Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics

"I hate saying things like this, but this is quite possibly one of the best books on the state of our politics now. They’re very good at using public opinion data and what they do is trace the Brexit identity division right the way back into the 1960s and ’70s. Then they show where that division comes from, that it’s been there for a long time, and how its activation and reinforcement by the referendum has gone on to impact on politics so spectacularly. So it’s a history of contemporary British politics, as well as a very, very nice explanation of where we’ve got to and why. It does in the sense that it describes these tribes that existed well before the referendum, sort of social values tribes, which made them very different to the traditional left-right tribes of our politics. It illustrates the way in which one of the implications of the referendum was to give those tribes meaning, identity and names, which reinforced them. The crucial point, I suppose, is that a lot of people say, ‘Oh, Brexit has created this divide’. And what this book does is show that actually it did nothing of the sort. That divide was there for ages, it had just never been mobilised quite as effectively as it was by calling a referendum, in contrast to an election. That provided a different set of rules that directly spoke to this particular division. It was about identity. It was about immigration. It was about feelings of security and insecurity. It was about a whole host of things that aren’t necessarily directly relevant to or directly linked to your class status, or how your economic preferences work. The crucial thing was that it remade some of the coalitions in British politics."