Justin Frosini (Bocconi University) and Mark Gilbert (Johns Hopkins University) draw on EH Carr’s seminal What is History? to consider the root causes of Brexit. They identify three key factors: a British preoccupation with parliamentary sovereignty, the role of the media and the impact of migration from Central Europe.
The Brexit vote was the result of a confluence of several social and political causes – though the debate over parliamentary sovereignty, which burst into flame when Britain applied to join the ‘Common Market’ and has never been doused since, permeated all of them. The prolonged debate over sovereignty is crucial, since it explains why 17.4 million British citizens not only voted to leave, but in many cases manifestly rejected the EU even as an ideal.
Why were so many British voters adamant that the EU was a superstate taking away fundamental rights? One answer might simply be that there are an awful lot of deluded nationalist bigots in Britain. But this is implausible. Brexit voters are ordinary, mostly lower middle and working class people who live in England’s rural towns and villages, the industrial heartland, the ports. They are Victor Meldrews, not Viktor Orbans. They voted for both John Major and Tony Blair not so long ago. Yet millions of them celebrated when Britain voted to leave in 2016 (and again on Brexit night in January 2020). Why?
The June 2016 referendum result was a car crash waiting to happen. We do not use the metaphor casually, since the methodological frame for our paper was provided by EH Carr’s use, in What is History?, of a road accident to explain historical causality. Carr examines the case of Robinson, who is knocked down while crossing at a blind corner where ‘visibility is notoriously poor’ by Jones, who is returning from a party where he has ‘consumed more than his usual ration of alcohol’, and is driving a car whose brakes are defective (Carr 1973: 104–5).
What is the cause of Robinson’s death? Jones’ drunkenness? The blind corner? The faulty brakes? The answer, of course, is that these causes fatefully combined. As Carr says, ‘the historian deals in a multiplicity of causes’ and the ‘relative significance of one cause or one set of causes or of another, is the essence of (a historian’s) interpretation’ (Carr 1973: 103). Most historians do ultimately identify one cause or set of causes that ‘in the final analysis’ they regard as overriding in any particular case (Carr 1973: 90). In the case of Brexit, the sovereignty debate is ours.
Of course, chance and human agency played a part in the accident, too. Jones might have knocked someone else down five minutes earlier. Robinson ought to have looked right and left before he crossed the road. Carr insisted, however, that we should not waste excessive time on happenstance. Scholars should construct their explanations primarily around ‘generalisable causes’. They should isolate the crucial socio-economic, intellectual, institutional, and political variables of any given case and suggest how they combined over time to produce a particular result.
The three generalisable causes that we concentrate on are
(1) the deep-rooted conviction that EU membership was incompatible with the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty;
(2) the role of the press;
(3) mass migration into a society that was already experiencing serious problems with social injustice.
We emphasise that the Brexiters’ slogan Take Back Control was a very effective way of summarising in plain English a 50-year debate about how entering the Common Market/European Union would adversely affect one of the pillars of the British constitutional system, i.e. parliamentary supremacy. Of course, this is not a debate unknown in other European countries (think of the judgment handed down by the German Federal Constitutional Court a few weeks ago), but it is particularly poignant in the UK because the sovereignty of Parliament has a similar significance to the British as postwar constitutions have for the Germans and Italians: though, of course, parliamentary sovereignty is centuries older and intrinsically bound up, for some, with a particular notion of British national identity. One of the huge paradoxes of Brexit, however, is that a campaign whose mainspring was giving back control to the British Parliament has damaged parliamentary sovereignty by enhancing popular sovereignty. In fact, mixing a classic representative democracy with an instrument of direct democracy such as a referendum gives rise to an unpalatable cocktail where the “taste” of direct democracy is overpowering. Whoever would have imagined the Daily Telegraph opening with the headline “Judges versus the people” after the famous High Court judgment concerning the triggering of Art. 50 TEU?
This leads us to the role of the press. We contend that, especially after the fall of Thatcher in 1990, the Eurosceptic press used a water torture method to disparage anything “European,” be it the European Commission, the Court of Justice of the European Union, or even the European Court of Human Rights, which of course is not even an EU body. Though some headlines were amusing if you share the British sense of humour, they were part of a strategy to intimate that British freedom was in peril. In a nutshell, the tabloids played an important part in achieving Brexit by raising the profile of the issue of lost sovereignty with public opinion.
