votes for Brexit; it would be easy for a certain type of reader to dismiss him as someone who does this simply out of resentment and ignorance, but Cartwright won’t let us get off that easily. Jukes is a nice man. He does have something to say, and it’s said subtly. There’s no racist raving against foreigners here, just someone who reckons his class has given far more than they have got in return. The industrial wasteland he digs up is a metaphor for Britain; it used everything towns like Dudley could produce and more, and moved on - and now those left behind scratch a living picking at the mess it left, feeling that they are despised and seen as stupid. In one memorable passage, Jukes ponders that people are tired - “tired of being told you were no good, tired of being told that what you believed to be true was wrong, tired of being told to stop complaining, tired of being told what to eat, what to throw away, what to do and what not to do, what was right and wrong when you were always in the wrong.”

This does strike a chord – even with me (and I am quite posh). The day after the referendum there was a pic doing the rounds on social media that showed lots of supposedly delicious European food on one side, and on the other, a solitary can of baked beans. I grew up on a traditional British diet, and my mother was a wonderful cook. I found the picture offensive. Ignorant peasants, your food is shit. Your identity is shit. “The rest of the country is ashamed of us,” thinks Jukes. You want us gone in one way or the other.” Tired of being told what to eat… what was right and wrong when you were always in the wrong. Meanwhile Grace tries to understand him, and a relationship – of a sort – begins; but the gulf is too wide, and they seem doomed from the start to hurt each other.

This novella was probably written quickly, and there are some flaws. Jukes is vividly drawn and very sympathetic. Grace, the film-maker, is somehow neither; it clearly wasn’t her that Cartwright wanted to write about. She is a bit two-dimensional. And I found the end of the novella (which I won’t give away) a bit melodramatic; from the readers’ reviews, others have felt the same way. But I think Cartwright meant it to represent the pain inflicted on two people who have misunderstood each other – as they do, tragically, at the end. Without revealing the plot, something happens to make Jukes feel unwanted and disposable, and his reaction leads to tragedy for both him and Grace. It is a little over the top, but it is an apt metaphor for the mutual self-destruction that has driven Brexit. And in general, The Cut packs a punch. It’s not perfect, but I wouldn’t have missed it.

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The Cut is an intense story, seen mainly through the eyes of one person on one side of the divide. Chris Beckett’s Two Tribes is shot with a wider lens, and from both sides. But the result is just as unsettling. 

Beckett is a science-fiction writer, and a successful one (his 2012 novel Dark Eden, in particular, was very well received and won the Arthur C. Clarke award). Two Tribes may be a bit of a departure for him. There’s a sci-fi angle, but this is a book about the present. From other readers’ reviews of Two Tribes, it looks like it didn’t work for some of his readers, but it worked very well for me.

The book has two main characters. Harry’s a middle-aged architect getting over the death of a child, followed by a divorce. We meet him first on his way to a weekend with wealthy friends in their Suffolk cottage. Michelle has also lost a child. She is an attractive Brexit-voting hairdresser from a working-class background who lives in the small Norfolk town of Breckham. Harry listens to his fashionable friends raving about the stupidity of Brexit. He agrees with them, but deep down their anger and their certainties are beginning to grate on him. He starts feeling curious about the other side. Then one day his car breaks down. In Breckham.

Two Tribes is, amongst other things, a love story, and I did get quite invested in Michelle and Harry and wanted things to work out for them. (This isn’t the place to say if they do.) But what Beckett really seems to want is to show us the divisions in English society and where they could lead. He does this in part by showing us the relationship between Harry and Michelle, their miscommunications and there struggle to relate. But whereas The Cut is very focused on its main character, Two Tribes has multiple viewpoints. There’s a wealthy retired Army officer on the outskirts of Breckham who is trying to recruit a right-wing militia, and you see exactly how he does it by playing on working-class frustrations and resentments. Meanwhile one of Harry’s fashionable friends has a daughter who lectures at LSE and argues that there might now be a need for a “guided democracy”. The so-called liberals lap it up. 

In fact I got the impression Beckett had equal sympathy for both tribes; at any rate, he doesn’t take sides. He seems more concerned with what all this could mean for the future. To that end, he’s used the plot device of a researcher in the 23rd century, who is reading Harry and Michelle’s respective diaries and filling in the blanks to make a narrative. It’s a bit artificial compared with the present-day bits, which are immediate and resonant. I did wonder if Beckett should just have written a novel set in the here and now. Still, this device does let him tell us what happened in England in the years that followed, with a picture of division then conflict – and cataclysmic climate change, which no-one prevented as they were too busy fighting teach other. 

