Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union

"This is written by my friend and colleague Matthew Goodwin and co-authors. Matt is an expert on the rise of UKIP. The underlying cause is this sense that people felt left behind by rapid economic change and adrift from the global economy or the modern economy of London and the southeast. In terms of voting for Leave, distance from London was a factor, communities which had lower skill levels was a factor, and people who were older. There was this combination of economic and social disconnection from the global economy in some areas, and the perceived contrast with London and other more prosperous areas like Oxford and Cambridge, York, and so on, that appeared to be doing relatively well. “In terms of voting for Leave, distance from London was a factor, communities which had lower skill levels was a factor, and people who were older.” The point that’s important is that this was not just about immigration. In some areas—say Lincolnshire and East Anglia—it related very much to immigration from the EU. But in lots of other areas that was not the case. These are places that have been economically depressed since the deindustrialisation and decline of the manufacturing industry in the 1980s and 1990s, i.e. well before the current wave of immigration from eastern Europe. It’s much more deeply rooted. It relates not just to the social impact of immigration but also of deindustrialisation, trade, technological progress, and so on. There is, but it came on top of these broader and more well-established economic drivers. Immigration, for some people, has become a symbol of something that was there already—the fact that some communities were being left behind, the fact that people with lower skills or qualifications are relatively very disadvantaged in the UK labour market. Now, the fact that there has been a recent arrival of quite large numbers of people from Europe who are more skilled and better qualified and yet willing to work in low skilled jobs for relatively low wages has provided a visible focus and intensification for those feelings. The evidence suggests it hasn’t really made things any worse for those people—things were bad already—but it has provided a visible focus for things which may have been happening anyway in a more invisible way because of changes to technology in the labour market. That’s the real challenge going forward, because it’s far from clear that Brexit will solve any of these problems. It depends on a lot of things we don’t know yet but, still, I think that most economists would say that Brexit will not lead to an immediate improvement for people who have been suffering from these broader forces. It is almost a truism, certainly among economists, that the big structural problems in the UK—to do with the labour market position of the low-skilled, the education system and the housing market—actually have little or nothing to do with the UK’s membership of the EU one way or the other. The EU has not messed up our housing market, we did that for ourselves. And, equally, leaving the EU won’t solve it. Then there’s a political economy question—whether leaving the EU will, in some ways, make it easier to solve some of these issues or whether it will make it more difficult. That, we don’t know. The other thing—and I’ll be interested to see what Matt’s book says about this—is that these economic factors also overlap very considerably with people’s social attitudes. As well as people being more likely to vote Leave if they were poorer, or lived in areas that were left behind, people were also much more likely to vote Leave if they had socially conservative attitudes—including on issues that have nothing to do with Brexit, like gay marriage and the death penalty. “Most people do not live in big cities or remote rural villages. They live in greater suburbia/small-to-medium sized towns. ” So there is this sense that a vote for Brexit was a reaction against a trend of social liberalism in the country as a whole which is, again, associated with the EU but of which the EU is not really the main driver. Although there are issues relating to the European Court of Human Rights, no one believes that leaving the EU means we’re going to roll back gay marriage or reintroduce the death penalty. And yet, views on these things were very strongly correlated with how people voted on Brexit. This ties in with a much wider social science literature which people are also looking at in the context of Trump. It’s very important to say that Trump and Brexit are different in all sorts of very important ways, but there is a common strand. Social scientists—like the authors of the book but also authors on the other side of the Atlantic—are looking at this divide between an authoritarian view of the world and a liberal one. David Goodhart’s new book talks about people from ‘somewhere’ versus people from ‘anywhere.’ I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification, to say the least. But there is clearly this dichotomy that is not based on purely economic grounds but is also about social attitudes. Yes, it’s data-driven analysis looking in more detail at what drove the vote to Leave."