Brexit referendum

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To)

by Chris Grey  · 22 Jun 2021  · 334pp  · 91,722 words

knowing what it was. This turned out to be prescient. Not only were all the models touted at different times by different advocates of Brexit during the referendum, but their differences were concealed, especially by persistent references to ‘single market access’ which could have meant any of them. The Vote Leave campaign

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said that it would be for the government, not it, to do so if the vote were to leave. It was only after the referendum that Brexiters claimed the vote had been for any particular form of Brexit. But that was not true, as was shown by the fact that for many

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extolling the soft Brexit Norway model, by the time of the referendum only hard or FTA Brexit would do. Some who campaigned during the referendum for soft Brexit afterwards championed an FTA hard Brexit. Still others who had argued for soft or hard Brexit came to say that ‘no deal’ was the

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would be agreed before the Article 50 process to leave even began. This was simply impossible given the terms of Article 50. After the referendum, many Brexiters claimed that both the exit agreement and the future terms agreement could be done as part of a single process.4 This was also untrue

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vote enabled a pivot from using the Project Fear accusation as a campaign tool to incorporating it into the post-referendum discussion of delivering Brexit. During the referendum campaign, Vote Leave had persistently and successfully attacked as Project Fear any warning of economic damage (or indeed any other kind of damage). In

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, not least as many individuals campaigning for Brexit stated explicitly that this – the Norway model – was what Brexit would mean. But ever since the referendum many Brexiters, including Gove, have insisted that it meant no such thing, and that such a model would not be Brexit at all. So an alternative explanation

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of the withdrawal negotiations that Brexit posed direct risks to the conditions that underpinned the GFA and, with it, the wider peace process. During the referendum campaign Brexiters dismissed these concerns as – yet again – Project Fear. More specifically, Boris Johnson said that the existing situation with the Irish border would be ‘absolutely

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the EU, had been eligible (because Norway is in EFTA/EEA). This harked right back to the repeated invocations of the ‘Norway model’ by Brexiters before the referendum, a model which May had, since the Lancaster House speech, insisted was not acceptable as it would not satisfy the ‘will of the people

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to potentially enable a no-deal Brexit that was not mandated by any election, nor by the referendum result. Brexit Ultras did not see it that way, of course, since they claimed that the referendum mandated any Brexit outcome, including no deal, regardless of Parliament and, moreover, claimed that the parliamentary vote to trigger

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been perfectly compatible with the referendum result and actually in line with what at least some ‘liberal’ Brexiters has campaigned for prior to the referendum. But the Brexit Ultras were adamantly opposed to this and May endorsed them. It was only later, in April 2018, that the People’s Vote campaign started

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approach imagined at the beginning of this chapter, not least as it was far too angry. For it is striking how, despite winning the referendum and getting Brexit, its supporters have never stopped being consumed by rage, as any social media discussion confirms. More fundamentally, as I have sought to stress throughout

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of Brexit. Amongst those effects is likely to be the ironic one that whereas control of immigration was such a central theme in the referendum campaign, post-Brexit Britain, with its ageing population, will probably end up using its independent immigration policy to increase the amount of immigration.133 Yet doing so

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

by Peter Geoghegan  · 2 Jan 2020  · 388pp  · 111,099 words

need to understand the disease’s aetiology. I have structured this book both chronologically and thematically. The opening chapters are directly concerned with the 2016 Brexit referendum and examine in some detail examples of electoral sharp practice that took place, from Vote Leave’s law-breaking to Arron Banks’s record spending

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alternative voting system.” ‘Yes’ lost by a crushing two to one on polling day.18 NO to AV also provided a trial run for the Brexit referendum in other ways. Elliott focused heavily on digital campaigning. He pushed messages on Facebook and built online applications that encouraged voters to attend real-world

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that the money saved on another layer of government could be used to hire additional doctors, teachers or police.23 In another echo of the Brexit referendum, the campaign was also dogged by arguments with the Electoral Commission and fellow campaigners against the assembly over designations and spending. In his insider account

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world and for Europe that she should be so intimately engaged in the EU”26). In the end, Johnson filed the original column, backing Brexit. Suddenly, the referendum seemed winnable. By then, Vote Leave had moved out of 55 Tufton Street to larger offices in the Westminster Tower beside Lambeth Bridge, right

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twenty years and was a member of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s inquiry into ‘fake news’ which had examined the Brexit referendum. “I voted against the election because I thought we needed regulation before the election. It’s a charade,” he said. With a short, unkempt beard

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, that you won’t break the rules, goes, you’re stuffed.” Vote Leave was not the only campaign fined by the elections watchdog following the Brexit referendum. Arron Banks’s Leave.EU was sanctioned, as were the Liberal Democrats and the official Remain campaign, for failing to provide receipts and invoices. A

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an optician’s in a shopping centre in the small city of Victoria, British Columbia. Cummings said he found AIQ “on the internet” before the Brexit referendum. “It was strange. Nobody in the UK had heard of AIQ. They seemed to come out of nowhere,” says Sam Jeffers, an expert on digital

