Full disclosure: this book was sent to me by the second author who described himself as a fan of my work, and it refers approvingly to my own fictional take on the same subject, Two Tribes. It also quotes (on p 71) from a scene in my book where a group of Remain voters at a dinner party, shortly after the Brexit vote, are, as my narrator put it, ‘trying to construct a shared narrative about what went wrong. But they were also, though they were not aware of it, constructing a new story about themselves and their relationship to the world.’
The phenomenon that Sara Hobolt and James Tilley explore here is the way in which the issue of EU membership, until relatively recently on the backburner of British politics, became a fault line so deep that much of the nation came to define itself as Leavers and Remainers – with many saying they would be reluctant to have a member of the other tribe as a lodger, or as a son- or daughter-in-law.
Unlike me, whose book relied on my own observations of these tribes consolidating among the people around me and in places like Twitter, these authors are political scientists who draw on the findings of many different surveys to show how these new identities emerged, and how they polarised large chunks of the population and reshaped British politics to the extent that the old two-party system now looks likely to collapse.
The authors show how peoples’ views hardened on both sides as they sought to be ‘good’ members of their chosen ingroup by demonstrating their loyalty to the emerging consensus within their ingroup, and exhibiting their hostility towards the outgroup. They demonstrate how well-known psychological processes came into play: cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. (They don’t refer by name to groupthink, but describe it by implication). Members of each group, they show, were demonstrably (and in very similar ways) inclined to attribute negative personal attributes to members of the rival tribe, and positive attributes to their own. Up until the vote in 2016, when it was widely assumed by both sides that Remain was likely to win, Leave voters were more likely than Remain voters to express concerns about the fairness of the voting process and how it might be rigged in Remain’s favour. But after Leave won, it was Remain voters who began to argue that the process had been unfair. It’s fascinating stuff, and it’s not just hunches. The authors use a rich trove of statistical data to track these changes of attitude.
British voters have always been more sceptical of the EU than voters on the European mainland, the book notes, perhaps due to the fact that we live on an island, as well as to other factors like the strong cultural ties that connect us to the rest of the English-speaking world, but until the referendum, EU membership wasn’t close to being the number one political issue for most British people, and few of us would have used it to define ourselves politically. We were much more likely to define ourselves by party allegiance, and our two main political parties both contained both Leavers and Remainers. (They still do of course, but the Conservative party in particular has become much more of a bastion of Leavers than it used to be, while newer parties with a clear Leave or Remain standpoint, like Reform and the Greens, are becoming more prominent.)
What led this single political issue to become so suddenly the basis of these powerful new ‘tribal’ identities? Hobolt and Tilley identify three factors. First: issue contestation – the issue was made the subject of a referendum. Second: issue expression – ‘it not only created a clear dichotomous divide between the two sides but also forced individuals to commit to one side or the other with their vote’ (p 27) (What would have happened if multiple options had been offered, I wonder, including, for instance, leaving the EU but remaining in the customs union and single market, like Norway?) Thirdly: issue alignment – the issue cut across party lines, so ‘the divisions resulting from the referendum were not immediately subsumed into the existing party divide’ (p 27).
So, the authors assert, ‘while demographic characteristics, such as education and age, were weakly correlated with EU attitudes and referendum vote, it was the act of voting that created the Brexit identities. Remainers and Leavers were both children of the referendum’ (p 191).
Myself, I feel this point needs a little unpacking. The vote clearly did polarize people round those two positions, but I believe there are demographic factors in play which measures of class identity such as income or education level do not necessarily capture. I also think that the authors could have said more about the shifting of political tectonic plates (to use a good but rather well-worn metaphor) that has been going on around the world, and which the Brexit vote is fairly obviously a part of, namely a reaction against a perceived meritocratic elite and the socially liberal, secular, technocratic, internationalist values which it espouses. I think Michael Young predicted such a reaction in his 1958 book: The Rise of the Meritocracy (I haven’t read it, because I haven’t been able to find a reasonably priced copy, but I’ve read a lot about it: see my post here about a book that quotes it at length, and see this book also on liberal elitism). Also, if I may blow my own trumpet again, I myself have been anticipating a reaction of this kind, admittedly in rather lurid science fictional terms, since my first novel. (Or in not-so-lurid terms in the case of my novel America City which has in some ways been surpassed by reality in respect of luridness!)
