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.
May you live in interesting times
This was no ordinary election. A blindingly obvious thing to say, perhaps, but an important one nonetheless.
We were asked an absolutely enormous, existential question by our government – and one that boiled down to just two answers, ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’. We were subject to campaigns from both sides which were defined by anger rather than reason, and in the end a little more than half of the country chose to leave. It was decisive, and we should respect that decision. Now is not the time to look backwards and pick over the mechanics of it all, but instead to look forwards and think about what happens next.
That said, two things that make the referendum different to other elections are worth bearing in mind as we think about the future.
The first is that it was an election based on proportional representation in a country that is defined by its first-past-the-post system. If you’re a Tory in Liverpool, or a Labour voter in Berkshire, your candidate is never going to be on the winning side. So why not put a cross in the box next to UKIP or the Greens instead? They will never get in, but at least it sends a message. Should we really be surprised if, in a referendum campaign dominated more by heat than light, they thought perhaps the same rules might apply here?
That’s why I don’t think those on the Remain side should be making the few people who say they now regret their ‘Leave’ vote the scapegoats for what has happened. If you want someone to blame for that, blame those in power who did not explain the terms of the referendum properly. And remember that there are nowhere near enough regretful Leave voters to have tipped the balance in the other direction, and that if we had voted 52-48 in favour of ‘Remain’ then an equal number of people would probably be thinking “what if?” and wondering if they should have voted Leave. It’s wrong to focus on that small group of people, and a distraction from what we need to be thinking about right now.
The second difference is even more important, because it points to what might happen next. We’re used to voting for political parties, single units defined (roughly) by a set of values turned into specific policies in a published manifesto. When that party gets into power, we know (again, roughly) what to expect from them and we have a set of promises to hold them to in future.
That’s not the case this time. The ‘Leave’ camp was not a coherent entity, and so no one single politician within it is going to feel bound to enact what another one committed to. They all have a different view of what a post-EU UK looks like. We’re already seeing that: Dan Hannan doesn’t think that we should put restrictions on immigration, which for others was the key issue of the debate; Nigel Farage doesn’t think that any money saved by leaving the EU should be spent on the NHS, which to some was a cornerstone of the Leave campaign.
This isn’t business as usual; this is pick‘n’mix politics, a kind of Darwinian policy-making in which only the most populist will survive. Every single element of our national life which was previously defined by our EU membership is potentially up for grabs. If we want certain things to survive into our brave new post-EU world, we’re going to have to fight for them.
As a Labour party member, trust me when I say that now is not the time to walk off the field of play. When we lost power in 2010, we spent six months navel-gazing while the Conservatives defined the terms of debate for the next five years: a focus on deficit reduction and public service cuts above all else. Then again, after the 2015 general election, we indulged in a lengthy and bitter leadership campaign while the sequence of events was put in place that led to last Thursday’s vote, and the Leave side started campaigning in earnest straight away.
We simply cannot afford to let the same thing happen now. We need to decide what it is about our country that we value most and make sure that those things are at the heart of this new process of national self-realisation.
People will have different views about what they should be. For my money, it’s workers’ rights, environmental protection and the fight against tax avoidance. All of those policy areas were defined by our EU membership. I don’t want to see vital protections for British workers and key pieces of climate change legislation redefined as “red tape” and abandoned. I don’t want to see my country turned into an offshore tax haven for the rest of Europe in a desperate attempt to stop businesses leaving for somewhere else.
That is our task now, and it is vital. Before last week, many people said that the question we should be asking was: “what kind of country do we want to be?”. That wasn’t a one-off; we need to be asking ourselves that question every day while the future of our nation and its relationship with the wider world is negotiated for us by a disparate set of politicians who never stood on a single platform and do not have a unified plan for the future.
So to everyone who cares about what happens next, I say this: I know that things seem uncertain, scary and potentially pretty bleak. They do to me too. But this is no time to sit back and leave the big decisions to somebody else. We’ve got work to do.
It ain’t easy
In the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a new Facebook trend. Every time I log in, another one of my friends is asking their social network the same question: “how do you think I should vote in the referendum?”
