Brexistential Angst and the Paradoxes of Populism: On the Contingency, Predictability and Intelligibility of Seismic Shifts
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719836356 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719836356
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(1) 187 –206
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0032321719836356
journals.sagepub.com/home/psx
Brexistential Angst and the
Paradoxes of Populism: On
the Contingency, Predictability
and Intelligibility of Seismic
Shifts
Colin Hay
Abstract
The time-travelling political scientist stepping out of her time machine today, having started her
journey even 5 years earlier, would be amazed and, no doubt, shocked by the world in which she
found herself. What sense, if any, might she make of British politics after the vote for Brexit – and,
indeed, of the politics which gave rise to it? And what does the answer to that question tell us
about how the vote for Brexit happened, how it was allowed to happen, its wider implications
(both political and economic) and the seismic changes in and through which British politics is
currently being remade? In an inevitably prospective and necessarily provisional way, I seek to
reflect on the paradoxes of populism and neoliberal globalism that Brexit reveals as a way of
drawing out a few of its implications for the conduct of British political analysis in a world in which
Brexit could happen yet was essentially unforeseen.
Keywords
Brexit, prediction, contingency, neoliberalism, political economy
Accepted: 15 February 2019
The Paradoxical Contingency of Brexit
To those who either think that a predictive science of politics is possible or, without
having thought about it very much, proceed on the basis that it is, contemporary British
politics presents something of a challenge.1 For who did – and who, credibly, could
have – predicted Brexit, certainly the Brexit that Brexit will turn out to be?
But, however chastening in this respect at least it may be, it is hardly unique. Much
that was previously solid, or seen to be solid, in British politics has melted into air in
recent years; much has changed and little of that change was foreseen. Consider the
Sciences Po, Paris, France
Corresponding author:
Colin Hay, Sciences Po, Centre d’études européennes et politique comparée (CEE), CNRS, Paris, France.
Email: colin.hay@sciencespo.fr
836356PSX0010.1177/0032321719836356Political StudiesHay
research-article2019
Article
188 Political Studies 68(1)
time-travelling political analyst stepping out of her Tardis on 24 June 2016 having just
delivered her account of the recent re-election of Margaret Thatcher at the 1984
Political Studies Association Conference. Then, to remind you, Peter Davidson was
Doctor Who; the guardians of the Special Relationship were Ronald Reagan and, of
course, the newly re-elected Margaret Thatcher; the Cold War was at its height; the
Berlin Wall had yet to fall; Gorbachev was on the verge of becoming General Secretary
of the Soviet Communist Party and the terms glasnost and perestroika were, as yet,
entirely unfamiliar even to Western diplomats. The European Union (EU) was still the
European Economic Community (EEC) and the debate on European Monetary Union
would take a further 5 years to begin in earnest. The Social Democratic Party had just
split from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and UK Independence Party (UKIP) had yet
to be founded and it was Labour and not the Conservatives who were divided over
Europe.
Still reeling from her chrononautia, there is much that she might find disconcerting:
That an anti-establishment party of the right that did not exist in 1984 (UKIP) would win
nearly 13% of the vote in the most recent General Election having won scarcely 3% in the
previous one (and, indeed, only 1.8% in the next one)? That the Scottish National Party
(SNP) would win 56 out of the 59 available seats in Scotland in the very same election?
That Britain’s third party (the Liberal Democrats) would suffer the largest single drop in
vote share (15%) ever recorded in a post-war British General Election having been in a
Coalition administration with the Conservatives until the election? That a Conservative
Prime Minister could have called a referendum on British membership of the EU and that
Britain could vote for Brexit in such a referendum?
But there is an irony here. For one would not have had to travel forward in time 3
decades to find any of this shocking. The brutal reality is that none of these outcomes
would have seemed very likely and virtually none of them were predicted even 5 years
before. It need hardly be pointed out that the vote for Brexit has not exactly brought an
end to this period of unpredicted and seemingly exceptional outcomes. Who, after all,
would have predicted that having expressly said she wouldn’t and after the passing of the
2011 Fixed Term Parliaments Act expressly intended to prevent such game playing,
Theresa May would both gamble and have the opportunity to gamble her slender parlia-
mentary majority at the polls in order to strengthen her Brexit-negotiating clout? And
who would have predicted that with an opinion poll lead of over 20% at the start of the
campaign and in an election in which Labour and the Conservatives achieved their high-
est combined vote share since 1970 (in an era generally considered to have seen the death
of bipartisanship in Britain),2 she would lose her parliamentary majority and end up gov-
erning with, of all parties, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)? You couldn’t make it
up, and more to the point, no one did.
So, has something profound changed in the nature of British politics and, perhaps,
politics more broadly? Has our politics become more profoundly contingent and unpre-
dictable than it has ever been? That, I think, is a very good question to pose. But, for me
at least, the answer is no. Exceptional outcomes are, in a way, unexceptional – they are
the very stuff of politics. The capacity to produce exceptional outcomes in the sense of
outcomes that we would have to be very lucky to predict and, hence, very foolish to think
that we could predict, show that the process producing them is itself political. But if
exceptional outcomes are the very stuff of politics, then we need to be careful – more
precisely, rather more careful than we tend to be – about what we think we know (and,
above all, about what we think we can know) about that politics.
To continue reading
Request your trial