Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 8th Apr 2021
Book review: ‘Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics’ by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, Cambridge University Press 2020, 410pp
Let’s kick off with a thought experiment. Imagine there’s a pandemic of a lethal virus, but for some reason it’s only possible to vaccinate half of the world’s population. The population becomes divided between those still susceptible to infection, who will find they have a harder time finding employment, can’t mix socially with the inoculated and are generally looked-down upon. They become deeply resentful and hostile toward those who have been inoculated.
OK, experiment over. Such a condition actually exists right now, but it’s not caused by the SARS CoV 2 virus – in their book Brexitland Sobolewska and Ford argue that Brexit was the culmination of conflicts that had been building in the UK electorate for decades, rather than their cause:
" ‘Brexitland’ is the name we give to our divided nation, but while Brexit gives a name and a voice to these divides, they are not new. They have their roots in trends which have been running for generations – educational expansion, mass immigration and ethnic change".
So the EU Referendum wasn't a moment of creation but one of awakening, when long-term social and political processes finally became sufficiently obvious to different voting groups for them to separate into distinct and opposed camps called ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’. Sobolewska and Ford are Professors of Political Science at Manchester, where Sobolewska leads an ESRC research project on identity politics in Britain, hence the framework for their analysis of the Brexit result is built around identity and ethnocentricity:
“... ethnocentric worldviews have a powerful impact on politics, and provide a powerful and intuitive theoretical explanation for potent political conflicts which are, at root, about group identities and group boundaries.”
The anthropological concept of ethnocentrism means to judge other peoples’ cultures, practices, behaviors and beliefs by your own standards (regarded as superior) rather than by their own. In politics it encourages solidarity with your own group and hostility toward other groups and so encompasses various attitudes which nowadays tend to be lumped together (rightly or wrongly) as ‘racism’.
The authors categorise the British voting population using a three-fold typology based on degrees of ethnocentrism, which they have measured and distinguished using questionnaires and by analysing voting patterns: ‘Identity conservatives’ favour their own kind and culture, which they fear is being diluted by immigration: historically they have voted for the Conservative Party; ‘Conviction identity liberals’ are cosmopolitan, actively embrace multiculturalism and oppose racism and sexism: historically they have voted Labour, Liberal-Democrat or Green; ‘Necessity identity liberals’ are immigrants or their descendants whose experience of racism in the UK has made them vote Labour alongside conviction liberals, even though their core values are otherwise far less liberal (especially on sexual mores and orientation).
Note the term ‘identity’ which all these three designations share: Brexitland offers a rigorous statistical and demographic analysis of the way in which identity has displaced economic class as the main determinant of political allegiance in the UK, steadily since WWII but speeding up in the 1960s, a phenomenon often popularly referred to as ‘culture war’. One of their more important findings confirms a strong correlation between voting patterns and educational status, since conviction liberals tend to be university graduates while identity conservatives tend to be either old or else ‘white school leavers’ without higher education. This typology is more subtle and more difficult than it first appears because these don’t claim to be total personality types but merely tendencies that may become more or less prominent in different political contexts, and hence are wide open to manipulation by astute demagogues.
Over 11 densely detailed and argued chapters (illustrated by a profusion of graphs) Sobolewska and Ford unpick several transformatory demographic forces that passed through the UK polity since WWII. Immigration came in two waves, a first from the Commonwealth starting from the 1948 British Nationality Act – including the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’ – and a second wave under New Labour from the enlarged EU, which started in 2004. The hostility these two waves generated differed, the first producing Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’, the National Front and BNP, while the second produced UKIP and the Brexit Referendum.
That difference was in large part due to a second force, the massive expansion of further education since the 1970s under both Conservative and New Labour governments. In 1988 15% of school leavers went to university but by 1994 that had risen to 33% and is rising still. Further demographic forces at work were deindustrialisation, which caused a weakening of the traditional Labour vote, and the rise of regional nationalisms in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which further drove identity conservatives away from the Labour Party. The complex interaction of all these forces over time, steered this way and that by political agents and agendas, compounded by constituency boundary changes, geography and urbanism, has resulted in the Labour Party ceasing to be largely a party of the industrial working class and becoming instead a party of the university-educated middle and professional classes.
Sobolewska and Ford’s work points in a similar direction to Thomas Piketty’s, which depicts in Capitalism And Ideology a 'Brahmin Left' that has become divorced from its proletarian class origins – and also like Piketty, they see the drift back toward identity politics as a symptom of detachment from politics altogether in many representative democracies. By a particularly tragic irony, an influx of young conviction liberals fostered the illusion that Jeremy Corbyn could turn Labour voters back toward socialism, an error that ultimately facilitated the triumph of a hard Brexit and Johnson’s 80-seat majority.
Sobolewska and Ford studiously maintain their commitment to demography and data throughout Brexitland and avoid any major digressions into psychology, not for want of knowledge because they refer in footnotes to Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt’s work on authoritarianism. However having previously reviewed Haidt’s The Righteous Mind for this journal, I’m tempted to extrapolate a little myself. Recent research reveals that young children who overhear negative comments about some unfamiliar social group may acquire long-lasting bias against that group, while Haidt’s own experiments found that liberal subjects score lower on a ‘fear of contamination’ than conservatives. The extreme vitriol and polarisation which Brexit provoked may stem from deep-seated psychological differences triggering powerful emotions that obstruct rational debate: perhaps it is possible to eliminate such biases by education, but they may equally reassert themselves with advancing age.
Two problems have vexed me for a decade, firstly why have so many of the world’s democratic electorates converged on a condition approaching stalemate with almost exactly half their populations voting for populist parties, and secondly how many Leave voters were surreptitiously voting for a complete halt to immigration (and equally secretly hoping for the removal of most migrants once Brexit is completed)? For obvious reasons Sobolewska and Ford didn’t put such a blunt, even offensive, question in their project.
Sobolewska and Ford do expect that identity politics will permanently transform the UK electorate, but not in any easily predictable direction. Their final section examines three possible futures which they label ‘fragmentation’, ‘restoration’ and ‘replacement’. Fragmentation could happen if
“identity conflicts prove impossible to contain within a two-party system still structured around economic divides, and voters become split between three, four or more substantial parties.”
This would prove chaotic under first-past-the-post and hence revive interest in some form of Proportional Representation. Restoration means a return to the traditional class-based fight between Labour and the Conservatives if
“identity conflicts fall down the agenda, for example, if a sustainable Brexit end state arrives and conflicts over immigration fade with the implementation of a new migration system.”
The third scenario, Replacement, sees one or both the traditional governing parties fail to accommodate identity conflicts and disappear, as its voters shift en masse to parties that better reflect their concerns. This happens rarely but is not unknown, and they invoke the collapse of the British Liberals after WWI or of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party in 1993.
Brexitland ends on a not quite pessimistic note for Labour supporters, because the proportion of identity conservatives in the electorate ought to decline as older cohorts die off and more youngsters go to university. However that alone won’t overcome the loss of Scottish and Red Wall seats, the party’s confusions over Brexit and immigration, and the low-intensity civil war between Starmer and Corbyn supporters. It will need a combination of determination, deviousness and openness to alliances as skillful as that deployed by the Brexiteers:
“The past decade has belonged to those who activated and mobilised identity conservatives. The next decades may belong to those who learn to do the same with identity liberals.”