Large-scale migration, in particular from CEE countries following the 2004 enlargement, was grist to the mill. Many British people believed that their government and parliament no longer controlled their country’s border. This sentiment was exploited during the referendum by an electoral poster, redolent of Nazi propaganda, showing an endless queue of refugees, and by fake news claims that Turkey was on the brink of joining the EU. Again, however, the issue of EU migration was not a compartmentalised cause, but one that added fuel to the burning question of parliamentary supremacy. Brexit was perceived to be about the most fundamental question of politics: who rules?
The reference to fake news underlines a key element of contingency in the Brexit process. The Brexiters were more ruthless and more committed than the Remainers. Farage, Johnson and Gove were ideologues and Machiavels. The Cameron government, by contrast, was complacent about the result and fearful of the damage a Remain vote would have done to party unity. The campaign swung decisive votes to the Brexit camp.
We acknowledge that the weight of causation might be placed elsewhere. In What is History? Carr argued that historical interpretation is like looking at a mountain: it looks different from every angle of vision (Carr 1973: 26–27). Cultural causes such as the English habit of defining themselves against a continental ‘Other’ (Spiering 2014), or the role of imperial nostalgia both mattered. The strange death of British social democracy mattered too. We mention David Goodhart’s emphasis on the cleavage between ‘Somewheres’ and ‘Anywheres’ (Goodhart 2017). These are all legitimate ‘generalisable causes’ which other scholars might weigh heavily in the balance.
We plead guilty to sketching the mountain from one angle in particular. But this angle is an important one, since the sense of liberation that many voters genuinely felt on 24 June 2016, and the tenacity with which Brexiters have since resisted compromise, is inexplicable unless you look at Brexit from this point of view.
References
Carr, EH (1973). What is History? London: Pelican.
Goodhart, D (2017). The Road to Somewhere, London: Penguin.
Spiering, M (2014). A Cultural History of British Euroscepticism, London: Palgrave.
This post represents the views of the authors and not those of the Brexit blog, nor LSE. It is based on Justin O Frosini and Mark F Gilbert, The Brexit car crash: using EH Carr to explain Britan’s choice to leave the European Union in 2016, Journal of European Public Policy.
All so true, though I’d add that I believe a lot of middle-class and successful people also voted for Brexit. Those who feel that they became successful on their own (often in sales-related occupations), that hate all types of government and governance, typically say “I pay too much tax supporting people who don’t work as hard as me”, devalue society as an institution, have private healthcare, perhaps send children to private schools, usually believe themselves to be fiercely patriotic (English, of course, not UK).
I had many conversations with these people, their knowledge of the EU and European institutions was thin (often mainly apolitical “can’t be bothered to vote, they are all useless”) and voting for Brexit was to them a whim “nothing much will change, but this will show them” “Them, who do you mean by them?”, “Well, them, the powers that be”. I think if these folks were given another choice, to close Westminster government, they’d have voted for that with a shrug.
They didn’t see the Brexit vote as very important, certainly didn’t think through the possible negative consequences, even not thinking that freedom of movement works both ways. While I got more impassioned they said “don’t sweat, it doesn’t really matter, you’ll see”
Shrug, I’ll be fine, I always am.
Facts:
One of Cameron’s first overseas trips as Prime minister was to Turkey on 27 July 2010 when he said in his speech ‘UK strongly supports Turkey EU membership bid’
In the autumn of 2015 following the migrant crisis the EU agreed to fund refugee camps in Turkey, issue visa waivers for Turkish nationals & speed Turkey’s application to join the EU.
Since I am an academic, allow me to say when you give priority to ideas of British sovereignty you run the risk of crediting the electorate with too much understanding of very complex matters. Having campaigned on the streets of north London for “Britain Stronger In” for many hours in 2016, and thus argued with numerous citizens, what was most striking was the general ignorance about just about every kind of knowledge educated people, especially academics, take for granted. This ignorance can be captured in the often-heard phrase “being ruled by those un-elected bureaucrats in Brussels”. When invited to reflect that almost by definition bureaucrats are never elected, the speaker tended to look nonplussed. When asked how many such bureaucrats there were, they had no idea, but they knew it was “masses’. In short, most people had no idea of how the EU parliament, commission, etc. worked, the relative modesty of their costs compared with UK expenditure on un-elected bureaucrats in London, Manchester, the size of the UK public debt, the meaning of GDP. I could spend an hour listing in detail the ignorance of modern life that readers of the LSE blog (such as me) take for granted. So this is not thought snobby, let me also add that many of those canvassing for “Stronger In” were scarcely better informed (so I wrote a 17-page paper of bullet points about GB and EU and global economics suitable for an A-level student, but Stronger In did not want to publish it. So it goes.