Depressingly, this is almost always followed by that friend saying that they feel completely let down by the people who are supposed to be giving them the guidance they need. “How can I trust any of them?” they ask.
I don’t blame anyone who feels like that. Too often, it seems the debate is being dominated by people just hurling abuse at one another, making a bold assertion which is then instantly denied by the other side. The message they seem to be sending is: “Look, this is easy. Just vote for us. If you don’t, you’re an idiot.”
But the question on the ballot paper is anything but easy. We insult people’s intelligence if we pretend that it is. You can’t just tell someone that they’re a moron for disagreeing with you and hope that that’s good enough to get them on board.
So, in the interests of trying to help out those friends of mine who are still unsure, and in an attempt to do so in a way that takes some of the heat out of things, below are my thoughts on a few key areas of the debate, and what you might want to think about if you are still undecided. It’s a slightly longer blog than usual, but I hope it’s helpful to at least a few people.
To be upfront and honest – this will not be an unbiased read. I am vehemently pro-Remain, and so I’m not going to sit on the fence. But I’ll try to explain it in a way that shows how I got to that position.
And I promise I won’t think you’re an idiot if by the end of it all you don’t agree with me.
The cost of membership
We pay to be a member of the EU. There is no getting away from that fact. It is a club with a fee. Larger and more prosperous countries like the UK pay more than smaller, less well-to-do ones.
It’s important to get that figure right, though. It is not – despite what you might have seen from the Leave campaign – £350m a week. That figure is simply incorrect, and it’s calculated by doing some pretty dubious maths.
The accurate figure is £8.5bn a year. The Leave campaign’s figure assumes a much higher amount of £18bn. That’s how much the UK would pay, if you didn’t factor other things in. For instance, we have an instant rebate of £5bn, taking it down to £13bn. And then the EU directly spends £4.5bn on the UK – investment in infrastructure, medical research, support for the poorest regions in the country – bringing it down to £8.5bn.
As a standalone figure, that sounds like a lot – and of course, when we’re talking about taxpayers’ money, it is. Any government should be making sure that a sum like that is well spent. But it is also worth thinking of it in context: every year, our government spends over £730bn in total. That makes our EU membership fee a little over 1% of total spending. Put another way, of the £11,500 that is spent per person per year in the UK, just £133 is spent on being a member of the EU.
Some people will still argue that’s too much – and you might agree – but it’s important we do it on the basis of proper figures, and that we put those figures in context. It is also worth considering, of course, that our relationship with the EU is not purely transactional, and that our £8.5bn arguably delivers a lot more for us, which is a little harder to directly quantify.
Trade and the economy
Respected estimates put the number of British jobs linked to our membership of the EU at three million. But it’s hard for people to know what that means. Which jobs? If we left, would they disappear overnight? And isn’t the UK one of the world’s largest economies anyway? Wouldn’t we cope on our own?
Firstly, it is worth saying that – as with all economic predictions – no one can really tell you the exact impact of leaving the EU. There are too many variables for precision.
But it is at least worth bearing in mind that pretty much every respected economic voice – the Treasury, the Bank of England, the IMF, the Institute for Fiscal Studies – think that the impact would be negative. And we are already seeing examples of the kind of economic trouble that we might face. Last weekend, a number of polls gave the Leave campaign a lead. On Monday morning, the pound fell 1.5 cents against the dollar. And in April and May of this year, investors took a total of £68bn in cash out of the UK – that’s the biggest withdrawal since the financial crisis. And that’s just what’s happening when people think we might leave.
Secondly, you need to define the timescale we are talking about. In the short term, absolutely everyone – including the Leave campaign – agrees that there would be a significant shock to the UK economy, and it would be a negative one. The disagreement is then over how long it would take to recover.
Brexiteers argue that the EU needs us more than we need them, and so it would be in their interests to arrange a new trade deal with the UK as soon as possible. To justify this, they point out that while £223bn of UK exports go to the EU every year, some £291bn of EU exports go to the UK. By that measure, we are more important to them than the other way around.