Besides, the book’s well-paced and the characters are very alive. Harry’s the hero if there is one, but he’s very real; he is tactless with Michelle, introducing her to people who clearly make her uncomfortable. He also seems to have an almost anthropological interest in her, as if she came from an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon basin. The anti-Brexit crowd preach liberalism and tolerance but this doesn’t seem to extend to Brexit voters – yet they are too self-satisfied to see the paradox; Beckett has quite a lot of fun with this. (Cartwright, in The Cut, sees it too. As Cairo Jukes thinks: “It’ll end in camps, it’ll end in walls, you watch, and it won’t be my people who build them, Grace, it’ll be yours. It’s already happening, in your well-meaning ways.") 

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Meanwhile Beckett’s fascist old officer gets guest speakers to talk to his militia, and it is chilling how the recruits’ psychology is manipulated. It is also very believable. And it is important, because Brexit wasn’t solely – or even, in my view, mainly – about economics. To be sure, Cairo Jukes comes from a class that has been used then abandoned, and he sees it. But Michelle’s different; she isn’t wealthy, but she runs a business of her own (she’s a hairdresser) and clearly has her life together. If you’re on the radical left, it’s tempting to see the Brexit vote as an uprising of the poor. That is part of it, but the whole truth is messier. 

As I said at the beginning, voting Leave correlates with limited income and education. A number of studies have confirmed this. In their report for the Rowntree Foundation,  Goodwin and Heath also do so. But they also note that younger voters tended to vote Remain, even if they were not wealthy. And they add that the disadvantaged voters who did vote for Brexit “are also united by values that encourage support for more socially conservative, authoritarian and nativist responses. ...Over three-quarters of Leave voters feel disillusioned with politicians; two-thirds support the death penalty; and well over half feel very strongly English.” The “nativist” bit matters here. Veteran politician and pollster Lord Ashcroft has found something similar. In a survey on referendum day itself in 2016, he found that of those who described themselves as  more English than British, 66% voted Leave. Of those who said they were English not British, 79% voted leave (A reminder of how Britain voted in the EU referendum – and why, March 15 2019).  

One suspects many people who would have identified as British 40 years ago now sense that people in the other home nations are now less likely to do so; so they don’t either, and identify as English instead. At the same time, however, they also sense that it is somehow unfashionable to be English, that foreigners prefer the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The picture I described earlier, with its implication that British food is crap, is an example of this sort of prejudice, and resentment at this may also have played a part. So it seems that part of what drove Brexit was a weakened and offended sense of identity amongst the English. I know of no data that proves that. But if true, it would explain the correlation found by Ashcroft and, I suspect, by others. 

This is what resonated with me when reading the passages in Two Tribes in which Beckett describes his ghastly old fascist, his “recruits” and the guest speakers that manipulate their emotions. I found myself thinking of Eric Hofer’s The True Believer, and the historian Peter Fritzche’s Germans into Nazis – both books that show, albeit in very different ways, how populists, including Fascists, prey on those who feel a need for unity and belonging. I also found myself thinking of academic Jan-Werner Müller’s definition of populism, as laid out in What is Populism? I wrote about that book at the time it was published in 2016 (here). But in essence, a populist identifies with “the people” but either does not define them, or does so in a way that “others” many of those around them, rather as Hitler did with Jews. So if you’re not in the core group of “the people”, you’re out of luck. It’s striking that, according to Ashcroft, the the vast majority of Asian and black voters went with Remain. For what it is worth,  anecdotal evidence suggests that ethnic minorities can identify as British but find it harder to identify as English, and if they do, they do not always feel that assertion is accepted. If Brexit is about English nationalism, the future doesn’t look great for them. 

It’s a dodgy cocktail. A people looking for an identity; a deeply flawed cause, Brexit, in which they find it; and a growing exclusion of all those who, for whatever reason, don’t sign up or are not invited. Meanwhile those who can see the disaster unfolding do not really understand how it has come about, and lack the skills and the grace to prevent it. Maybe Beckett is right, and nastier things than Brexit might now be on their way. In fact Two Tribes feels prescient. As for The Cut, it is a warm and humane picture of a decent man with nothing to lose. Polling data can tell you a lot, but now and then a novelist hits the nail right on the head.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

Follow Mike on Twitter and Facebook.

Why Europe? Peace. That's why

The Brexit debate in Britain has been bogged down in bad-tempered arguments about tariffs and the terms of trade. But Europe is a much bigger question than that

Ever since the Brexit referendum campaign began in early 2016, we’ve been bombarded with economic arguments from both sides. Neither has convinced the other. Leavers cling to their belief that Britain can simply trade on World Trade Organization terms, although they rarely understand what that really implies. Remain campaigners, meanwhile, have continued to hit voters with facts and figures that in the abstract mean little, and have failed to have impact. Remainers have needed to come up with a better story.

