Six things that led to Brexit
Like most people engaged (or even remotely interested) in politics right now, I’ve spent a lot of the last two weeks trying to work out how on earth we got here: to a situation where the UK is on its way out of the EU, and with most of our assumptions about British politics turned completely on their head.
I’m not for a minute saying that I have managed to work it out, but working on the assumption that writing things down can help to clarify them – and that if we’re hoping to shape what happens next, it’s a pretty good idea to have thought about what came before – here are six things that I think helped contribute to a Leave vote.
(The usual caveats about lists apply. It’s not exhaustive, and there will be plenty of things I’ve overlooked. But right now, for me, these are the main themes that I keep coming back to when trying to make sense of it all.)
- The impact of globalisation on working class people in rich countries. As this fascinating Washington Post article shows, over the last 20 years, every single group of people in the world (rich people in rich countries, rich people in poor countries, poor people in poor countries) has seen their living standards improve except poor people in rich countries. They are globalisation’s losers, and nowhere near enough has been done to acknowledge or address that problem, and so those people are rightly angry. This is not just a British phenomenon – you only need to look at the success of Donald Trump, Marine le Pen and others – but by holding a referendum that put the status quo on one side and the opportunity for change on the other, we provided a lightning rod.
- Labour complacency, followed by confusion, over the impact of immigration. From the end of the 1990s onwards, as the UK embraced globalisation and opened up to the world, we moved incredibly quickly to a new, multicultural future without acknowledging that not everyone would welcome it as rapidly as liberal professionals in big cities. The accession of Eastern European countries to the EU in 2004 with no transitional controls played a part in that, but there was also a wider, less tangible sense that no one was allowed to express any kind of concern about immigration without being labelled a racist or a bigot. The public space to air any kind of concerns was shut down, meaning people had to look elsewhere to find an outlet. This was exacerbated by the Miliband years in which immigration was correctly identified as a weakness for Labour, but for which the solution proposed was not to address the issue head-on, but rather to “move the conversation onto something else”.
- Nigel Farage’s UKIP rebranding. The UKIP of the 1990s was a laughable fringe party obsessed with the idea of “sovereignty” above all else. They asked people why they would want their laws made in Brussels when those laws could be made in Westminster. But for most people, Westminster was just as distant and unaccountable as Brussels, so the idea never caught anyone’s imagination. Then Farage, like the expert campaigner he is, decoupled ends from means: while his main concern over the EU might have been about sovereignty, he saw that the major issue for those people whose votes he needed was immigration. So why not pivot the party’s focus and promise instead that leaving the EU would mean taking back control of our borders, rather than our laws?
- David Cameron’s infuriating short-termism. Trying to hold his party together, first through a painful (half-finished) process of modernisation, and then through the compromises of coalition, Cameron used “Brussels” as the catch-all bad guy for anything and everything that was going wrong. Never one to engage in difficult, long-term thinking if he could instead postpone today’s crisis with a cheap shot, Cameron never looked beyond the horizon and saw that he was simultaneously damaging the brand of the EU in the eyes of British people, and burning every possible bridge he might need further down the line. Remarkably, he even carried on doing this once he’d set the country on the path to the referendum and so knew that such a reckoning was coming.
- The spectre of Scotland. Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that everything in politics seems so unpredictable at the moment, people clung to the precedent which they thought had been set during the Scottish independence referendum: a “safety first, don’t rock the boat” approach, with a late swing to the status quo. But it was never as simple as that: what was being defended in Scotland was a 300 year old union, intimately bound up with ideas of culture, identity and patriotism – not a 40-year old economic project which only gradually grew into a multi-lingual, multi-cultural union of distinct countries. People also seemed to forget that the Scottish referendum was an incredibly close-run thing, and that Better Together very nearly lost it. On top of that, Labour’s subsequent annihilation in Scotland in May 2015 led party strategists (wrongly, in my view) to believe that the problem was having shared platforms with the Tories. So any similar spirit of bipartisan cooperation was scrapped in favour of protecting a domestic political base.
- The simultaneous loss of our most pro-EU voices. From a Remain perspective, the last thing we needed, a year before the referendum, was for the unashamedly pro-European Liberal Democrats to be decimated and for Labour to elect as its new leader a former Eurosceptic, who even now could only be described as ambivalent about Europe at best. The Lib Dems could never make enough noise on their own, and Labour was (and still is) trying to work out how to speak to and for disenfranchised working class voters who are concerned about immigration and moving over to UKIP. Perhaps not surprisingly, many people did not consider a full-throated defence of EU membership to be a key part of that strategy. Add to that the fact that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was seen as under threat from day one, and that his critics within Labour decided to make the local elections the key test of his viability, and you had a Labour party fixated on winning on 5 May before they would even start to think about what was going to happen on 23 June.
There were of course lots of other factors which influenced the outcome – a rising anti-establishment view that had been brewing ever since the expenses scandal; vast swathes of the media being run by people who would financially benefit from EU anti-competition laws no longer applying to them; the persistent and immensely frustrating unwillingness of most people below the age of 25 to actually vote – but the ones above are the ones that I personally keep coming back to.