Again, though, context is everything. For the UK, that £223bn is nearly 50% of all our exports. For the EU, their £291bn is just over 10%. In that sense, we are much less important and in a much weaker negotiating position.
Of course, we can’t – and shouldn’t – deny that the UK is the fifth biggest economy in the world, and so will be able to strike reasonably good trade deals with other countries around the world in time. But we would be doing that as a standalone country of 65 million people, and not part of the world’s biggest trade bloc of 500 million. And it would take time: the EU-Canada trade deal currently on the table has taken seven years so far.
So in the long run we could get back to a position of strength, following the short-term economic shocks of Brexit. But, as John Maynard Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead”. How long is acceptable for the UK to be suffering economically, and for people to be out of jobs or in low-paid ones? Five years? Seven? Ten? If you’re 20 now, then that’s the first decade of your working life hamstrung by trying to find a job in an underperforming economy. Is it worth doing that to ourselves – administering a self-inflicted shock so soon after the financial crisis?
Immigration
Last, but far from least, is perhaps the most emotive and divisive issue of the referendum: immigration.
To a large extent, people’s views on immigration in the EU debate will reflect their views on immigration as a whole. Fair enough, you might think. But it is still important to be clear about what exactly is on the table – and what isn’t.
Immigrants currently arrive in the UK from both EU and non-EU countries. In 2014, 168,000 people from outside the EU came to the UK. You might think that figure is too high, about right, or too low. But it has nothing to do with the referendum on our EU membership. The UK government has the power to restrict that number to zero if it wants to, whether we are in the EU or not.
Immigration from EU countries is different. Being part of the EU means signing up to the free movement of people (as well as of capital, services and goods) and that means allowing other EU citizens to come and work in our country. By the same token, UK citizens are free to go and work elsewhere. The figures suggest that this is generally balanced: there are about two million EU citizens living in the UK, and about two million UK citizens living in other EU countries. So you could see it as an equal exchange, if you want to look at things in that way.
Added to that is the fact that EU migrants are net contributors to the UK economy. They tend to be highly educated, of working age, and they pay more in taxes than they take out in benefits (in fact, just 0.2% of EU migrants claim out-of-work benefits without having contributed first). We are not part of the so-called ‘Schengen’ system (of passport free travel), and we cooperate closely – through Europol – with our EU partners to make sure that suspected terrorists and people with criminal convictions are not allowed to enter the UK.
And lastly, there is the fact that those countries which are in Europe but outside the EU – like Norway and Switzerland – have to accept the principle of free movement if they want access to the single market. So if we want to secure that good trade deal, we might not be able to close the borders anyway. And if we prioritise lowering immigration, then the price tag would come in the form of a much worse deal economically. That’s a key question for the Leave camp: which is most important to them, protecting the economy or reducing levels of immigration? Because it’s very hard to see how you could have both.
The fact is that for a lot of people such statistics won’t matter. Theirs is an emotional response. They don’t like that, over time, they have seen – or worry that they will see – the culture and traditions of their town, city or whole country changed by immigration. They don’t like that whenever they have tried to raise those concerns they feel they’ve been labelled a bigot or a racist and told they’re not allowed to think like that. It’s a vein of sentiment that Nigel Farage has very cleverly tapped into, telling people that he is the only one who understands those concerns and somehow – pretty disingenuously – saying that if we only left the EU these things would be better.
I think we need to have a national conversation about immigration. I think it needs to be of a level and a calibre considerably higher than anything that we’ve had so far, and certainly than we’re seeing in the referendum debate. In fact, I think if we’d had it a lot earlier then the polls probably wouldn’t be looking as close as they are now. But we simply do not have time to have and resolve that debate in the next 11 days.
Instead, I think it’s best for people to consider the multiple elements of the EU debate before they cast their vote:
- It does cost money to be in the EU. But that money is a fraction of what we spend as a nation, the tangible returns are good and the intangible benefits are enormous.
- It’s hard to say exactly what our economic future would look like outside the EU, but everyone says that it would be bad in the short term, and that “short term” could be seven years or more.