Arriving to sign the Treaty of Trianon, June 1920

We have one: the European Union has kept the peace in Europe. This is quite an achievement. After all, its people have been butchering each other with grim enthusiasm ever since the first hairy hominids quarreled over who should paint the bison on the cave wall. And it's not ancient history. I can remember a conversation with my field director in Sudan about the ghastly war being waged in the south of the country. He had no doubt of its brutality. “But don’t forget,” he added, “Europeans were deporting people to death camps just 40 years ago.” 

It was a fair point, and one also made by a much-loved Israeli writer, the late Amos Oz, in his essay Between Right and Right. Don’t wag your fingers at us Israelis and Arabs for our cruelty and stupidity, he wrote; when we finally make peace, we’ll come together much faster than you did. “Our conflict in the Middle East is indeed painful and bloody and cruel and stupid, but it’s not going to take us a thousand years to produce our equivalent of the Euro,” he wrote. “Our bloody history is going to be shorter than your bloody history.”

The European Union was founded to stop this bloody history, and by and large it has. It’s an argument not much used by Remainers, who prefer to drone on about tariffs and the regulatory framework. When it does get raised, one is often told, “No, the EU has not kept the peace; NATO has done that.” But NATO is an organisation that has no sanction except a mutual agreement to use force, and such pacts did not keep the peace between the world wars; indeed they did not prevent the first one. The EU can, and the reason for that lies in the nature of the nation-state itself.

The concept of the nation-state is quite new. I suppose one could, if one wished, argue that the England of Elizabeth was the first. For the most part, though, the modern country based on ethnic or linguistic identity only really goes back to 1848, when those identities became a liberal rallying-cry for freedom from traditional power structures. Even then, there were few such countries until 1919. Then the break-up of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire meant there were, quite suddenly, a number of states that were ethnically defined. By reorganising the continent along these lines, the Paris peace conference profoundly altered its character in much the same way that decolonisation would affect Africa some 40 years later.

But ethnic and linguistic boundaries are rarely clear-cut. After the Paris conference, countries emerged whose territory did not always match their ethnic base, leaving their own people outside their frontiers and enfolding those of other states within their own. Few realise the scale on which this happened in 1919. Perhaps a third of Hungarians wound up living in Slovakia, Transylvania or Yugoslavia, plus a few in what became Austria. Meanwhile many thousands of Slovenians found themselves in Austria instead of the new Yugoslavia, which itself went to war with Italy over Trieste. Neither was this confined to continental Europe. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks fled from western Turkey. Millions of people suddenly found an international frontier between themselves and the local tobacconist. In some cases, family members even became different nationalities by accident of birth (the writer Stefan Zweig was Austrian, but his elder brother had been born in Bohemia so assumed Czechoslovak nationality). The legacy of Versailles, the Treaty of Trianon (which defined the borders of Hungary), and other decisions at Paris was that millions of people owed allegiance to countries other than those in which they lived, and almost no country fully accepted the borders it had been given.

All of these potential conflicts festered, and destabilised Europe. What could have helped, with more support, was the League of Nations, which did try to mediate disputes (in one case, the Åland Islands, very successfully). But the only real answer was some way of organising the continent so that people could just wander across frontiers if they wanted to, and there was some sort of overarching structure that protected everyone and prevented conflict – both of which had been the case under Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey, for all their faults.

Portugal, 1976: Mário Soares takes over (Hans Peters/Anefo)

That was the idea behind the EU. It started with the Iron and Steel Community, the purpose of which was to bind together the Western European economies so that the countries could not fight each other, and provide an area of mutual prosperity that would be worth belonging to rather than fighting your neighbours. Although initially it was just north-west Europe and Italy, in my lifetime it has twice expanded to stabilise regions in a time of rapid change, and steer them towards democracy. When I was in my teens, Spain and Portugal still had their prewar fascist dictatorships, and Greece had a foul military government. When these collapsed, the prospect of EU membership was an incentive to replace them with something less nasty. Better to be part of a modern, prosperous, peaceful bloc than stay in isolation and move backwards.

