The Riddle
A decade of disruption
Since the referendum was held ten years ago today, Britain has ploughed through six prime ministers and is about to have its seventh - an impressive rate considering the previous seven lasted from 1964 to 2010. It’s the most notable indicator of the immense political instability that has come to characterise what The Economist called ‘Britaly’. (Indeed, Giorgia Meloni has now seen off three British premiers, still some way off surpassing Thatcher’s achievement of outlasting nine of her equivalents in Rome). We’ll soon have more former PMs at Remembrance Day than Second World War veterans.
It’s a bit like the Brothers Grimm fairy tale ‘The Riddle’, where a string of suitors attempt to answer the princess’s question, only to be dispatched when they can’t solve it. What is Britain’s riddle? Is it planning and infrastructure, the dominance of financial services, the outdated Westminster constitution, its replacement Blairite constitution, the ‘Blob’, inequality, class, or some deeper, more spiritual malaise, the inevitable slide towards decadence which all once great peoples eventually face? Whatever the riddle, Starmer failed to solve it and is now followed by another hopeful, who has been proclaimed with indecent haste. You’d have to be one of life’s great optimists to imagine he will come closer to solving the riddle; like Boris Johnson, after all, Andy Burnham is a product of the mayoral system which provides a springboard for popular politicians without really testing them, like hiring officers on the western front based on their ability to captain a football team.
Yesterday’s resignation speech by Keir Starmer was marred, as was Rishi Sunak’s damp-squib election announcement, by the terminally annoying nuisance that is Steve Bray, one of a handful of minor celebrities who came to prominence after the referendum, among them Jolyon Maugham, Gina Miller, Femi and Led by Donkeys.
It was Bray, however, who came to symbolise the tribe most of all. As Samuel Rubinstein wrote in UnHerd yesterday: ‘Thanks to 10 solid years of shouting “Stop Brexit!”, the poor man has become the face of the fevered mood of the late 2010s. Anthony Seldon’s new edited volume, The Brexit Effect, portrays him on the front cover, with his EU-flag cape and “Stop Brexit” top hat.’
Curiously, Rubinstein notes, ‘the most interesting thing about Bray is that he was not political before 2016. Nothing could better encapsulate the problem with the Europhile, Remainer ideology. It has no deep roots in British culture. It was a synthetic product of the moment that followed the referendum. Practically nobody in Britain was waving around EU flags before 2016; you would have been looked at funny if you solemnly sang “Ode to Joy”. Nobody in Britain attached any romantic warmth to Brussels. But in the early hours of 24 June 2016, a kind of ethnogenesis occurred: at long last, the “British European” stepped forth. People who had never previously given much thought or care to the EU all of a sudden decided that it ought to be at the heart of their identity.
‘It was, in a sense, a familiar, primitive impulse: initiates to the tribe marked themselves with the acronym “FBPE”, defining themselves against a Faragist outgroup. It became a powerful means of signifying what sort of person you were — softly Left, but in a “moderate”, “sensible” way; attentive to the “experts” and wary of “Russian disinformation”.’
Indeed it is notable how Leave and Remain identity became so firmly established, and even now ‘about 60% of people in Britain identify as a Remainer or a Leaver, and people’s emotional attachments to their Brexit tribe are much stronger than their attachments to any political party.’ This reached a peak in the years following the vote, and at one point close to half of Remainers objected to their child marrying a member of the other tribe. It was like one of the controversial 1960s social science experiments where a group of people were arbitrarily divided into two groups to see how long it took to get them to hate each other.
I felt torn by the whole thing, being a very early Bregretter, Many people agonised about it, and even right-wing publications like the Spectator were divided. That was one interesting asymmetry: Remain voters tended to be more segregated, socially and physically, which is why only about 40 per cent of constituencies had pro-EU majorities but those tended to be bigger – 16 constituencies had a larger Remain win than the most Brexity seat. Remain voters were less likely to be surrounded by people from the other side than vice versa, as is also true of left-leaning political movements generally; if you had Leave voting friends as a Remainer, you were also more likely to ‘bin’ them, as Bray did.