None of those challenges present easy solutions. The fact is that the UK government – whichever party is in power – needs a proper industrial and economic strategy to look after those people who have suffered most at the hands of globalisation. Labour has to have a mature debate about immigration, which needs to acknowledge that people’s concerns are valid without running away from open, tolerant, liberal values. The Conservative party needs to decide which is most important: reducing immigration or growing the economy, because you can’t have both.
That’s not to say that rising to such challenges is impossible. Anyone looking for a sliver of hope, and some useful pointers as to what we can do next, could do a lot worse than study the campaign to get Sadiq Khan elected as London Mayor. The people behind it ran a positive campaign in which the candidate neutered the strikes against him without ever abandoning his values. He won across the whole of the city: he had support from business leaders, from faith groups, from civil society and trade unions, and he motivated young people to come out and vote. And he is, so far, governing with the same sense of optimistic realism that characterised his campaign. Yes, his was a London-centric campaign and quite often London might as well be a different country. But in these dark days Khan’s success is a beacon of hope – and as we try to wrestle with the realities of a post-EU UK, his is the example I think we should follow.
What I did on my holidays
One of the hardest tasks faced by the ‘Remain’ campaign in the forthcoming European referendum is trying to communicate all those ways in which our membership of the EU makes things better and easier, but which have been part of our daily lives for such a long time that we risk taking them for granted.
I’m going to give this a go – in the manner of a primary school student coming back after a break – by telling you about what I got up to on my holidays.
Last week, my wife and I went to Scotland for a wonderful, relaxing Easter break. My Facebook friends can attest to the smugness of the photos that followed. What is less hard to spot or quantify is how much of our holiday was affected by the UK’s EU membership. Sounds a bit tenuous? Stay with me.
Let’s start with the fact that we are both British citizens working in Belgium. That alone is to do with our EU membership – as UK citizens, we have the right to work in any of the other 27 Member States.
We are then free to travel around the European Union on holiday, needing nothing more than our passports and tickets. It’s easy to forget that things aren’t always that simple. Travel somewhere outside the EU and you’ll often have to apply (and pay) for a visa several weeks in advance.
Then there’s the fact that, for the week that we were on holiday, both of us continued to get paid by our respective employers. You probably also get paid leave, and would expect to be entitled to it as part of your job’s terms and conditions. But you might not know that the right to that paid leave stems from the EU: it’s the Working Time Directive that guarantees 20 days of paid holiday a year, and that made millions of British workers’ lives better when it was introduced in 1993.
For our holiday, my wife and I were originally going to fly to Edinburgh. After all, the flights were pretty reasonably priced – no doubt in part thanks to the EU having put an end to the days where only certain airlines were allowed to fly to certain countries, meaning they could charge whatever they wanted.
In the end, our flights were cancelled, so we switched to travelling by train. We were entitled to a full refund of the cancelled flight. Again, this isn’t in UK law – it’s in an EU Regulation which guarantees compensation and assistance to people whose flights are cancelled or delayed for a long period of time.
We stayed in Edinburgh for two nights, before going up to the Highlands, where we stayed in the breathtakingly beautiful Glen Affric just west of Loch Ness. It’s hard to think of a better place to get away from everything – stunning, remote, untouched wilderness. And the reason that it’s untouched is because it is a ‘Special Protection Area’, as designated by – yep, you guessed it – the EU. Glen Affric looks as beautiful as it does because the Habitats Directive and the Birds Directive say it has to.
None of this may seem like much on its own, and most of it would pass you by if you didn’t know to look for it.
But now try to imagine a Europe in which my wife and I found it much harder to work overseas in the first place; where if we wanted to take off a week of holiday we had to do it without being paid; where we had to fork out money and time to get a visa to go to a neighbouring country; where we lost a load more money on an expensive flight which was then cancelled with no prospect of a refund; and where when we finally got to our beautiful rural retreat the whole thing had been so overdeveloped that all that lovely wildlife had long since departed.
That may all sound quite apocalyptic, but it’s EU membership that guarantees all of those things. In a country that’s been a member since 1975, there are many of us who have never known a life outside the EU. But just because that membership is sometimes invisible to us, don’t think that it isn’t there – making life a little better, and a little easier, in thousands of imperceptible ways.
Homage to Caledonia
Last week I wrote that the Conservative victory meant the starting gun had been fired on a Labour leadership election campaign. Of course, it also signalled the beginning of another, much longer campaign: the one that will culminate in a referendum on Britain’s future in Europe. A Tory majority means that the referendum is now a certainty – at least by 2017, but recent reports suggest it could take place as soon as next year.
For those of us who passionately believe that the UK should remain in the EU, work on that campaign has to start straight away. The Eurosceptics who have been calling for a vote on our future in Europe have been preparing for this for most, if not all, of their political careers. The pro-Europe campaign cannot afford to be out of the debate for a moment.
