Beyond Brexit
| Author | Anand Menon |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905819871847 |
| Subject Matter | Last Word |
40 POLITICAL INSIGHT • SEPTEMBER 2019
Last Word
‘In what other job do you get an
instruction from your boss, ignore it, then
not get the sack?’ This is how a low-
income voter in Dudley summed up the
way MPs have handled Brexit. On all sides there
is frustration, not only with the failure to deal
with what is the dening political issue of our
times, but also with the inability of Government
to do anything else while trying to handle Brexit.
So what does Brexit actually mean? Let’s
face it. The fact that, after three years in which
the process of leaving the European Union has
dominated both politics and the media, we still
do not know what Brexit means is little short of
remarkable.
This matters. Not merely because our
relationship with the European Union is
enormously important, whatever the outcome
of Brexit. It also matters because, for as long
as debates about that relationship crowd out
everything else, we will remain incapable
of addressing the myriad other problems
confronting this country.
For some leave voters, it was these problems,
many of which had nothing to do – directly or
indirectly – with the European Union that at
least partly explained their Brexit vote. As a man
from one of our recent focus groups in Glasgow
put it: ‘If you just kind of leave us to rot and just
let everything fall to London, because that’s
where there’s more money to be made, then it’s
eventually going to backre big time.’
These problems relate to both economics
and politics. The was a sense that talk about
aggregate measures of economic success such
as Gross Domestic Product were misleading and
did not accurately represent the lives they lived.
That as long as the South East was prospering,
politicians were happy. And, remarkably perhaps,
this intuition is borne out by the data.
Over the period 2007-17, average household
incomes in London grew to seven percentage
points above the UK average, while those in
Yorkshire and the Humber, and Wales, fell by four
points. Indeed, except for London, the East of
England and West Midlands, all UK regions have
been getting poorer relative to the UK average.
Beyond Brexit
Leaving the EU has consumed Whitehall and Westminster – but
British politics has ignored the frustration that contributed so
much to the Brexit vote, argues Anand Menon.
Moreover, there was a perception that
Westminster seemed to prioritise the wrong
issues. While politicians obsess about high speed
trains, many of the poorer families hardly take
trains at all but rather tend to travel on buses –
yet thousands of services have been axed over
the last decade.
Politics, in other words, was seen as
unresponsive, and as frustrating aspirations for
change. And the combination of what people
saw as the profound similarity between two
parties broadly in favour of the status quo, and
an electoral system that seemed eectively
to rule out any end to their duopoly, led to
increasing levels of disengagement from the
political process.
The referendum oered an opportunity to
protest against a system many saw as failing
them. I am not implying that this was why all
leave voters voted the way they did. But it was a
reason why some of them did.
But Brexit has not only dominated the
headlines, it has also completely taken over both
Westminster and Whitehall. Brexit, as the phrase
goes, has left little or no bandwidth for eective
government in other areas.
Over three years on from a referendum that
saw a number of people protest about the
state of their lives, virtually nothing has been
done to address this discontent. Indeed, many
of the arguments I used have subsequently
been conrmed by some work that the UK in
A Changing Europe initiative has undertaken
in collaboration with the Joseph Rowntree
Foundation.
We carried out 18 deliberative workshops with
low income voters in nine deprived areas across
the UK. The ndings were complex but perhaps
most striking was the insistence of people across
the country of the need to reform the economy,
to provide more in the way of opportunities and
training, and to address what many see as an
inherent systemic bias in favour of London.
As interesting was the intense localism of
many of the discussions. Dissatisfaction with the
state of high streets, with the amount of litter, or
with the lack of green spaces. A discussion more
removed from parliamentary shouting matches
over the Withdrawal Agreement would be hard
to imagine.
Focus group participants voiced a deep-seated
anger with the political establishment. While our
society is perhaps more divided than ever when
it comes to the issue of Brexit itself, the one thing
over which people seem able to agree is that
politics is failing them.
As a ComRes poll earlier this year showed, large
majorities feel that politicians are not up to the
job and that the British political system needs a
complete overhaul.
Brexit, then, might not yet mean much, but
the Brexit process has had a negative impact on
perceptions of our politics. It remains far from
certain that any outcome might eectively
address this sense of exasperation, given the
profound divisions over what Brexit should
entail. The challenges facing our politicians in
the months and years to come could hardly be
greater.
Anand Menon is Professor of European Politics
and Foreign Aairs at King's College London
and director of the UK in a Changing Europe. His
recent TEDx Talk ‘Democracy vs The People’ can
be viewed at https://bit.ly/2YdgRX3
ComRes poll, 14-15 January 2019
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
%
N=2,010
Parliament emerging
from Brexit in good light
Current generation
of politicians not
up to the job
British political system
needs complete
overhaul
Brexit process has
shown politicians are in
touch with the country
Current British political
system enables my voice
to be heard
Written constitution?
Agree Disagree Don't know
Political Insight SEPT2019.indd 40 01/08/2019 14:10
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