Brexit and British Politics

"I felt a bit ashamed putting our own book in, but anyway… The story of this book is quite a sad story in the sense that we sent the first complete manuscript to the publishers on the day that Theresa May called her snap election in 2017. I cannot remember ever being so hacked off about a political development in my whole life, because of course, it meant that we had to wait and incorporate the election. What we wanted to do was have a first cut at showing what drove the outcome of that referendum in 2016 and what it might mean for British politics from then on. It was very, very early in the game and many of the other books—Robert and Maria’s and a couple of the books that we’re going to come to—are far better at reflecting in a calm and cool way what was going on. But we just wanted to put down our first thoughts on what was happening to the British electorate because of Brexit, and what that might mean. In terms of the referendum campaign itself, which I think this book talks more about that than any of the other books, several things are noteworthy. One important finding is that very few people changed their minds, not just during the referendum campaign, but actually in the few years leading up to it from about 2012 through to 2016. There’s tremendous stability of opinion. We explain that by saying that this is because these opinions are rooted in identity and identities don’t change very quickly, if at all. Secondly, the flip side of that is that the Leave campaign was very, very effective, not in convincing people, but in getting people who were already convinced to go out and vote. One of the statistics that sticks in my mind is that 2.8 million people who could have voted in the 2015 election, but didn’t, voted in the 2016 referendum. So a lot of people who weren’t in the habit of voting in general elections were motivated to go out and vote in the referendum, which is one of the reasons why we saw the result that we did."