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to run the biggest targeted digital misinformation campaign ever seen in Britain. Vote Leave was often seen as the ‘nice’ face of an often vicious Brexit referendum campaign. Daniel Hannan preferred to talk about sovereignty and Brussels bureaucracy, rather than immigration. UKIP’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, joined Vote Leave ostensibly because

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and an admiration for President Vladimir Putin’s muscular foreign policy. Banks had acknowledged meeting Russia’s ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovenko, months before the Brexit referendum. Over six hours in November 2015 that ended with shots of vodka from a bottle supposedly produced for Stalin, Banks and Wigmore discussed everything from

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case. Reports in the Observer and elsewhere revealed that Banks had numerous previously undisclosed meetings with Russian officials and businesspeople around the time of the Brexit referendum.59 He eventually admitted to having three meetings with the Russian ambassador in London. He soon revised that figure to four in a newspaper interview

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meetings with the Russians and much else. When it was revealed that he had spent £450,000 bankrolling Nigel Farage’s lavish lifestyle after the Brexit referendum, Banks dismissed the story as “a smear”.106 He accused the established media of bias and even set up his own news site, Westmonster, modelled

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the full weight of its electoral machine behind a Leave vote, at least not initially. The Democratic Unionists only registered as a participant in the Brexit referendum a month beforehand. Becoming an official participant was significant – the DUP could now spend up to £700,000 on the campaign. But there was little

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within the bounds of electoral law and only gave out money from eligible donors domiciled in the UK. * In the days leading up to the Brexit referendum, around five million voters – most of them in England – received targeted Facebook ads from the DUP.19 Bright blue and red messages with the party

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a surprising choice for the DUP. The company was small and young, with little obvious experience in the world of political advertising. But during the Brexit referendum, various Leave-supporting groups spent more than £800,000 with the firm. Otherwise fierce rivals Vote Leave and Leave.EU both employed Soopa Doopa to

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£435,000 was not the only donation that the CRC made to the Democratic Unionists. Cook’s outfit also made two further contributions after the Brexit referendum, totalling more than £13,000.30 The last came just five days after the party lost eight seats in the snap 2017 Stormont election. The

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shadowy operation. Privately, some within the DUP regretted accepting the CRC windfall. The £9,000 left over in party coffers at the end of the Brexit referendum was hardly consolation for the endless, at times hyperbolic, questions about dark money and dubious donors. The story broke at the very worst time for

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politics since the 1970s, libertarian-minded universities and think tanks were helping to nurture an outsider idea that would later come to prominence during the Brexit referendum and, especially, in its aftermath. As might be expected, the Anglosphere had support from the dispensers of American libertarian dark money. Conquest was a fellow

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City of London. Six years previously, it had been a quarter.68 Many of the Conservatives’ growing ranks of City funders supported David Cameron’s Brexit referendum strategy. Big business heavily backed Remain, including Goldman Sachs, Citi Group and The City of London Corporation.69 Pro-Brexit funding came from the City

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as publicly unpopular, and which he supports, came to dominate British political debate after June 2016. Free trade and deregulation – issues largely absent during the Brexit referendum – were held up as totemic of the “will of the people”. Prominent Leave voices, from Nigel Farage to the ERG, declared that anything less than

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role was largely to support Legatum’s international philanthropic work. He contributed a chapter to a Heritage Foundation report on economic freedom. Then came the Brexit referendum. “When I turned up at Legatum on the morning after the vote, it was like walking into a morgue,” says Legatum board member Toby Baxendale

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able to have very focused messages to all of those people.”35 Digital campaigning in Britain really came into its own during the 2016 EU referendum. The Brexit vote followed an unprecedented surge in targeted advertising. During the final weeks of the campaign, Vote Leave alone sent more than a billion targeted

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fewer activists on the ground, the online platforms give parties the opportunity to vastly extend their reach. Data has become political hard currency. Before the Brexit referendum, the Liberal Democrats sold personal information about their members to the Remain campaign for £100,000.48 Political parties now employ in-house staff dedicated

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, but the measures were not implemented – apparently because of fears that any revamp of electoral law would raise awkward questions about the legality of the Brexit referendum, according to a November 2019 report in Politico.79 Around the same time, May’s successor Boris Johnson took the highly unusual step of refusing

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Steven Edginton, a 19-year-old former digital strategist at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, to head its online campaign. Just as Leave.EU did before the Brexit referendum, the Brexit Party specifically targeted Labour voters on Facebook. It spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on slick ads. Attacks on the British political establishment

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far right. Ted Malloch, an American professor and friend of Nigel Farage based in England, met Salvini on a number of occasions. Ahead of the Brexit referendum, Salvini met Farage and promised to celebrate the demise of the European Union if the UK voted to leave.30 In America, intermediaries between the

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in loans from Russian banks, including one close to the Kremlin. (She insisted that the deal was commercial, not political.) Ahead of the 2016 EU referendum, Brexit’s most generous backer, Arron Banks, discussed lucrative gold and diamond investment deals offered through the Russian embassy in London. Banks has said that he

