Why did Britain vote for Brexit? As Parliament gazes into the abyss, the question seems worth asking, even if I don’t pretend to be able to offer a simple answer. And that’s the point, really. Britain is teetering on the brink of a grand failure of policy and politics because, insofar as anyone involved has even wondered why a majority of voters rejected Britain’s political-economic settlement in June 2016, they have generally come up with simple, shallow answers.
Among No Deal Leavers, most explanations for the referendum result these days refer to “control” (especially over immigration policy) or “sovereignty” or some nebulous idea of the economic opportunities that lie in different trading arrangements.
Among those Remainers who want to stop Brexit, the level of analysis is often even worse: 17.4 million people voted the way they did because they were lied to, because they didn’t understand what they were doing, because of a promise on the side of a bus, because Facebook, because Russia.
Any and all of those things could, of course, have been factors in the referendum vote. But only partial ones and certainly not sufficient ones. Today those who purport to lead Britain, or at least make decisions about its future, are as embarrassingly bereft of comprehensive explanations for the Leave vote as they were in the summer of 2016.
That failure weighs especially heavily on those who seek to reverse that decision. Many of those people are my friends and I think their motives are honourable, even if I disagree with them about their aim (Britain voted to leave so Britain has to leave) and politely despair of much that they do. I also note that their efforts over the last two years have been almost entirely unsuccessful. The NatCen poll of polls, overseen by Sir John Curtice, reckons the current balance of opinion among the UK electorate is 53 per cent Remain and 47 per cent Leave. In 2016, we flipped a coin and it came down for Leave. A new vote tomorrow would be another coin-toss.
A closer look at the polls shows that much of the slight lead that Remain holds there comes from differences in the two groups’ stated propensity vote: Remain-inclined voters are now more likely to say they would definitely vote than they were in 2016, when a number of them did not vote (either because they didn’t think they needed to or because they were unable to). In other words, there has not been significant switching between Leave and Remain. If Britain votes again on the EU, roughly half of the electorate would again vote against membership. That, to repeat, represents political failure by the Stop Brexit camp. After more than two years, during which the costs, challenges and difficulties of Brexit have been played out in painstaking detail on every media outlet every hour of every day, those who are working to reverse that 2016 vote have persuaded almost no-one who voted to Leave to change their mind. If Brexit is the self-evident disaster that the ardent Remainers insist (and to be clear, I don’t see any major benefits to leaving either), why is it that 16 or 17 million people would vote for it again? My side of the argument lost in 2016, and we’re still losing today.
Those Remain explanations for the Leave vote are one of the obstacles to a fundamental political breakthrough with Leave voters. If you believe the electorate was lied to, you can believe winning again is simple: put the truth before voters and they will quickly come around to your view.
But that demands an impossibly shallow and short-term explanation of Brexit as an event that suddenly erupted out of Conservative Party politics in the early half of this decade. Some of the anger at David Cameron over the referendum is to my mind justified (refusing to prepare for a Leave vote and running away when it happened are both culpable) but he was not the sole author of either the referendum or its outcome. For years and even decades, British politicians’ approach to Europe had been akin to playing pass-the-parcel with a live hand grenade; Cameron’s decision was to try to defuse the thing rather than hand it on to the next person in line.
Any attempt to undo Brexit must take a longer view of its causes. That means listening to historians and especially economic historians. They’ve been out of fashion of late as the econometricians and their models make the running (and take the money) but they deserve a lot more attention. Economic historians don’t come much better than professor Nick Crafts at Warwick University, so his latest thoughts on Brexit should be read closely at Westminster.
He argues that a clear line of causation should be drawn from the 2007/8 banking crisis and politicians responses, to the “austerity” programme of fiscal consolidation starting in 2010, and on to the 2016 referendum vote:
…the sequence of events seems clear – the financial crisis led to an austerity programme which boosted support for Ukip enough to make the Conservatives promise a referendum and antagonised left-behind voters whose protest votes were enough to tip the balance for Leave.
This isn’t, of course, an argument that the banking crisis caused Brexit. It’s a suggestion that the consequences of that crisis were a significant factor in the multifactorial outcome of the 2016 referendum. And that factor is too often overlooked on both sides of the “debate” around Brexit today.
Remainers won’t persuade Leave voters to switch sides unless they engage with the reasons those people voted as they did. That means considering much more carefully economic arguments like those developed by Nick Crafts, as well as the cultural questions advanced by people including Matthew Goodwin.
They should also look back further and accept that in 2016 they lost not a quick skirmish but a long war, one that the other side started fighting in the late 1980s. If taking Britain out of the EU was a generational political project, any campaign to reverse that outcome needs to be fought on a comparable timescale.
But there are hard lessons for Leavers here too. Not enough of them engage with the questions of economic distribution that contributed to their success. Repeated attempts to construe the vote to Leave as a popular mandate for a smaller state, lower spending and the creation of an institutionally austere Singaporean model do not just misread the nature of the UK economy but, worse, grossly misinterpret the Leave vote itself.
Here, the winners of that 2016 vote should pay close attention to another of Nick Crafts’ observations. He estimates that a hard Brexit could leave the UK with another huge fiscal hole to fill, a structural budget deficit of 5.7 per cent of GDP. That’s bigger than the structural deficit the Cameron-Osborne team faced in 2010. And yes, it does take into account ending UK contributions to the EU budget.
Perhaps Nick, and pretty much every other serious economic analyst, will be wrong and the public finances will not suffer greatly from disruption to trade with the UK’s biggest trading partners. Perhaps new trade deals with more distant economies will be agreed with unprecedented speed and almost instantly generate fiscal gains big enough to mitigate any hit to the Government’s books.
But what if he’s right? What if Brexit, made possible by austerity, forces a new and potentially larger fiscal consolidation on the British state than the one that began in 2010? What will the victors of the 2016 referendum say to Leave voters then?
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