Fine, where does this get us: if people are so uninformed and incomprehending, where do they get their opinions from? Answer: primarily the newspapers, and, in the case of Brexit voters, the tabloids, notably The Daily Mail which has been fostering the idea of British sovereignty, exceptionalism, etc. since it was found for this purpose in the 1890s and wonderfully enriching Lord Rothermere and his family. So, if we are to study the contribution of fears of loss of sovereignty as a motivation for voting Brexit we need to study the origins, dissemination and ideological purposes of this set of ideas, and above all how they relate to historical reality. It is to me astonishing that the British political class and the BBC and so many people one hears on the radio and television talk about the electorate as if they had an excellent understanding of British history, the British constitution, EU institutions and so on, whereas if you watch Question Time on the BBC you see that most people — including the experts and panelists — are conspicuously fooled by an education system which seeks primarily to replicate Britain’s ruling class institutions (vide Boris Johnson as a spectacular example, but also Andrew Roberts who insists the the British Empire was God’s gift to the benighted Indians, and so on and so on).
“This sentiment was exploited during the referendum by an electoral poster, redolent of Nazi propaganda, showing an endless queue of refugees” I would like to know which Nazi propaganda. After some digging through the links it turns out that apparently the general form of the poster (a long queue of refugees coming from the top left of the frame, bending round and coming to the bottom left) is similar to a still from a Nazi film which also shows a long queue of refugees with the same form. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClLIL84WYAIaNJv?format=jpg&name=360×360 . Allegedly the still comes from a BBC documentary “Auschwitz: the Nazis and ‘The Final Solution'”, but I don’t know what original Nazi propaganda was. If I had to guess it would be that the Nazi propaganda was a news-reel.
The classic examples of Nazi propaganda are films like the Eternal Jew. I have seen this and various other examples of Nazi propaganda. After all, since I live in Germany, am now indeed a citizen, coming to terms with this evil is rather necessary.
In typical Nazi propaganda I think the refugees would be represented as rats, or shown in other ways meant to suggest that they are subhuman and to stop you feeling sympathy for them (see “The Eternal Jew” for countless examples). The cited Nazi propaganda does this by saying that the refugees are “parasites, undermining the host countries” (I quote the subtitles, which I presume the BBC added). In the Nazi propaganda, it also appears to me that the vast majority of the refugees are not looking at the camera, so you don’t see their faces that well. In the “Breaking Point” poster many refugees are looking straight at the camera, making it harder for the viewer to discount their humanity.
To sum up, I think, as the Guardian wrote http://britishguardian.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-ukip-poster-that-won-brexit.html “it’s unlikely that Farage knew of the connection”. If Farage really were trying to channel Goebbels, I think he would have done a better job of it. If he wanted to be Nazi without being accused of being one, I think he would have avoided the superficial form of the poster (whether the refugees bend round to the left or right is irrrelevant to the message, surely?) and worked harder on making them look subhuman.
I think it is more likely that Nigel Farage and his advertisers were influenced by the following classic political poster, which also shows a long line of people snaking around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Isn%27t_Working
Great blog, though I’d say that a lot of middle-class and successful people also voted for Brexit and forget them at our peril.
I have met a lot of these and before the vote I would generalise as follows: They feel that they have been successful primarily on their own, often in sales-related functions, consider all elements of the state as a burden “I pay too many taxes”, seem to think that they are very patriotic (English, naturally, not British) and that the outcome of the vote was unlikely to affect them overmuch “I’ll be fine, because I’m great” – frankly it didn’t seem to matter much to them, “well, I voted leave, let’s see what happens”.
They have been successful, earning way above average wages, have private healthcare, nice houses, nice cars, perhaps private education for their kids.
If we’d given them another decision “should we close Westminster?” – they might have voted for it, on the basis that all restrictions/laws are just there to bind them.
Now, their attitude seems to be “well, let’s see, the world hasn’t stopped turning and we have other things to worry about” – I think many would still vote for Brexit again as they find it difficult to have the empathy to see what might happen to other people “I’ll still buy chicken from the farm shop, why should I care if cheaper food is poor quality?”
“By the way, why would I want to live/work anywhere else, England is great – if I do, I bet I can pay enough to get over any paperwork issues”
Some could call them arrogant a-holes, but I wouldn’t be so bold.