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Conservatives did better than anyone else in 2019 was to actively stoke the growing frustration with politics and politicians among many British voters. Unlike the Brexit referendum’s promise to “take back control”, Johnson’s winning campaign promised to make politics go away. Get Brexit Done. No more politicians squabbling on voters

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needed to push dark money and disinformation from a niche concern to the top of the political agenda? If proven law-breaking – as in the Brexit referendum – and obvious electoral manipulation is not enough to make us all stand up and take notice, what would be? And even if public anger at

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. 44 James Cusick and Adam Ramsay, ‘Police still not investigating Leave campaigns, citing “political sensitivities”’, openDemocracy, October 2018. 45 Dominic Cummings, ‘Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won’, Spectator, January 2017. 46 Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit (London, 2017), pp. 415–416. 47 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Vote

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Brexit campaign ads for the fake news inquiry – but what’s wrong with them?’, New Statesman, July 2018. 53 Dominic Cummings, ‘Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won’, Spectator, January 2017. 54 Carole Cadwalladr and Mark Townsend, ‘Revealed: the ties that bound Vote Leave’s data firm to controversial Cambridge Analytica

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, Better for the Country and others referred to the National Crime Agency for multiple suspected offences’, The Electoral Commission, November 2018. 39 ‘Arron Banks faces Brexit referendum spending probe’, BBC, November 2018. 40 Arron Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London

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-offences; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 83 Charles Hymas, ‘Arron Banks threatens to sue Electoral Commission after being cleared by National Crime Agency over loans in Brexit referendum campaign’, Telegraph, September 2019. 84 Andrew Marr Show, BBC, November 2018. 85 Ian Cobain, ‘Ashcroft’s millions: from Belize tax haven to Tories via Southampton

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman  · 30 Nov 2017  · 721pp  · 238,678 words

About the Publisher Acknowledgements This is the second book I never intended to write. Just as with All Out War, my 2016 book on the Brexit referendum campaign, Fall Out is the product of extraordinary events. The original intention was to add a few chapters to All Out War to bring the

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-age group in society is worse off in terms of living standards and stagnant wages and cuts. Those in charge have lost control, as the Brexit referendum demonstrated. And we recognised there is an underlying volatility in British politics since the financial crisis with the rise of the Lib Dems, the rise

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squad, Banks rounded on Nuttall for opening his general election campaign with a push on Muslim issues rather than treating the election as ‘a second Brexit referendum’, pronounced Ukip dead and announced that he and Farage would start a new movement in the autumn. In an extraordinary statement emailed to political journalists

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sticking point was the party’s Brexit position. Farron’s closest aide Paul Butters was among those arguing, ‘We should make this election a referendum on Brexit. If you are voting for us you are voting for an anti-Brexit party.’ Most of the party’s big guns agreed that they should

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May had given to LBC’s Iain Dale on the Wednesday, in which she refused to say how she would vote if there were another referendum on Brexit. ‘I don’t answer hypothetical questions,’ the prime minister said, effectively refusing to endorse her own government’s main policy. Pressed, she added, ‘What

The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century

by Geert Mak  · 27 Oct 2021  · 722pp  · 223,701 words

ask. He’s silent for a moment. Then he says, ‘I was shell-shocked. It’s our biggest mistake since the First World War.’ The Brexit referendum that hijacked British politics from 2016 onwards and largely paralysed the British government – how necessary was it actually? If a year earlier, in 2015 or

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the virtual world. Over the past twenty years we have seen their early manifestations: cyberattacks on Iran, Lithuania, Georgia and Ukraine, alleged manipulation of the Brexit referendum and the American presidential election, trolling wars over Ukraine, and spyware in foreign digital products. In 2007, Estonia became the first state to suffer a

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again)

by Nick Clegg  · 11 Oct 2017  · 93pp  · 30,572 words

may help to provoke precisely the reforms that will assist in securing the EU’s own future. So there is a silver lining to the Brexit referendum: it may help to strengthen the EU itself; and it may lead to the conditions in which the UK could be reintegrated into a reformed

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eve of the referendum vote. Indeed, it has been reported that in a private conversation in the Prime Minister’s flat shortly before the referendum, the pro-Brexit editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, pointed to a TV screen and told David Cameron that the pictures of refugees on the daily

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dramatic shift in the political weather; could Europe survive the coming storm? The answer, it appears, is a resounding Yes. By the Christmas after the Brexit referendum, the clouds had already begun to lift. In Austria, the pro-European Alexander Van der Bellen defeated Norbert Hofer’s far-right Freedom Party and

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Brits than that which came before. So there has been a huge amount of change across Europe – and the world – in the months since our Brexit referendum. And when the world changes, people’s views change, too. In this new landscape, I will now explain why stopping Brexit would not be anti

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-democratic. It would actually be the more democratic thing to do. Why it is right to stop Brexit THE REFERENDUM CAMPAIGN was, for the most part, an uninspiring affair – for which both sides must bear some responsibility. Much of the argy-bargy between the