- Immigration is of course part of the debate. But only a part of it, and one that is intrinsically bound up with economics. There are as many Brits in the EU as there are EU citizens in the UK. And those that are here are contributing. Leaving the EU would not address the concerns that many people have about immigration, valid or otherwise.
After thinking about all of those things, I vote to Remain. I vote Remain for many more reasons, as I’ve written about before – because I want my country to be at the top table internationally; because 70 years of unbroken peace didn’t happen by accident; because I’m proud of a Union that makes our environment healthier and our working lives safer – but I don’t want to pretend that it’s an easy decision for anyone. It’s hard. The implications are massive. It deserves thinking about.
And it’s in that spirit that I hope, in some small way, for at least one person, all of the above helps them when they’re considering which box to cross on 23rd June.
The patriotic choice is to vote to stay in the EU
Should we remain in the European Union, or leave? It’s a question that’s going to get asked a lot in the next few months and – assuming you have registered to vote in advance – it will be one staring up at you from the ballot paper on Thursday 23 June.
It might well be a question you’re thoroughly sick of hearing by the time that day comes round, but it’s no less important for that. In fact, the amount of media coverage that is going to be given to the debate, the increasing passion of each side’s arguments, and their relentless determination to secure your vote, are all reflective of the fact that this is the biggest political decision of our generation.
In between now and the vote, I’m going to try and set out a range of different arguments for why I think we should stay in the EU. If you’re unsure at all about how to vote, then I’d urge you to read what you can about it and to hear the points of view of both sides. I will only be putting forward the case for staying in – but there will be plenty of opportunities to read the arguments for and against.
For me, the overwhelming case for staying in is in the answer to a different, but related question: what kind of country do we want to be?
The world has rarely been more dangerous, more unstable and more uncertain than it is right now. We’re seeing a shift in geopolitical power the likes of which hasn’t happened for nearly thirty years. We’re seeing economic woes and the subsequent rise of far-right nationalism with horrible echoes of the 1930s. And we’re seeing environmental challenges that are unprecedented.
There is an argument that, in the face of such turbulence and uncertainty, the best thing to do is hunker down within our borders; look inward; care for our own and let everyone else do the same. If the world outside is dangerous and scary, build a great big wall and shut it out. It’s an argument that’s got a lot of traction in places like Hungary. Donald Trump is building a terrifying election campaign on the back of it.
It’s an appealing argument in dark times. But it’s the wrong one, and certainly not one befitting of the UK.
On the contrary: there has never been a more important time for us to be an outward-looking, alliance-building, progressive country. The biggest challenges of our time – from terrorism to climate change, from the billions of pounds lost to tax avoidance to the millions of jobs at risk due to technological change – do not respect national borders. If we are to rise to those challenges, then we have to reach out to our neighbours and friends and work with them.
It is hard to think of a better example of that kind of constructive, cross-border working than the European Union.
Within the 28 Member States of the EU are countries that in the past have fought one another, conquered one another and tried to wipe one another off the map for good. In different times, faced with problems arguably less challenging than those we face right now, those countries have reached for their arms without blinking. I don’t have to look too far for the evidence of the what happens next: I live 10 miles from Waterloo, 80 miles from Ypres and 100 miles from Bastogne.
Today, the leaders of those same countries sit around a table and talk to one another. They argue things out. They debate, they negotiate, they frustrate one another… and then they compromise. As a result, we are living through the longest period of peace that Western Europe has known for centuries. It is an extraordinary achievement, and one those of us born in the last 50 years take completely for granted.
If there is going to be a group of countries that get together, and work with one another for the greater good – a union of nations that looks at the challenges we face and decides that the only way to rise to them is to pool their efforts and work together – then I want my country to be part of it. I’m incredibly proud to be British, precisely because it is part of the EU.
There are of course lots of other reasons for voting to remain part of the EU – because it is better for our economy, for the environment, for workers’ rights – and I’ll touch on each of those in upcoming blogs. But for me, the overriding reason will always be what our membership of the EU says about us as a country: that we believe the world can be better than it is, and that we want to be part of making it so.
the unfinished article 
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