Geoffrey Evans - Brexit and British Politics

Geoffrey Evans

Anand Menon

polity

Copyright Geoffrey Evans, Anand Menon 2017

The right of Geoffrey Evans, Anand Menon to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2017 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2389-4

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In writing this book, both of us have drawn on help and support from many sources.

Geoff would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding the EU Referendum waves of the British Election Study (BES), and his colleagues in that study for their insights. Particular thanks to Jon Mellon, Chris Prosser and Noah Carl for their input. A special thanks also to those people in Stoke and North Staffordshire who gave him views on Brexit that were refreshingly different from those that could be found in the Senior Common Room.

Anand would also like to express his gratitude to the ESRC for trusting him with the Directorship of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative, and to Ben Miller, Phoebe Couzens and Navjyot Lehl for effectively running it while he was writing this book. Hes had the privilege of working with some of the best scholars in the business, from whom he has learnt a great deal. Special thanks in this regard to Catherine Barnard and Jonathan Portes, both leaders in their respective fields and both valued friends. They will doubtless recognise in the pages that follow many of the things they have taught me. Camilla Macdonald and Jack Glynn provided invaluable research assistance, without which this book would not have appeared before we left the European Union. Finally, Leigh Mueller was a remarkably fast and ridiculously patient copy-editor. At Polity, grateful thanks to Louise Knight, who, from the first coffee in Pret, has proved relentless in both believing in the project and insisting that the manuscript was finished (more or less) on time.

We dedicate the book to our partners, Julia and Nicola, who, after all, have had to tolerate its intrusion in their lives for far too long.

The lack of referendum was poisoning British politics, and I put that right.

David Cameron, April 2017

At 4.39 a.m. on Friday 24 June 2016, David Dimbleby appeared on our television screens to announce that the people of the UK had voted to leave the European Union. The British people had rejected the advice of their political establishment, of experts both foreign and home-grown. They had confounded academics and commentators alike by rejecting the status quo and voting for change.

The result generated plenty of hyperbolic comment. And hyperbole, was, unusually, not wholly out of place. This was, after all, the first state-wide referendum in which the electorate had rejected the advice of the government. It was described by the BBCs Andrew Marr as the biggest democratic rebellion in modern British history.

Politicians and pundits alike were taken by surprise. Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), had conceded defeat as the polls closed. And one of us was in a BBC radio studio to hear John Redwood effectively do likewise an hour or so later. Andrew Cooper, David Camerons pollster, had predicted a win for the Remain camp by 10 points on the day of the vote itself. Meanwhile, financial markets had blithely ignored the possibility of Brexit. Between the polls closing and the announcement of the result, the pound fell 10 per cent against the dollar a slide larger than those that had accompanied both the financial crisis of 2008 and sterlings departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

That the referendum was a defining moment in the political history of the country seemed clear enough at the time. On the morning of the result, a harried political editor of one of the quality broadsheets could be heard on College Green, opposite the Palace of Westminster, breathlessly proclaiming that the Prime Minister has just resigned, and its only the third story on our website.

David Camerons departure, moreover, was soon followed by a leadership challenge against the Labour leader of the opposition and the resignation of Nigel Farage as leader of UKIP. British politics was changing.

Mr Camerons successor in 10 Downing Street was quick to emphasize that she saw the Referendum as the beginning, not the end, of that process of change. From her first statement as Prime Minister, Theresa May made it clear that Brexit marked a break in our politics. Standing outside her new front door on 13 July, she declared her intention to make Britain a country that works for everyone, driven by the interests of those just about managing rather than those of the privileged few. Launching her Plan for Britain in March 2017, she was more explicit still, remarking that the EU referendum result was an instruction to change the way our country works, and the people for whom it works, forever.

It was in part her desire to bring this about that led to her ill-fated decision to call a snap General Election for 8 June 2017. We all know what happened then. After a disastrous campaign, she squandered an overwhelming lead in the polls and ended up with a minority government in place of the slim majority that had so frustrated her. The outcome illustrated all too clearly that Brexits political impact was far from over.

Indeed, the potentially profound long-term implications of that Referendum are now clearer albeit still profoundly indistinct than they were in its immediate aftermath. There were signs, in that recent election, of a real Brexit effect on our politics: in the higher turnouts witnessed in both strongly Remain and Leave areas; in the drama of constituencies making hitherto inconceivable shifts across the political spectrum; in the final sweeping-away of the relationship between social class and party politics established in the post-war period; in the return to a two-party system seemingly so redolent of that era.

Brexit has become the issue du jour. It has dominated news coverage since the Referendum to a remarkable degree. It still dominates many a dinner-party debate (we hear). And, of course, Brexit was virtually all the Prime Minister spoke about as, on 18 April, she announced her doomed attempt to strengthen her position as Britains Brexit leader.