The Question Still Remains – What is Brexit About?

We’re just over a year away from the day when the UK leaves the EU – March 29th 2019, if you want to note it down. Of course, we’ll probably only shift into some transitional deal on that date, with full removal coming in the years after. Still, we are much further along than certainly I realised, yet the dissection of the referendum result still goes on. Why did Leave win, what triggered that little extra support it needed?

Whilst wildly sensationalist, the knee-jerk response to the result suggested that all Leave supporters were racists and xenophobes who didn’t like immigrants very much. As ridiculous as that sounds, that perception was real, and the next explanation was that the polls taken before the referendum (which mostly had Remain winning) were inaccurate as Leave supporters didn’t want to admit to voting Leave because they knew they’d be seen as racists. A similar phenomenon happened with Trump in the USA, but the parallels between Trump and Brexit have been drawn to death by this stage.

After a period of political buffoonery – remember the Conservative leadership contest and Labour’s self-destruction, followed by the snap election? – it was decided that the main driving force for the Leave campaign was a demographic made up of those ‘left behind’ by globalisation and European integration. These people had been gathered up by prominent Brexiteers using catchy soundbites (including the almost hypnotically vague ‘take back control’), brash claims (we all remember Boris’ big red bus) and venomous retorts (Remain being characterised as ‘Project Fear’). Instead of being ignorant racists, Leavers were now just ignorant fools, a title no less condescending.

Then with the blue passport episode came another potential explanation in the form of ‘restoring national identity’. In a way, this sort of turns us back towards the first idea of the supporters as racists – after all, you can’t establish a national identity with other nations involved. It’s a more quaint, innocent stab at cleansing, ignoring the fact that the conceived idea of ‘Britain’ has never really existed. This reasoning pursues a world of fiction at the expense of reality.

I’ve slated previous explanations without really offering an alternative. The reason for this is simple, almost common sense – there is no one reason why people voted Leave, just like there is no one reason people voted Remain. If Remain had won, there’d be no articles trying to get to the ‘heart’ of the vote, no attempts to find one magical reason for the victory. The desperation to find one key issue which tipped the scales in Leave’s favour is driven by nothing more than fear and anxiety. Ardent EU supporters want there to be one sole reason for leaving the EU so that the problem becomes easy to fix and Brexit is instantly halted. Unfortunately, life isn’t so generous – each Leave voter will have voted according to their distinct experiences which only when generalised into a ‘national picture’ appear racist or ignorant. The answer to such people is not to insult them or wittily try to break their logic with a bombardment of facts and statistics (which was all the Remain campaign really was), but to allow them to see the effects of their actions, which could take years.

Until then, it’s all going to be a bit chaotic, I imagine. 

• brexit
• britain
• europe
• european union