Remainers don’t get it. That much has been obvious since early 2016. Academics are a different kettle of fish again. For the most part, academics are paid scribes. They swim in a totally different ocean from the rest of us. However, though there are many academics who have a broad understanding of the issues, in the matter of Brexit, the ivory tower syndrome is overwhelming amongst pro-EU academics. As noted before, on this issue there are basic differences which are irreconcilable in the short run and which cause the majority of opposing contestants to dig in without taking the trouble to see the other side’s perspective. One major problem, perhaps the most crucial and central in matters of political contention in the West is an unmentionable on most academic blogs, which I will mention anyway. It concerns the fact that academia is not neutral on many issues. Global warming and globalisation/EU federalisation, for instance. Well, keep pushing and see where you land up, partisan political operatives, academic or otherwise. Civil rights are being dismantled, and that means human rights along with them. Totalitarianism has yet a long way to run, but it always comes up against the strongest human powers extant, which is the will to live free. Society is a body of free individuals with a government based on representation and reciprocity, but most of all, the people choose their government. Where a government and an entire body politic in charge of a country thinks it can choose themselves a different people and sail on disregarding and dispossessing an entire nation, save those on the federalisation gravy train, things go wrong. When you’ve got a supranational body such as the EU, thinking to lord it over a continent of a vast variety of peoples in such a hasty and haughty manner as the EU have, ir goes wrong inexorably more so. But, it must be shown for people who are blind, to be felt, indeed, in such a manner as that their eyes are opened. The EU project has plenty of happenings in store yet. Brexit is only the beginning.
“For the most part, academics are paid scribes.” Gratuitous sneer 1: almost by definition scribes are paid for writing what they are requested to write; academics are paid to think independently, hopefully originally. No one tells them what to write. Gratuitous sneer 2: the ivory-tower syndrome. Try reading the reams of books and articles on EU law, administration, policies, politics. One can easily critique all of it but “ivory tower” is a worn-out metaphor for people studying ancient languages and cultures of no relevance to modern life. Gratuitous sneer 3) academics not neutral on many issues. There is no requirement for academics to be neutral. There is an implicit requirement for them to develop rational argument based on explicit evidence. Global warming for example is accepted by almost the entire scientific community who have been convinced by abundant research. Gratuitous sneer 4) the Eu, thinking to lord it over a continent ….” Surely you are aware that the EU is a democratic institution supported by the vast majority of EU citizens.
Now, I do have the greatest respect for those academics who do their job as I think academics who are in one way or another paid for by the nation or its taxpayers. There are indeed many academics who are immensely dedicated to their work, who provide research, analyses and papers which many not academic writers would struggle to match. Unfortunately, increasingly these days, there are many academics who hide behind the academics doing sterling work for humanity at large and society or societies closer to home. I realise society has to take the rough with the smooth, but the rough here is having such an impact on the functioning of what used to be democratic society, undermining civil rights and using pseudo- or false arguments to push a political agenda that the smooth effect of academic work is fast losing traction.
Your rebuttal above of my comments is so patently without foundation that I see no point answering them or, indeed, seeking to reason with you. Academically generated propaganda in support of a political and/or commercial narrative which is used by elected politicians, top bureaucrats. and international bodies which do not represent the people who are taxed to pay for it all, to institute schemes which cost the earth and have no discernible benefit other than put lots of taxpayers moneys into the pockets of people who produce nothing of value is a blight on human society. Although I see no way to remedy the matter, I do have an opinion about it. In due course, insofar as it causes any problems, no doubt other academics will solve them, again, of course, at great cost to the taxpayers, ratepayers and consumers. Better enjoy your stipend while it lasts.
This is a welcome improvement on the “leavers were all a bunch of moronic, racist bigots. Stands to reason” arguments that were peddled as ‘explanations’ over the last four years.
The weakness of Frosini and Gilbert’s argument is that their example from Carr explains _involuntary_ change. The current pandemic is an example of involuntary change. The referendum was an example of _voluntary_ change. Why did the British people choose to reject the status quo and take a leap into the unknown? Frosini and Gilbert outline the pull factors, which encouraged people to choose change. We also need to consider the push factors: what was it about the way the EU went about its business that so alienated people, that they decided anything was better than the status quo?
I would question the use of the word ‘strategy’ when describing the role of the press. This suggests that there was some kind of plot or conspiracy. As a conspiracy theory sceptic, I think I would want to see some evidence to support that.
This is to David, primarily, but has bearings on what others have said. Is it a conspiracy if Lord Rothermere, the Barclay brothers (owners of Telegraph) and other high-net worth opinion formers meet in a club or by chance and establish a shared view (on offshore tax havens, the Singapore model, … whatever)? No it is not a conspiracy. It is an agreement of like minds.