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pair of shoes, should apply to the way in which Brexit was sold falsely to millions of voters? There are many reasons to revisit the Brexit referendum outcome, but this is the most compelling of all: we took the decision on a false prospectus. Voters were sold a dodgy promise on a

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UK. The economic benefits to a nation supposedly ‘liberated from the shackles of Brussels’ are nowhere to be seen. Just over a year after the Brexit referendum, it turns out that the eurozone is growing twice as fast as the British economy. So much for economic liberation. While the full extent of

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shaping events across the globe. Don’t take my word for it. Just look at how the world’s largest nations have reacted to Brexit. Since the referendum the leaders of two of the world’s most significant new powers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Xi Jinping of China

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. Modi has also been to Spain and France. Xi has taken trips to Belgium and the Netherlands. Neither has come to the UK since the Brexit referendum. Both Xi and Modi know that it makes far more sense to do business with a major bloc rather than with an isolated nation. The

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very much that many – maybe any – of those names are familiar to you, and I doubt whether their money alone could have bought the referendum result. The Brexit elite, however, wields influence in many ways. A small group of newspaper owners and editors – again, all men, none of them young – have made

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else. But while the Brexit elite played a decisive role in making Brexit happen, they cannot be held responsible for the conduct since the referendum of the Brexit talks themselves. For that display of serial incompetence, only government ministers and their advisers are responsible. It is their job to negotiate the best

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the Conservative Party’s Europhobic demons from engulfing the country. And once the Conservatives got their way in power on their own and triggered the Brexit referendum, the Lib Dems have been consistent in arguing for a way back into Europe. But at a time of national emergency, and for as long

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acrimony that would no doubt arise once again, I believe that the British people would vote to change the judgement we arrived at in the Brexit referendum of June 2016 – especially because voters will, unlike then, be able to compare the promises made by Johnson, Farage, Gove et al. with the reality

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quo ante is wise, or feasible. Those who believe Brexit is a mistake should not make the same high-handed error committed by the Brexiteers. After the referendum, they simply assumed that they could ignore the 48 per cent of voters who had voted the other way. But one half of the

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asked to foot the bill for eurozone liabilities. This was a point already conceded in David Cameron’s much-maligned ‘renegotiation’ package, prior to the Brexit referendum. Britain would remain, as it is now, by far the largest EU country outside the eurozone. As now, it would remain a member of both

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December 2016 20. Nigel Farage in a speech on 24th June 2016 21. www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk, 23rd May 2016 22. Dominic Cummings, ‘How the Brexit Referendum was Won’, blogs.spectator.co.uk, 9th January 2017 23. Office of Budget Responsibility, Economic and Fiscal Outlook – November 2016, 23rd November 2016 24. D

Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: The Facts About Britain's Bitter Divorce From Europe 2016

by Ian Dunt  · 11 Apr 2017  · 158pp  · 45,927 words

, but the comparison is not particularly useful. No advanced economy which is a central cog in the global financial system has done anything like Brexit. After the referendum, Britain had about 40 people who could do the job. That is nothing like enough. Brexit requires hundreds of them. The EU has 550

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a tough position. For a start, the polling is unhelpful. The number of people who said they would vote for independence in a second referendum following the Brexit vote is largely unchanged from the 44% who voted for independence in 2014. Asking Scottish voters to choose between the European single market and

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pleasant. For this I apologise. I thank Martin Hickman, my publisher, and Lisa Moylett, my agent. Martin came to me after my first post-referendum blog on Brexit, Everything you need to know about Theresa May’s Brexit nightmare in five minutes, despite the fact that it didn’t tell the reader

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles

by Fintan O'Toole  · 5 Mar 2020  · 385pp  · 121,550 words

her party conference speech, Theresa May confirms Article 50 will be triggered before the end of March 2017 18 June 2016 Six days before the Brexit referendum, it seems that something profound is being created: not a mere exit from the EU but the real possibility of an English state. Yet no

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worth savouring. TIMELINE 17 January 2017: Prime Minister Theresa May gives her Lancaster House speech, setting out a hardline interpretation of the meaning of the Brexit referendum result. 26 January 2017: Government publishes European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill. 2 February 2017: Government publishes its Brexit white paper, formally setting out its

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May does. 9 June 2017 May and Corbyn both lost the election. The result – a hung parliament – seems to bear out the feeling that the Brexit referendum had undermined the stability of Britain’s political institutions. So there’s only one queen in England after all. The coronation of Queen Theresa is

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Nemo me impune lacessit, which roughly translates as ‘Don’t mess about or there will be consequences’. The British political class messed about with the Brexit referendum, and the consequence is, if not quite anarchy in the UK, a crisis of authority that has profound implications for Brexit itself. The prime minister

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brand that has been trashed three times in two years by the Tories themselves. David Cameron took a hammer to it when he called the Brexit referendum in the first place. May gave it another kick when she decided, entirely spuriously, that the vote in that referendum was a mandate for an

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to be lived with and perhaps even embraced. Irish people, for the most part, have come to terms with this necessity. The English, as the Brexit referendum suggested, have not. This is why the Irish border has such profound implications for Brexit – it is a physical token of a mental frontier that

