6.6.5.8 The Brexit vote to leave the EU in 2016
The Brexit vote to leave the EU was due to nostalgia, a surge of nationalism, neoliberalism, and resentment at feeling left behind
On 23 June 2016, voters were asked in a referendum whether they wanted Britain to remain in the EU or to leave it in a ‘Brexit’. This amounted to asking if they were satisfied with the status quo, because no one had defined what a post-Brexit Britain might look like. People were experiencing different kinds of dissatisfaction, not all of which were connected to EU membership. The overall result was a narrow decision, by 52% to 48%, to leave (but Scotland and Northern Ireland voted against Brexit).
There were three main strands of public discontent – nostalgia, neoliberalism and feeling left behind – as illustrated in the diagram below (the numbers on the diagram relate to the paragraphs of explanation which follow it):
1. 
As revealed in a YouGov survey
three days after the Brexit vote to leave the EU, 71% of people in the 18-24
age range voted to remain in the EU, but 64% of people aged 65 or more voted to
leave – suggesting that nostalgia may have been a factor: wanting to
return to the world as it was before EU membership.[*]
They believed that Britain could proudly stand alone: “Land of hope and
glory”. They wanted to recover the country’s sovereignty. The Vote Leave
campaign came up with the powerful slogan “take back control”, to resonate with
these voters. Boris Johnson inspired confidence by his energy and ability to
brush opposition aside: he was an authoritarian populist (6.3.2.6).
2. Margaret Thatcher was a champion of deregulation and free trade. She had been instrumental in setting up the EU Single Market, but she disliked the Commission’s increasing bureaucracy and its desire for more integration. She said in her Bruges speech in 1988: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” That fed Euroscepticism in her party, including the writers of Britannia Unchained. They wanted to leave the EU in pursuit of a deregulated neoliberal vision of a “global Britain”, able to trade with other faster-growing parts of the world. George Monbiot’s article, Billionaires bought Brexit, also identified neoliberalism as the motivation for wealthy sponsors of the leave campaigns and the newspaper owners who supported them.
3. Globalisation and neoliberalism (3.5.9.1) have benefited most people but have also created some losers in wealthy countries: people ‘left behind’. This problem is not caused by membership of the EU (which erects tariff barriers against the rest of the world). It is a global economic issue, whose political aspects are examined later in this chapter (6.7.8) and which is summarised in the last chapter (9.3). UK governments of both political parties had ignored ex-industrial regions – leading to feelings of neglect; the YouGov survey showed that people were more likely to have voted to leave the EU if they lived in these regions. Vote Leave analysed Facebook data to build a database of people’s profiles – which include those who had lost confidence in the political system and did not usually vote; the campaign spent more than £2.7m on Facebook advertising to reach them with cleverly targeted (and dishonest) messages, including the claim that Turkey was joining the EU for example.
4. Some people associated social change with immigration. Nigel Farage and the millionaire Arron Banks set up the Leave.eu campaign, which attracted supporters of UKIP and the anti-immigrant British National Party. Leave.eu successfully stimulated a wave of ‘alt-right’ identity politics (6.2.4.6), using propaganda with echoes of Nazism. They persuaded voters that they needed to “take back control” of the UK’s borders by leaving the EU – which had received a large influx of refugees, mainly from wars in Syria and Afghanistan. Islamists of Arab origin had recently perpetrated terror attacks in Paris and Brussels, so immigration had become associated with terrorism.
5. George Osborne was the Chancellor who imposed austerity in Conservative governments following the Great Recession. He was a Thatcherite and wanted to reduce the size of the Welfare State. Although most economists since Keynes have advocated stimulating an economy during a recession (3.3.8.2), Osborne took the opportunity to persuade his colleagues and the country that a period of austerity was necessary: to ‘balance the books’. He reduced welfare benefits, resulting in economic hardship – especially for poorer families. Austerity bred distrust and resentment against the government and the Treasury. When the government advised people to vote to remain in the EU, people naturally did the opposite – encouraged by Michael Gove saying that “we have had enough of experts”.
Reflections on the Brexit vote to leave the EU
Voters in the fifth category above could be described as victims of neoliberalism. Perhaps they didn't realise that they had voted for a Brexit which included what the neoliberals themselves wanted: free markets and a desire for less regulation.
A BBC article, Eight reasons Leave won the UK's referendum on the EU, described how Vote Leave ran a more effective campaign than the government – though arguably more dishonest. The government, in arguing for a vote to remain in the EU, tried to play on people’s fears of the unknown – “Project Fear” – and failed to put forward positive arguments for retaining Britain’s influence on its more powerful neighbour.
People with very different reasons for the Brexit vote to leave the EU became united with nationalist fervour, seeking to recover Britain’s sovereignty. Boris Johnson had nationalist instincts (6.3.6). His slogan ‘take back control’ was very effective and an LRB article, New-Found Tribes, describes how British nationalism was a more important factor than economic considerations for many voters. Michael Gove had appeared to offer an intellectual justification for Brexit – but he misunderstood, or misrepresented, the nature of pooled sovereignty (2.8.3). He didn't mention the advantages of agreeing a set of rules jointly with other countries for mutual benefit (6.6.5.1). And Boris Johnson’s government negotiated a trade deal that prioritised sovereignty over frictionless trade and cooperation with the EU.
Gove also failed to point out that all exports have to comply with the regulations of the importing country – so freedom from regulation is a fantasy for exporters – and, as noted above (6.6.5.4), many Brussels regulations were designed by the British. The government nonetheless pressed ahead with its Retained EU law bill, to scrap “thousands of regulations” derived from EU law. This “could endanger important worker, consumer and environmental rights”, so it was opposed by businesses, trades unions and environmental groups.
YouGov reported in November 2022 that One in five who voted for Brexit now think it was the wrong decision. And “Almost two years since Britain left the EU on 31 December 2020, YouGov data shows support for Brexit is at a record low, with only 32% of the British public saying it was right to vote to leave and 56% saying it was wrong to leave.”
(This is an archive of a page intended to form part of Edition 4 of the Patterns of Power series of books. The latest versions are at book contents).