Nearly all policy in all institutions is made by small groups agreeing, pressing a point, persuading others. Sometimes the process is covert, often it is not. In the case of all nation states the line taken by the mass media and by the legislature results from these kind of agreements and these kind of informal but powerful pressures. I am sure we can agree on this truism.
So when it comes to major policy issues such as Brexit we do not need conspiracy theory to observe that a small group of people who have between them billions of pounds/dollars funded a campaign which explained that pre-existing social vexations would be resolved by leaving the EU would help make their lives better. A sufficient number of those voting (only about 30% of those eligible to vote) were persuaded by this representation. But a very small number of those voting either Remain or Leave had direct experience of the EU bureaucracy, or had lived in another EU state, or speak any foreign languages. Most of them (again on either side) had very little understanding of how EU laws are made. Yet probably a high percentage of voters considered themselves sufficiently informed to make a profound political decision based on such slight real-world understanding. The question, to my mind, is how do they come to this view, given that in most cases it is not grounded in experience. The answer can only be they come to it because of the work of ‘opinion formers’. It follows that to understand the decision taken we need to consider the kinds of narrative they produced, the values they hold, and whose interests they serve. We need a sociology of knowledge.
Benedict Anderson, a former British diplomat, long ago wrote a famous book called Imagined Communities which studied how newspapers (primarily in Asia as it happens) worked to create the idea of a national community, and then, working backwards, discussed how the concept of ‘Britain’ was created in 18thC England (and Scotland, which had just been persuaded to join the Union). Linda Colley has also written a fine book on this called Britons: Forging the Nation. My point is that we should all consider how we come to know what we think we know, see where the ideas came from, who pays for them to be disseminated, who benefits from them, and above all why. Boris Johnson clearly rides a wave of imperial nostalgia, but have any of his adherents any idea how Britain became rich? The evidence is there in the libraries – by way of introduction try the book Scandalous Empire by the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor (who happens to be a confirmed anglophile). However multimillionaires who keep their wealth off-shore will not ask you to dinner if you are so impolite as to mention it. Unprofitable ideas are often unprofitable for quite obvious reasons.
The referendum campaign was rather like asking someone with almost no medical training to decide on which one of two very complex operations their partner or child should have. I bet most of us in such a situation would ask the expert to decide. I also bet that if we would be suspicious if the person recommending one particular method happened to own the company that made the expensive drugs the patient would then take. My point is that the forceful expression of
I did so enjoy Robert’s “agreement of like minds”. It’s like one of these irregular verbs: we think along the same lines; you have an agreement of like minds; they are a conspiracy.
The nub of Robert’s argument concerns how people make up their minds. “The question, to my mind, is how do they come to this view, given that in most cases it is not grounded in experience. The answer can only be they come to it because of the work of ‘opinion formers’.”
I fear he credits what Corbyn called the ‘billionaires’ with superhuman powers. The days of Northcliffe and Hearst are long gone, if they ever existed in the first place. I think the power of the ‘yellow press’ of a century ago was always more apparent than real. These days, with falling circulations and the rise of social media, it’s a rash press baron who is willing to antagonise his readers by trying to tell them what to think. Of course, it’s possible to slant the news, but Private Eye is always there to catch them out. In any case, the BBC is there, with its strict impartiality. Although, of course, the BBC is as prone as the universities to their unconscious, metropolitan biases. People, not being stupid, understand that no one tells them the unvarnished truth.
I suggest that people make up their minds about things by a complex process of personal thought and opinion-sharing, together with a generous helping of emotion. Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the mahout is persuasive here – for all of us. Above all, what influences people most is lived experience, of themselves and their circle of family and friends. Cummings understood this very clearly at the outset of the referendum campaign, which is why he was successful. I recall one economics academic who was out and about during the referendum campaign: to his surprise he was told by a farm worker: “My pay packet has been cut in the last five years. I bet yours hasn’t.” Which is why academia was so surprised at the outcome.
If Robert would like to continue this discussion, he would be very welcome to contact me on 642354@soas.ac.uk.
Incidentally, “Imagined Communities” is necessarily a generalisation, even if his choice of press, maps and museums was inspired. For example, Anderson’s book is a poor predictor of the frontiers in newly-independent Latin America. Leslie Bethell’s still-superlative “Independence of Latin America” offers a useful corrective.
Damage control tango, Pas de dux, thinking along the same chimes?