This was also what happened in Eastern Europe after the Wall came down. In this latter case, political scientist Laurence Whitehead has written of “the wish for modernity”. In a 1996 essay, Three International Dimensions of Democratization, he put it thus: “An almost universal wish to imitate a way of life associated with the liberal capitalist democracies of the core regions (the wish for modernity) may undermine the social and institutional foundations of any regime perceived as incompatible with these aspirations. ...[This] will also serve to generate the consistent and broad-based support needed to bolster fragile new democracies.” This was important. It was absolutely not pre-ordained that these countries would become stable democracies; in fact in the late 1970s Spain seemed very unstable, while in the 1990s the Eastern European states looked as if they might fall into the hands of people like Slovakia's Vladimír Mečiar. The prospect of joining a prosperous, strong alliance was their incentive not to.

Better still, today tens of potential ethnic conflicts are defused because everyone is part of a larger polity that protects them, and if they want to visit relatives or work in the next village and it happens to be in another country, that's not a problem. Ireland is one of the best examples of this, but there are others. The region of Cieszyn Silesia or Těšín Silesia was formerly the Austro-Hungarian region of Teschen; in 1919 the border between the new states of Czechoslovakia and Poland went straight through it, separating communities and causing a shooting war between the two states. Today that border is a benign one between two democracies. Elsewhere, the accession of Slovenia to the EU means that a Slovene who happens to live in Klagenfurt can drive to Ljubljana in two or three hours and should not feel cut off from the “mother state”. That is not to say that s/he will have no grievances, or that an Irish Republican living in the Six Counties will not. But the cause of conflict – a border that separates one from one’s fellows – is substantially defused.

Ireland: Sinn Féin protest against a hard border

Conversely, the re-emergence of borders will revive such conflicts, not least because it would provide a fertile breeding-ground for populism. This is because of the nature of populism itself, and its inherent connection to identity politics. There is no agreed definition of populism, but in his 2016 book What is Populism? Jan-Werner Müller, Professor of Politics at Princetown University, says a populist is someone who claims to identify with “the people”. S/he rejects everyone else. How “the people” are defined is left conveniently vague, but it is made clear that everyone not fitting that description is an outlier, a deviant, or, worse of all, part of an unresponsive “elite” against which s/he is leading a popular rebellion. 

If the populist says to you, “I represent you. You, the people,” you have come home. You have an identity, and have no need to share it with those with whom you do not identify, whether they be Slovenes, German speakers, Jews, Poles, Gypsies, perceived welfare scroungers, Goths or gays. Even more important in this context, you do not need to share your identity with those who speak another language or are ethnically related to the folks across the border. They are not “the people”. But you are. If someone lives (say) on the wrong side the Polish-Czech border, or the Irish border, you will find them a useful scapegoat. If that border has no real substance, and everyone crosses it daily to shop or to visit friends or relatives, it will be much harder to manipulate people in this way. If on the other hand we return to a world in which power-structures are defined solely by language or heritage, we will walk straight into the populists' trap. 

To weaken European unity is to go backwards towards the 1930s. It is to abandon multilateralism and go back to a fractured world of quarrelling, paranoid countries that can be manipulated by the strong, just as Hitler manipulated them in the 1930s – for example by promising Poland the disputed territory of Teschen in 1938 so it didn't oppose his plans for Czechoslovakia, telling Hungary he'd help get them Transylvania back from Romania, and encouraging Romania to join the Axis powers so that it would get Bessarabia (now mostly in Moldova) back from the USSR. It worked like a charm.

To be sure, leaving the EU would make us poorer, but that is only part of it, and it is not even the most important part. The real point is that Europe is an instrument of peace. NATO can only promise to revisit conflict on those who seek it. European unity, however, can remove its causes. It has achieved much in 60 years, but as the British philosopher John Gray has pointed out, history is not an automatic progression towards something better; it can go into reverse. That is why Brexit is an historic blunder. If it weakens the EU, as some on the right (and a few on the left) would like it to do, we will see a vicious lurch backwards through history.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

 

Brexit: Reading the runes

Evans and Menon’s Brexit and British Politics is not the first book about Brexit, but it’s a shrewd and convincing analysis. This referendum wasn’t just about Europe

Anyone who, in the wake of the Brexit vote, still thinks that it is politics as usual should read Evans and Menon’s Brexit and British Politics. This slim volume explains clearly why the June 2016 referendum wasn’t wholly about the EU. It also demonstrates that the mendacity or otherwise of the campaign may be moot, because the result was probably preordained. It’s a convincing thesis in many ways, but there are one or two odd omissions.

Geoffrey Evans is Professor of the Sociology of Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford. He has published widely on inequality and politics. Anand Menon is Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College, London. He has written a great deal on the European Union, including but not limited to Britain’s role in it. Together they are, I suppose, paid-up members of the great and the good, and the sort of experts that Michael Gove thinks we have all had enough of. That hasn’t stopped them from writing a challenging analysis on the roots of the Brexit vote.