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to happen. The only triangle it actually resembles is the mythical one off Bermuda into which flights of fancy disappear. In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, the brilliant historian of post-war Britain, John Bew, suggested the only way forward was a ‘reinvigorated special relationship’ with the US that would, in

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that many Brexiteers seem to find extremely difficult: Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. You would not have known this, admittedly, during the Brexit referendum debates, and it does not seem to have become any more obvious to the true believers in the period since their great victory. But it

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the moment of conception’, inserted in 1983, is overturned by a majority of two to one. The whole process contrasts starkly with the way the Brexit referendum had been conducted and points to how any second referendum might be handled. In all the excitement of what happened in Ireland’s referendum on

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. So did the government. And it turned out that a sample of ‘the people’ actually knew pretty well what ‘the people’ were thinking. If the Brexit referendum had been preceded by such a respectful, dignified and humble exercise in listening and thinking, it would surely have been a radically different experience. Second

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second was what usually happens when something very big is building up and everyone is trying to keep the lid on it: an explosion. The Brexit referendum vote on 23 June 2016 was about many things, but one of the main ones was the non-metropolitan English blowing the lid off. And

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of the Irish Sea. Except that to fetishise it at this moment is to miss the point spectacularly. The point is not just that the Brexit referendum showed how disunited the union is: Scotland and Northern Ireland voted one way, England and Wales another. It is that the great force that lay

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can deny that English Dreamtime is a nightmare from which we are all struggling to awake? 24 November 2018 In February 2016, just as the Brexit referendum debate was getting going, the Evening Standard columnist Anthony Hilton wrote, ‘I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union

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Johnson’s Telegraph column of 16 March 2016. It is important because it is the one in which he announced that he was backing Brexit in the referendum. We now know that Johnson had in fact submitted two columns – the other one arguing passionately for Remain – because he had not, at deadline

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government sure managed, to adapt Samuel Beckett, to fail better. It is worth saying that the EU made mistakes, especially in the period between the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and May’s triggering of the Article 50 withdrawal process in March 2017. Brussels pressured her to invoke Article 50 quickly, which

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possibly have had a slight whiff of contempt and vilification. But that was then, this is now. Liddle’s ‘chavmonkeys’ have been redeemed by the Brexit referendum. Their ‘fugue of idiocy’ is now a swelling symphony of reasserted sovereignty, their ‘dumbed-down culture’ a fount of wisdom. The man who saw ‘a

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the breathtaking recklessness of Johnson’s career. But it is akratic that intrigues. The Leave campaign that Johnson led to a stunning victory in the Brexit referendum of June 2016 owed much of its success to its carefully calibrated slogan ‘Take Back Control’. Akrasia, which is discussed in depth by Socrates, Plato

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. 20 July 2019 England wins the cricket World Cup. The team’s Irish captain knocks xenophobia for six. If there were to be a new referendum on Brexit in the UK, what should the slogan be for the Remainers? Last time out, the Leave campaign owed much of its appeal to a

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so superbly that he is now prime minister: he could never be found out because his mendacity was never hidden. Just three months before the Brexit referendum, Johnson was publicly and forensically exposed as a liar by his own party colleague Andrew Tyrie, who cross-examined him before the House of Commons

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raise you a sceptical eyebrow. 3 October 2019 Johnson unveils his proposals for a new Brexit deal that will ‘honour the result of the referendum and deliver Brexit on 31 October’. They are based on the long discredited idea that the UK, including Northern Ireland, can leave the customs union and single

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dead end. Their respective exit strategies give us two very different ways of thinking about the Brexit endgame. It is tempting to imagine a new Brexit referendum in which the question is: do you want to be in Crossroads or do you want to be in Emmerdale? Boris Johnson is currently an

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the wilful erasure of an obvious truth that both the British government and the DUP themselves accepted and articulated in the immediate period after the Brexit referendum: that Northern Ireland is different from Britain and that therefore Brexit would have to be different for Northern Ireland. It is hard to remember, after

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. With Brexit, a deadline is a line that is drawn forever and then dies away. What we glimpse in these moments is that, with the Brexit referendum, time went out of joint. Britain began simultaneously to occupy two completely different temporal worlds. In one, Brexit was hurtling ever faster forward, towards a

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire

by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson  · 15 Jan 2019  · 502pp  · 128,126 words

Conservatives; there was some speculation that erstwhile leader Nigel Farage would stand for a Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party parliamentary seat.13 Furthermore, the long Brexit referendum run-up and debate became a useful distraction from the reality of austerity. In any case, once the EU referendum result was declared, David Cameron

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people mouthed slogans about improving social mobility while producing policies that actually ring-fenced the wealthy and made most of the population poorer. After the Brexit referendum, these people tried to convince us that it was poorer northern Labour supporters who swung the vote to leave the EU, whereas it was huge