In contrast, if you were a university-educated Leave voter in your 30s and lived in London, you were largely surrounded by members of the other side, and they often had no idea. I remember on one occasion in our local Facebook group in north London, which was often insufferable because of Brexit chat, a local woman commenting casually on how ‘no one in the area’ had voted Leave. But even here one in four people did; she probably spoke to them everyday but they never raised the subject in case she harangued them.
There was a great deal of quite reasonable anger, from people whose domestic situation was upended or whose working life was made much more difficult and poorer. Much of the rage that followed was simply shock at the result, which came out of the blue and reflected deeper problems with the media ecosystem, including the decline of the local press.
The only person I remember calling it correctly was a fellow parent at my children’s school whose family were long-standing Labour supporters and activists in the Midlands, all of whom were planning to vote Leave; he concluded from this that they probably had enough to win. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that he was one of the minority of parents who had not gone to university.
Many shared the shock of former Remain campaign Thomas Prosser who wrote how ‘I took the result badly. On the morning of 24th June, I wept and, in the weeks following the referendum, my thoughts scarcely became more coherent. Not only was my anticipation of the economic effects very wide of the mark – I predicted on Facebook that unemployment would be 10% by the autumn - but I was convinced that we had experienced a profoundly authoritarian event. Speaking to a Polish friend a few weeks after the result, I told him that I now knew how Poles had felt watching General Jaruzelski declare martial law.’
He was hardly alone - the BBC even produced an Agatha Christie adaptation which linked Brexit to 1930s fascism. The Guardian ran numerous first-person pieces from people leaving Rainy Fascist Brexit Island to escape racism by moving to rural France (ho ho). In fact, all the polling after 2016 showed the public becoming more liberal on immigration, some of it no doubt a reaction to the prejudice they felt was unleashed by the referendum.
What made the post-Brexit fallout uniquely unpleasant was that it obviously divided along the lines of winners v losers. Those who benefited from globalisation wanted one thing, those who lost – allied with the retired who had less interest in economic consequences – wanted another, and the issue was totally binary.
The winners lost, and weren’t happy about it. There is a reasonable amount of evidence suggesting that policymakers respond to the demands of the wealthiest quintile more than any other group. As conservatives, that’s something we accept as a fact of life, even if the social policies favoured by the wealthy often have a destructive effect which they are shielded from. Brexit completely violated that rule, in a genuinely revolutionary way, and enraged people who understandably felt that the country was committing economic self-harm.
The overt snobbery that resulted was often unpleasant, reflecting a general trend towards American-style snark. People who identified as democrats and egalitarians stated quite explicitly that voters with lower levels of education should not have the final say over economic issues they didn’t understand. That would nullify possibly every Labour victory in history.
The hardcore Remainers were among the most unsympathetic movements in history, but it doesn’t make it easier that annoying people are sometimes correct. Right from the start I feared that Brexit might be reckless and economically destructive, that the Leave side were making promises to voters in so-called ‘left-behind’ areas that they could not deliver on, and that this would lead to incredible bitterness. Voters will forgive a lot, but a sense of being tricked, taken for a ride, betrayed even, is fatal. People hate feeling like mugs. I also felt that it was radicalising many young people even more against the Tories; the impression was of mostly older people throwing away their children’s prospects for often contradictory and sentimental reasons, informed by watching too many war films. It meant a brain drain from the Right, something clearly evident in the declining quality of Tory ministers.
I was also not convinced by the ‘money isn’t everything’ argument, that Brexit might make us poorer but it would be worth it. Money is a lot; if you haven’t retired or paid off your mortgage it is rather jarring to hear this line from people who have. I understood the rationale for a more egalitarian economy that might drive down total GDP by restricting the supply of workers. But I also think that if a country grows relatively poorer, and stagnates, that’s a sign of a deeper malaise. National wealth is national greatness, and Britain was at its relative richest when it was well-governed, dynamic and culturally confident. That it is stuck in a rut now suggests a deep cultural rot, while failure begets failure as more dynamic citizens emigrate and a shrinking economy leads politicians to extract from their enemies to reward their friends. A junta of Belgian ticket inspectors would indeed be preferable to rule by Tony Benn.