The authors point out that in the 1990s and 2000s, Europe wasn’t really the pressing issue for the public that it was for Tory MPs. “The percentage of Britons citing Europe among ‘the major issues facing Britain today’ rose to double figures in the 1990s ...but the EU never became a decisive political issue,” they say, pointing out that by 2001 it had sunk back so that just 14% named it as an issue that might determine their vote.

What was happening at the same time, however, was an evolution in politics that concentrated all debate in the centre. Evans and Menon see this as a phenomenon of the Blair era and they are surely right to ascribe a large part of it to the New Labour project; as Labour chased Basildon Man, a broader polity disappeared. One might call this centrification (my phrase, not theirs). They refer to it as an elite consensus. Within it, acceptance of globalization was not open to question. Importantly, neither was a certain liberal set of values on matters such as gay marriage and capital punishment. One of the nice insights of this book is that it sees this “values factor” as equally important in fostering a sense among those not part of this consensus that they were excluded from influence, and that politics did not serve them. The authors also note a growing homogenization in MPs’ backgrounds; professional politicians replaced the trade-union representatives of the past, for example. So when the 2016 referendum offered people a rare chance to register a protest against the elite consensus, they took it.

Evans and Menon may ascribe a little too much of this “centrification” to Blair’s era; there was concern in the early 1960s about so-called Butskellism, the easy consensus around certain centrist preoccupations or views. (Rab Butler was a prominent Tory politician of the late 1950s; Gaitskell the moderate Labour leader of the same era. Both were robbed of the premiership – Butler by Harold Macmillan, and Gaitskell by death.) Even in the 1970s, a lively time in politics, there was a perception that ideology no longer mattered. I can remember William Davis, editor of Punch, writing in 1973 that it was now, “Forget the politics: Are we better managers than the other lot?” So this ossification around an elite consensus in the 1990s was not really new. But it is true that interest in politics fell away rapidly in the time of New Labour, as Evans and Menon themselves demonstrate. “In the 1970s and 1980s, close to 80% would go to the polls,” they say. “Since the turn of the century, ...the average has been around 63%.” But for the Referendum it was 72.2%.

From all this, one could conclude that people voted leave purely because they had a chance, for once, to give the establishment a good kicking, and were not that interested in the EU at all. In fact, Evans and Menon don’t go quite that far. They make it clear that many voters did have reservations about the EU and that most British people had never really identified with Europe (apparently they scored 28th out of 28 for “feeling European”). The Single European Act of 1987, creating the single market, probably took integration as far as most British people really wanted to go. Neither do they ignore the role of immigration in the debate. The authors are also careful about the common analysis that Leave voters were the poor and those left behind by globalization and European integration. There is truth in this, they say, but it is not the whole truth; there were actually more middle-class Leave voters than there were working-class (to be sure, this does turn a bit on definitions). Brexit was not entirely a revolt by the dispossessed. Neither do Evans and Menon ascribe the breakdown of confidence in politics solely to “centrification”; they also cite (for example) the ghastly expenses scandal of 2009, when MPs were caught fiddling their expenses on a massive scale.

Even so, the authors make a compelling case that Brexit was not simply a vote on Europe. It was to a large extent a rebellion against a centrist consensus – and against a perceived elite with which that consensus was identified. The referendum campaign itself, as they demonstrate, made very little difference at all.

However, there is an elephant in the room that Evans and Menon ignore, although it has been trumpeting loudly and crapping on the floor for many decades. This is the British electoral system, which they mention only two or three times, and very briefly. They are clearly aware of it as a factor, but do not seem to attach much weight to it. But it is the biggest single factor in the exclusion of most people from the political process.

This is partly just because it delivers results that do not reflect popular voting intentions, and also excludes huge areas of the political spectrum from power. This is evident from the 2015 general election results. The Tories were able to secure an absolute majority in the Commons although they received the support of only 37% of the voters , and only 24% of those registered to vote. Again, the culprit is the “winner-takes-all” electoral system. According to the UK’s Electoral Reform Society: “Labour saw their vote share increase while their number of seats collapsed. The Conservatives won an overall majority on a minority of the vote, and the Liberal Democrats lost nearly all their seats – despite winning 8% of the vote. The SNP won 50% of the Scottish vote share, but 95% of Scottish seats.” UKIP won more than one in eight of the votes cast but just one seat. It could be added that many will have abstained because they knew their votes wouldn’t count where they lived. No wonder people feel that politics does not serve them.