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) ‘EU referendum: youth turnout almost twice as high as first thought’, The Guardian, 10 July, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/09/young-people-referendum-turnout-brexit-twice-as-high 9 Lord Ashcroft Polls, with turnout figures as given in Speed, B. (2016) ‘How did different demographic groups vote in the

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: Britons now back Remain over Leave by 10 points, exclusive poll shows’, The Independent, 16 December, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-second-referendum-latest-poll-remain-ten-points-leave-bmg-a8114406.html 26 Jack, I. (2018) ‘The sun may never set on British misconceptions about our empire’, The

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political, administrative and imaginative efforts. – TARIQ MODOOD AND COLLEAGUES, 20121 INTRODUCTION British history is currently greatly contested and that long-running debate partly explains the Brexit referendum.2 There was an ancient Roman province called Britannia, but its female personification, the goddess Britannia, had disappeared as a symbol in Britain for almost

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as English was weaker among the young (45 per cent) and stronger among the old (72 per cent). Three quarters of Leave supporters in the Brexit referendum reported a high level of pride in being English; among those who voted Remain that applied to less than half.24 BEING BRITISH The most

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want to trade freely with the UK if we go it completely alone, out of both the customs union and the single market. If the Brexit referendum felt very much like the last death throes of empire, when even many Brexiteers were not expecting to win, the post-referendum period was even

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the UK.2 There had been an 89 per cent drop in the numbers signing up to work in Britain in the year after the Brexit referendum, as compared to the year before. On top of that, there had also been a 67 per cent rise in the number of EU nurses

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. FIGURE 8.4: COUNTRIES PROJECTED TO BE MOST HARMED BY A UK EXIT FROM THE EU Estimates published on 9 June 2016, just before the Brexit referendum, by Standard & Poor’s.63 The situation in Ireland is further harmed by commentators who believe that ‘it is difficult to disagree with the conclusion

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ideology, and it might also be a means of gradually persuading people to reject hard Brexit. The debate that should have taken place about Brexit before the referendum only started to take place in the last few months of 2017. Necessity is the mother of invention. A PLACE IN THE SUN? Many

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De La Baume, M. (2016) ‘Greenland’s exit warning to Britain’, Politico, 24 June, https://www.politico.eu/article/greenland-exit-warning-to-britain-brexit-eu-referendum-europe-vote-news-denmark/ 24 Joint declaration by the European Union, on the one hand, and the Government of Greenland and the Government of Denmark

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response

by Tony Connelly  · 4 Oct 2017  · 356pp  · 112,271 words

union’. The next day Cameron held an emergency Cabinet meeting, the first on a Saturday since the Falklands War. The Cabinet endorsed the deal. The Brexit referendum would be held on 23 June. Cameron declared he would fight ‘heart and soul’ for Britain to remain in the EU. Any optimism that Cameron

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a firm friendship with Declan Kelleher, his Irish counterpart, who himself had just arrived from Ireland’s embassy in China. By the time of the Brexit referendum, he had been ‘Sir Ivan’ for less than half a year, the title having been bestowed on him in the 2016 New Year’s Honours

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out, it’s so complex.’ The contours of that complexity had been steadily mapped out by civil servants in the months leading up to the referendum. Once Brexit became a theoretical danger, changes were made. Inside the Department of the Taoiseach, the Economic, International Affairs and Northern Ireland Division, in existence since

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lorry again to a distributor in the West of Ireland. This entire paradigm of economic activity was now under threat. On the night of the Brexit referendum, the BBC signal found its way to a quiet farmhouse near the village of Ballacolla in County Laois. Jer Bergin and his wife, Margaret, stayed

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, Hogan’s reinvention as the Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Affairs proved fortuitous for his career, but also, arguably, for the EU itself. During the Brexit referendum campaign, Jean-Claude Juncker insisted the Commission could not get involved. The logic was obvious: the first intervention by a Brussels bigwig would have allowed

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British government said the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland would attend the Brexit Cabinet Committee only ‘as required’. When he visited Belfast after the referendum, the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, had to meet the DUP and Sinn Féin separately. While the devolved administrations of Scotland and Wales have both produced detailed

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-Brexit, when the UK is likely to end up outside that regulatory sphere. For Irish companies operating in the UK, the anxiety created by the Brexit referendum and its aftermath was not entirely conducive to trying to break into the European market. ‘Brexit is a burning platform,’ says Marina Donohoe, Enterprise Ireland

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Armagh back in November 2016. It was very general, and had been gathering dust while the Executive was in hiatus. One year on from the Brexit referendum, the Irish government was still looking for the UK’s direction of travel. The two advisers who dominated Theresa May’s thinking and policy on

…

technically complex,’ says one Irish diplomat. ‘There aren’t hundreds of people they can call upon to set something up.’ On the morning after the Brexit referendum, the European Council General Secretariat hit ‘send’ on an email intended for 27 EU governments. It was a statement by Donald Tusk, the European Council

…

also established the North South Ministerial Council, which prioritized the first seven cross-border areas that should be looked at in the wake of the Brexit referendum from a list of areas which included environment, health, agriculture, transport, education/higher education, tourism, energy, telecommunications/broadcasting, inland fisheries, justice and security, and sport