So I would say that the vote did indeed polarise opinions and create two tribes, but my own hunch is that its effect was that of a catalyst, speeding up a process that would have happened anyway. I think Brexit brought to light pre-existing but previously unnamed social divisions, and pre-existing shifts in the relations between them.
In fact I’d assert that we are all, including the authors of this book, perfectly aware of the powerful demographic factors that lay behind the referendum results across the country. Here are two quotes from the book:
Increasingly dilapidated EU flags flew on in Clapham and Cambridge for years after the referendum, just as fading union jacks did in Weston-super-Mare and Worksop. (p 86)
People who live cheek by jowl with fellow Brexit identifiers are no more likely to dislike the other side than people who find themselves part of an embattled minority within their local area. Leavers in Basildon are no more radicalised than Leavers in Oxford, just as Remainers in Peckham are no different from Remainers in Grimsby. (p 164)
The point I want to make is that both of these quotes rely on readers being able to recognise the difference between Leave-voting and Remain-voting places. Thus, being familiar with Clapham, Cambridge, Oxford and Peckham, I don’t need to look up the referendum results for any of them up to know that they are all Remainer areas. Likewise, I don’t need to see the voting figures to know that Weston-super-Mare, Basildon and Grimsby are Leaver areas. (I’m not familiar with Worksop, so I wouldn’t have known, but I’ll bet I could tell which way it voted if I spent a few hours there.) And in the same way I don’t need to look it up to know that Brighton and Bristol voted Remain, or that Great Yarmouth and Southend voted leave. Old fashioned downmarket seaside towns, I just instinctively know it, are classic Leaver heartlands, prosperous middle-class cities with large student populations and liberal/alternative reputations are classic Remainer strongholds.*
And there are nuances and subtleties which I think most British people are likewise aware of without really even having to think about it. Southwold in Suffolk is a prosperous seaside town with a big middle-class, and in those respects is more like Brighton than it is like its fellow East Anglian resort of Great Yarmouth, yet I didn’t need to look it up to know that Southwold, like Yarmouth, voted Leave. How do I know that? Because I’ve been aware since childhood that there are vertical divisions within the middle class as well as horizontal ones. There is a Telegraph-reading middle class and a Guardian-reading one, each one associated with different kinds of occupational group, and, if I know a town at all, I can tell which of the two is likely to be predominant there.
My point then is, firstly, that there must be quite powerful demographic factors at play here, even if they aren’t measureable by income or education level alone, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to intuit which way a given place voted. Secondly, each ‘tribe’ is actually, like the traditional parties, a coalition: Southwold is not the same as Yarmouth but they voted the same way. I’m guessing that to tease out these distinctions in an objective way one would have to look not only at income levels but at how the income is earned, and not just at education levels, but at the actual subjects studied.
My own instinct, and I am not a political scientist, is that almost all of politics is a contest between elite groups. (Even uprisings of the poor and the working class are usually led by people who are not poor or working class – Castro, Mao, Lenin and Ho Chi Minh all being examples.) Members of the general population have some power because elite groups find them useful as allies and sources of legitimacy, but most people’s political choices are about which elite group they are going to give their support to, not about getting power for themselves. And my feeling is that, all around the world, those choices have been shifting, and the Brexit vote was just one of the sites where that took place.
*The authors of the book refer only to places in England, and understandably so. The situation is more complicated in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland because of local nationalisms (or competing nationalisms in the case of Northern Ireland).