However, simple inequities in the result aren’t the whole story; even worse, the system makes a relatively small number of voters pivotal and sends the political discourse in their directon, excluding everyone else. If you’re not a floating voter in a marginal, no-one cares for your opinions. This is what happened in the 1990s when the two main parties chased Basildon Man. They forgot about everyone else. On June 23 2016 the political establishment paid the price for refusing to change an iniquitous electoral system that kept them in power.

There is a further point that Evans and Menon don’t discuss, although they will be aware of it. This is the perceived denigration of national identity by a pro-European elite – an especially sore point amongst the English. This is related to the “values” issue that the authors do cover so well. However, it is distinct from that and especially toxic, as the referendum and its aftermath have been accompanied by some nasty displays of noisy nationalism. The way some in politics have played on this has been very worrying – for example, the silly business about getting blue passports back (the old ones were black not blue, and in any case the colour change wasn’t insisted upon by the EU). And yet one understands how some English people feel. The morning after the referendum, a picture was widely posted by Remain voters; it showed delicious European foods on one side and a solitary can of beans on the other. The picture was well-shot, and in a way witty, but one wonders if it was wise. No-one likes to see their culture insulted. Remain voters may be right, but they often struggle to understand the other side.

Notwithstanding these caveats, Evans and Menon’s analysis is shrewd and interesting. If they miss one or two insights, they have plenty more to offer – and in any case, it is early days; one suspects they will have more to say when the time is right. In the meantime, Brexit and British Politics is thought-provoking, and a good read.

Evans and Menon finish by warning that the Brexit vote has left British politics in disarray, with a rudderless political establishment trying to work out where it now stands, and a deep divide between the governors and the governed. In a telling quote, they describe how one of them warned in a pre-vote debate that Brexit would cause a reduction in GDP – only to be told by an audience member, “That’s your bloody GDP, not mine.” Late in the book, the authors quote journalist Chris Deerin, writing in The Herald Scotland in summer 2017: “The collapse of trust in our politicians, our politics, our institutions and our post-war settlement is real and it is profound. It pervades every layer of British society ...The titled, the humble and the dogs in the street alike know that our democracy has gone wonky.”

So what do we do now?

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads

Post-factualism

British voters have made a choice that defies logic. The reasons for this are more complex than they appear. And they are very worrying

The British voters have made a rotten decision. Worse, they have consigned leadership of their country to vocal but foolish people who cannot build but only destroy, and have no idea what to do next.  As The Economist said on June 27, the UK is rudderless, with no-one willing to take responsibility for the decision or its consequences. Predictably, all my friends’ Facebook walls and Twitter feeds are full of comments about how bloody stupid the Brexit voters are.

The Full English. With beans

I resent this. As I explained in my previous piece, I was a Brexit supporter myself only a few years ago, and I refuse to accept that everyone who voted that way is a thick bastard. The unfair voting system in Britain means that most people are effectively disenfranchised and this was their only chance to protest. There has also been a feeling that English identity is denigrated. This is not imaginary. There’s a pic doing the rounds on social media today that shows lots of supposedly delicious European food on one side, and on the other, a solitary can of baked beans. I grew up on a traditional British diet, and my mother was a wonderful cook. I found the picture offensive. Racism is the big taboo of the liberal – unless it is against the English (or the Americans). That, it seems, is OK. So I understand why people voted Out.

That does not mean it was a good idea. And as Huffpost and others have reported, the Leave vote has led to a perceptible uptick in harassment and hate crime, with EU nationals (and non-white British people) being screamed at and asked when they are going home. This won’t, in the end, protect British or English identity; it will destroy it. As a German friend pointed out in a sincere and decent blog post (A Letter to English Racists) on June 27, for Germans, the racist crimes of one generation undermined the sense of identity of those that followed.

Moreover, while I can’t condemn Brexit voters wholesale, they should not be wholly off the hook. They are not all racist bigots, of course. But they have accepted lies and ignored facts, just as Germans did in the 1930s. Within 24 hours of the vote Leave leader Daniel Hannan staggered the BBC’s Evan Davis by admitting frankly on air that Brexit wouldn’t stop free movement from the EU, at least not if we want access to the single market. Meanwhile Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph on June 26 that: “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down.” But this won’t be possible unless EU nationals can do the same in Britain. So either Johnson is lying, or this bitter referendum has been for nothing. As for the claim that pulling out would give us an extra £350 million a week to spend on the NHS, Nigel Farage now admits that won’t happen (and anyway, the figure was spurious).