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism

by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart  · 31 Dec 2018

, and unquestionably morally right. In cases of conflict, for example, if Westminster disagrees with the outcome of the Brexit referendum, the public’s decision is thought to take automatic precedent. On the night of the Brexit referendum to leave the European Union, for example, the leader of UK Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage, crowed

…

one seat in the May 2015 general election, but its rhetoric fueled rabid anti-­European and anti-­immigration sentiment, pressuring the Conservatives to call the Brexit referendum, with massive consequences.34 Similarly, in the September 2017 elections to the Bundestag, the nationalistic, anti-­Islamic, and pro-­family values Alternative for Germany (AfD

…

. Chapter 11 analyzes the populist revolution that shook the foundations of UK party politics just a few months before Trump’s victory – the June 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, as well as the sudden rise and fall in the fortunes of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the 2015 and 2017

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Brexit: An individual-­level analysis of the 2016 referendum vote.’ Parliamentary Affairs 70 (3): 439–464; Matthew J. Goodwin and Oliver Heath. 2016. ‘The 2016 referendum, Brexit and the left behind? An aggregate-­level analysis of the result.’ Political Quarterly, 87 (3): 323–332. 75. Tim Shipman. 2016. All Out War: The

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government, religiosity, homosexuality, race, drugs, guns, and pornography.6 Similar generation gaps on moral and social issues are evident in Britain.7 In the 2016 Brexit referendum, for example, age and education divided the UK public more than social class.8 The Brexit result in 2016 reflects the views of older voters

…

-­college educated has been widely observed as one of the clearest and most consistent divisions in the profile of Leave and Remain supporters in the Brexit referendum.10 Similar patterns have been observed among Trump supporters; for example the CNN exit polls in the 2016 GOP primaries and caucuses reported that, on

…

. ‘Research note: Libertarian–authoritarian value change in Britain, 1974–2001.’ Political Studies 53: 422–453. 62. Matthew J. Goodwin and Oliver Heath. 2016. ‘The 2016 Referendum, Brexit and the left behind? An aggregate-­level analysis of the result.’ Political Quarterly 87 (3): 323–332; Edwards J. Arnold, Ed. 2000. The Development of

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election, with rising import competition strengthening Republican vote share gains.22 But there is little consensus about these claims; in the case of the 2016 Brexit referendum, for example, ward-­level analysis suggests that very little variation in the vote to leave the EU is explained by a local authority area’s

…

the 65th Panel Meeting of Economic Policy. http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1480.pdf; Matthew J. Goodwin and Oliver Heath. 2016. ‘The 2016 referendum, Brexit and the left behind? An aggregate-­level analysis of the result.’ Political Quarterly 87 (3): 323–332. Dante J. Scala and Kenneth M. Johnson. 2017

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Donald Trump. The literature provides considerable support for the cultural grievance thesis. Several recent studies have found that support for the Leave outcome in the Brexit referendum was strongly associated with prejudice against foreigners, measured by right-­wing authoritarianism.61 Similarly, in the run up to the

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Brexit referendum, Curtice found that many British people saw EU membership as economically beneficial, but expressed concern about its cultural consequences.62 Survey results also suggested that

…

’s generation (or birth cohort) – which had more impact than all of the indicators of ethnicity and immigrant attitudes. Cross-National Comparisons Evidence from the Brexit referendum suggests that levels of migration, trade, and EU transfers to UK regions were weak predictors of the Leave vote.83 By contrast, the growth rate

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parties. It is important to understand the reasons why people vote for Authoritarian-­Populist parties. Authoritarian-­populist forces were decisive for the outcome of the Brexit referendum on the UK’s membership 257 258 Who Votes for Authoritarian-­Populist Parties? in the European Union in June 2016, igniting anti-­immigrant and nativist

…

by low levels of education, depopulation, economic decline, and the loss of secure employment due to shuttered factories and mines.9 Similarly, in the UK Brexit referendum, as we will see in Chapter 11, the Leave vote was concentrated in the Midlands and North of England, areas characterized by low levels of

…

/wp/2016/11/19/ the-country-by-county-data-on-trump-voters-shows-why-he-won/. Matthew J. Goodwin and Oliver Heath. 2016. ‘The 2016 referendum, Brexit and the left behind? An aggregate-­level analysis of the result.’ Political Quarterly 87 (3):323–332. Harold D. Clark, Matthew Goodwin, and Paul Whiteley

…

. 2016. The New Minority: White Working Class Politics, Immigration and Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press; Matthew J. Goodwin and Oliver Heath. 2016. ‘The 2016 Referendum, Brexit and the left behind? An aggregate-­level analysis of the result.’ Political Quarterly 87 (3): 323–332; Harold Clarke, Matthew J. Goodwin, and Paul Whiteley

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recent years, Authoritarian-­Populist parties have increased their share of the vote. In the aftermath of the successive shockwaves of the Austrian presidential election, the Brexit referendum, and the US victory of President Trump, the stable foundations of the left–right cleavage in electoral competition, which Rokkan and Lipset claimed had ‘frozen