With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about what we can learn from last year’s referendum in Scotland.
A few caveats first. One: no two votes are ever the same, and it can be pretty crude to say that just because one particular strategy worked (or didn’t work) in the past, then it will definitely work (or not) this time round. Two: what I’m about to write almost suggests that the No campaign in Scotland lost. I know that it didn’t, but for those of us who want the Union to continue, the result was uncomfortably close – and we should think about why that was, in order to aim for a much more decisive result in any EU referendum. Three: I am only talking about communication and messaging here, not content. The European Union is clearly in need of reform, and we need to have a serious and informed discussion about what that reform looks like – but that’s for another blog.
Having got all of those out of the way, I do think there are four fundamental elements of the Scottish referendum that can and should be applied to Europe, in principle at least.
First is the critical importance of running a positive campaign. If we want to build support for the UK’s place in Europe, then we have to do it by selling the benefits of staying in – not scaremongering about the perils of leaving. One of the most frustrating things about the ‘Better Together’ campaign was that too often its name was the only positive thing about it. A lot of the time, a more accurate brand would have been ‘Worse Apart’. Don’t get me wrong – there is a place in a referendum campaign for making sure people are aware of the risks of voting against your position, but that place is towards the end of the campaign, after you have cemented in people’s minds the positive, hopeful story that you have been telling for the last year or more. People need to be sold on the ‘why’ before you can effectively explain to them ‘why not’. If you start the other way around, you are basically telling people that their inclination to vote against you is ignorant or wilfully stupid, neither of which is a particularly endearing message.
Secondly, it is easier to run a positive campaign if you have been able to frame the question in your favour. One of the greatest feats Alex Salmond achieved long before the referendum ever took place was to secure ownership of the word ‘yes’. He ensured that the question was asked in such a way that his answers to it were always affirmative, positive, hopeful. Arguing against him was always going to be an uphill struggle from there. The pro-Europe campaign should do all that it can to make sure that the question on the ballot paper is “should we stay in Europe?” and not “should we leave?”
Thirdly, for a positive campaign to work it needs to be focused on people first and foremost. A lot of the arguments that are currently made in favour of staying in Europe are conducted at a structural, macro-economic level. The European Union is the largest trading bloc in the world. It gives businesses access to 500 million customers. Three million British jobs rely on us being in the EU. Those things are all true, and important – but they do not connect with people. I can’t picture what 500 million people look like, nor really envisage what it means to be part of a larger or smaller trading bloc. Three million jobs might well rely on our EU membership, but what most people will want to know is if that includes their job or not. So we should talk to people in human, personal terms. The car manufacturer that you work for chose to expand last year, and hire you, because they can sell their cars to French, Dutch and German families. You can make a last minute decision to go on holiday to Spain, armed with nothing more than a passport, because we are part of the European Union. Those are the kind of messages that will resonate with people.
Fourthly, as with all campaigns, we need to bring in different voices to help make the case. I live in Brussels, and work for a Member of the European Parliament. I’m probably pretty likely to say I think staying in the EU is a good idea, and my powers of persuasion are going to be limited by that. So we should be seeking out unusual voices, and people from other sectors whom you might not expect to be pro-European – from the financial sector, from industry, from civil society, from academia and beyond. In particular, this is where business comes in. Business came very late to the party in Scotland, but when organisations like the CBI did begin to argue in favour of the Union then it made an enormous difference. If British business leaders genuinely want us to remain in Europe, then they should begin saying that now, and saying it loud. They should shrug off a fear of being seen as overly political, and start making the case – to the media, to the general public, but crucially to their own staff – for continued membership of the EU.
None of these four things are easy to do – especially in the face of a well-established, articulate campaign fighting for us to leave – but I don’t see how it is possible to win without doing them. I think the hardest of all is translating our membership of a union of 28 countries and half a billion people into something meaningful and deeply personal to people in the UK, but it is also without a doubt the most important.
Finally, in the interests of balance, there is also one lesson that I think we should not learn from Scotland, and where we should instead do precisely the opposite. With the timing of the referendum still currently unknown, I would argue that it has to take place in spring, not autumn. Turnouts in UK elections are not much to boast about at the moment, and a low turnout referendum will serve the Eurosceptics much better than those who want to stay in (highly motivated ‘outs’ are more likely to go to the polls than people who are just broadly comfortable with the status quo). While the turnout in Scotland was very high last September, I find it hard to believe that the same would be true in a European referendum. However, if the question is on the ballot paper at the same time as next year’s elections for the Scottish and Welsh national assemblies, for the next London mayor and for councils across England, then people will be heading out to vote anyway. And – cynically – they will be voting in the two devolved nations and the capital city where pro-European sentiment is at its highest. It seems too good an opportunity to miss.
If I am right about that, and if someone with power over when these things happen agrees with me, then we’ve got less than a year to run and win the campaign. Time to get cracking.
the unfinished article 
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