But what is important is not that the Brexit leaders lied. It is that the facts did not matter. Michael Gove said the country was fed up with “experts”.  When the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that there could be a big financial black hole in the event of a Brexit, Nigel Farage said it was biased because it was part-funded by the EU. The IFS does get about 10% of its funding from the European Research Council, but this is a highly reputable funding agency and five of its grant recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.  Anyone with Internet access could have found this out in five minutes, as I did. They didn’t bother. Let it be said, Cameron and Osborne were at it as well – as Peter Oborne pointed out back in May. But for barefaced lying, the Brexiteers took the biscuit.

Why did the voters not call them out on this?

Post-factualism
The answer is something very dangerous – post-factual politics. It’s a phrase that has been flying around in the US with regard to the Trump campaign, but the idea has been around for a while. As writer and former Sanders aide David Sirota wrote in the Huffington Post back in 2007 (Welcome to the Post-Factual Era): “Why is politics the only arena where those who turned out to be right still get flayed as outcasts, while those who are known to be utterly wrong get rewarded as visionaries? In business, if you make the wrong calls, you lose money and, most often, lose your job. ...In politics, it generally works the opposite way. The people who make the right call ... are punished with elite vitriol, and those who repeatedly make the wrong calls are vaulted into the highest echelons of the Establishment. ...Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Iraq War.” Sirota says this is “to do with where the money and power is.” He is part-right. But there is something else here. Politics has moved online and few people now engage politically face-to-face.  

The morning after the vote, I wrote the following on my Facebook page: “All the people moaning all over social media this morning should ask what they themselves could have been doing to prevent this disaster. With one exception, nobody I know has.” I then pasted an extract from a piece I had written three years earlier (actually after the death of Thatcher).  It was as follows:

In a 2008 Guardian article, Vernon Bogdanor pointed out that when Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 it had a membership of about 1.5 million; 30 years later it was down to 145,000. Labour underwent a similar decline between 1996 and 2008, from 400,000 to 150,000. In the 1950s one Briton in 11 had belonged to a political party; now just one in 88 did. Voter turnout, well over 80% in 1974, dropped to just 59% in 2001 (it has since recovered a little). ...There is an increasing disinclination to take part in the mainstream democratic process.

“This might be a good time to stop writing "Oh God I'm ashamed to be British" on your wall, and start thinking about how things change,” I added.

But why should politics on the Internet not be politics? Must we really go out on a wet winter night and huddle in a church hall somewhere with about four other people we don’t much like, arguing?

Yes, we must. 

The disputed view
We have lost the facility to argue, debate and reach consensus; we see only those arguments that accord with our own. This is true of me as much as almost everyone else; virtually none of my friends backed Brexit – yet the fact is, many other people on the Left did. But because they do not belong to the same social circles as me, I am not hearing their arguments. Had I been to a bunch of Labour Party meetings over the last six months, I would have done.  Nearly 40 years ago, as chairman of my university Liberal party, I travelled to Blackpool for a special party conference, to debate the arrangement the party then had with Callaghan’s Labour administration (not a coalition; it was basically confidence and supply). Several of our delegation were determined to end this arrangement. Halfway through a speech by the then Liberal Leader David Steel, a friend turned to me and said, “He’s right. I’ve changed my mind.” And so did I.

Would that happen now? Would we hire a draughty railway carriage and have it shunted from train to train to get to Blackpool, then listen to arguments for and against and make a decision?  Most of the people ranting about Brexiteers on my Facebook wall would not do so, and have not acquired the skills one needs to make a fellow-voter think again.

It goes deeper. Even 60 years ago, Party members were a minority, albeit a much bigger one. But people were still exposed to more debate than they are now.  For a start, they didn’t spend every evening in. Now they likely do. In December 2014 the Institute of Economic Affairs reported that the number of pubs had dropped from 58,000+ to 48,000 since 2006, a decline of nearly a fifth in just eight years.  There are a number of reasons for this decline; the IEA has ascribed it to the smoking ban, a decline in beer drinking as opposed to wine (the latter was expensive when I was young), increasing alcohol duty and more. Whatever is driving the drop in pub-going, however, it is a loss to democracy. I spent much of my misspent youth fishing cigarette-packets out of pools of beer while the person opposite me told me I was talking shit and made me defend what I had just said.

Social engagement: Central London, 1983

This is not just about pubs, or political parties. In January 1995 Robert D. Putnam published a paper called Bowling Alone. Later developed into a book, the paper posited that the propensity of people to associate with one another in civic fora was a key to a healthy democracy and to good governance. It was a thesis Putnam developed more fully in his famous (for academics) book Making Democracy Work, which examined the success of local government in northern and southern Italy. Civic engagement, said Putnam, was in decline. “The number of Americans who report that ‘in the past year’ they have ‘attended a public meeting on town or school affairs’ has fallen by more than a third (from 22 percent in 1973 to 13 percent in 1993). Similar (or even greater) relative declines are evident in responses to questions about attending a political rally or speech, serving on a committee of some local organization, and working for a political party.”