…

these issues, the next chapters turn to two events having immense consequences: the 2016 US elections that brought Donald Trump to the Presidency and the Brexit referendum. 326 Party Fortunes and Electoral Rules Notes 1. Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell. 2015. Populists in Power. London: Routledge. 2. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

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, the phenomenon of authoritarian populism seems strikingly similar on both sides of the Atlantic, as indicated by the dynamics of the Leave decision in the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and the Trump victory in November 2016. These events generated an enormous amount of speculation about the reasons for these political earthquakes

…

country ‘that works for everyone,’ in the interests of those ‘just about managing’ rather than ‘the privileged few.’ But what does the outcome of the Brexit referendum – in context with plummeting support for the UK Independence Party just a year later in the June 8, 2017 general election, indicate about the state

…

from the British Election Study panel surveys, which allows us to examine the factors dividing supporters in the Leave and Remain camps in the 2016 Brexit referendum, as well as those predicting support for UKIP from 2015 to 2017. Part IV examines the evidence including the impact of demographic control factors like

…

introduced the European Union Referendum Act 2015 to parliament. This was passed a year later and received the royal assent in December 2015, triggering the Brexit referendum on June Part III From Values to Votes 371 23, 2016. Britain woke the morning after to discover, shocked, that it had voted to Leave

…

lead in the telephone polls and the betting markets during the May campaign, but online polls showed greater uncertainty.24 On June 23, 2016, the Brexit referendum upended UK politics. The margin of victory was modest, with 51.9 percent of the electorate voting 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% Leave Remain

…

to take over from Cameron more than any deep rooted Euroscepticism or even belief that they would actually win.68 The result of the consultative Brexit referendum was extremely close and, like similar contests in Ireland and Denmark, could have been rerun, or the rules could have required a qualified majority to

…

equation, the evidence we have scrutinized suggests more predictable and consistent patterns about the main drivers of public opinion and voting behavior in the Brexit referendum, once the referendum had been called, and in patterns of electoral support for UKIP in the 2015 and 2017 general elections. Three key findings deserve emphasizing from

…

generated a new cultural cleavage that can be mobilized by populist leaders such as Nigel Farage, and opportunities to express public preferences, such as the Brexit referendum. The empirical evidence in this chapter confirms that both authoritarian and populist values are strongly linked with voting behavior in the United Kingdom, as hypothesized

…

economics? Public attitudes to the European Union in Britain.’ Political Quarterly 87 (2): 209–218. 10. Matthew J. Goodwin and Oliver Heath. 2016. ‘The 2016 Referendum, Brexit and the left behind? An aggregate-­level analysis of the result.’ Political Quarterly 87 (3): 323–332; Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig. 2016. ‘Global competition

…

. 2014. Revolt on the Right: Explaining Public Support for the Radical Right in Britain. Abingdon: Routledge; Matthew J. Goodwin and Oliver Heath. 2016. ‘The 2016 Referendum, Brexit and the left behind? An aggregate-­level analysis of the result.’ Political Quarterly 87 (3): 323–332; Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, Rita Guerra, and Claudia

…

the 65th Panel Meeting of Economic Policy. http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1480.pdf; Matthew J. Goodwin and Oliver Heath. 2016. ‘The 2016 referendum, Brexit and the left behind? An aggregate-­level analysis of the result.’ Political Quarterly 87 (3): 323–332; Luigi Guiso, Helios Herrera, Massimo Morelli, and Tommaso

…

).32 Finally, it can be argued that despite UKIP winning only one seat in the May 2015 general election, Cameron’s pledge to hold the Brexit referendum the following year would not have happened without UKIP’s popularity in the opinion polls. After Cameron’s resignation, also Theresa May adopted a hardline

…

Eroding the Civic Culture general election, its populist rhetoric fueled rabid anti-­European and anti-­ immigration sentiment in Britain, pressuring the Conservatives to call the Brexit referendum.42 The consequences of the vote for withdrawal have been profound, instigating Britain’s messy divorce from the European Union, the resignation of Prime Minister

…

a new cultural cleavage that can be mobilized by populist leaders, such as Nigel Farage, and by opportunities to express public preferences, such as the Brexit referendum. The empirical evidence in this chapter confirms that both authoritarian and populist values were strongly linked with voting behavior in the United Kingdom, as hypothesized

…

purely temporary if the main problem arises from contingent factors, such as the way that Cameron recklessly decided to bet Britain’s future on the Brexit referendum. Strategic miscalculations, leadership blunders, personal scandals, and mistakes by leaders and party elites are all part of the story. In multiparty democracies that meet international

…

Robert Ford. 2017. ‘Britain after Brexit: A nation divided.’ Journal of Democracy, 28(1): 17–30. Goodwin, Matthew J. and Oliver Heath. 2016. ‘The 2016 referendum, Brexit and the left behind? An aggregate-level analysis of the result.’ Political Quarterly, 87(3): 323–332. Goodwin, Matthew J. and Caitlin Milazzo. 2015. UKIP

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