Putnam suggested several reasons why this was happening. Greater participation by women in the workforce had reduced the time they had for (for example) parent-teacher associations. However, he found that men’s attendance in civic fora had also declined. Putnam pointed to online shopping replacing the corner store (a decline in human contact), the growth of the VCR and, particularly, TV. “The new ‘virtual reality’ helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests?”

Should we blame TV? Putnam himself admits that changes to people’s living environment, for example slum clearance, are also a factor, breaking up social networks. This will also have been a factor in Britain, where the built environment has changed immeasurably since 1945. Indeed, as far back as 1934, T.S. Eliot could write (in The Rock):

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads

And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor

Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance.

...Nor does the family even move about together.

But every son would have his motorcycle,

And daughters ride away on casual pillions. 

Slacktivism
But although TV may have kept people at home, historically, in Britain at least, it recreated the space for dispute and discussion. The BBC has always been required to reflect “balance” in its news coverage, and ITV also inherited this obligation when it started broadcasting in 1955. At that time there were only two TV channels; a third (BBC2) arrived in 1964 and a fourth (Channel 4) in 1982, but they were bound by the same strictures. Moreover the fact that there were few viewing options meant that there was a national conversation.  

This was certainly the case in the European referendum of 1975. In particular, two days before the vote, millions watched the Oxford Union debate between Edward Heath and Jeremy Thorpe on one side, and Peter Shore and the great Barbara Castle on the other. Castle (who spoke for Out) later felt that she had been a failure, but I remember the debate 41 years later, and I suspect I am not alone. To be sure, one shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about the quality of the 1975 argument (as this piece from Prospect demonstrates). But was there an event like the Union debate this time, in which the main players were picked up upon what they said, and made to defend it? I didn’t feel there was.

To an extent, this reflects a decline in the quality of the political class. That of 1975 understood history because they’d been part of it. Heath had taken part in the Normandy landings and seen the destruction in Europe. Castle had been brought up in the North during the Depression and her mother ran a soup-kitchen.  Cameron, by contrast, has never worked outside politics, and a growing number of the political class are the same.  But there is something else going on here: Slacktivism.

There are a few definitions of this, but broadly, it’s the use of social media to express one’s views, followed by a feeling that one has done what one can. In fact, posting on Facebook and “liking” posts about racism require no real commitment. Or risk; I am just old enough to remember the civil rights and Vietnam protests in the US. The cost to those who took part, and the fear involved, could be high. (If anyone doubts this, they can watch the remarkable documentary Freedom Riders – a story of a time when activists, African-American but also some white middle-class liberals, did more than just click ‘like”, and were threatened and beaten for their pains.) No problem now. Click Like and all your friends will roar approval, because, of course, your friends mostly share your views. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.

Just how this works was described very well by sociologist Joel Busher in his excellent recent book on the English Defence League, The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest. A recurrent theme through the book is the way in which activists’ beliefs, lifestyles and relationship reinforce another. Much of this happens online. It is as true of people like me, on the Left, as it is of the EDL. There are no more draughty church halls. There are no more cigarette packs soaked in slops. No-one need watch Newsnight anymore. Politics has become a dialogue of the deaf. No-one who does not share my views will hear my arguments, and I will not hear theirs.

This is why we had a disaster last Thursday. All the information about the consequences of this vote was available beforehand; the threat to the Northern Ireland peace process, the fact that we would still have to have free movement of people (or limited access to EU markets), the fact that the UK might break up, that the pound would fall, that markets (and thus pensions) would have millions of pounds wiped off their value; it was all there. But no-one thought of these facts when they went to vote. They had felt no need to acquaint themselves with them.  People’s interactions are now grouped in vertical silos, into which no information may enter from any source that they have not chosen. It has thus never been easier to manipulate people, for they are complicit in their own deception.

Few people outside Britain welcomed the Brexit vote, but those who did included Marine Le Pen and Greece’s Golden Dawn. “A direct consequence of Brexit will be the empowerment of patriotic and nationalist forces across Europe,” said Golden Dawn’s spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris.

I can hear the drip, drip, drip of factoids being fed into those vertical silos right now. It’s the Poles. They’re scrounging bastards. They’ve taken your job. Those bastards. It’s the Romanians. It’s the Tutsis. It’s the Gypsies. It’s the Jews. The Jews. The Jews. The Jews.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads