Brexit, British Politics, and the Left-Right Divide
| Author | Paula Surridge |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/2041905818815189 |
4 POLITICAL INSIGHT • DECEMBER 2018
Brexit, British Politics,
and the Left-Right Divide
The demise of the traditional left-
right divide in British politics has
been widely touted. Voters, some
commentators contend, no longer
base their political choices on this familiar
binary. Sure enough, the left versus right
vision of the world was unable to predict
Brexit, nor distinguish between Labour and
Ukip (or indeed Green party) voters at the
2015 General Election. But old ideas of left
and right are far from a useless relic as far as
understanding key political outcomes are
concerned.
The resurgence of two-party competition
in England in the 2017 General Election
returned a situation where the key factor
in distinguishing between Labour and
Conservative voters was their position on
the traditional, economic left-right scale.
While the dimension variously described as
‘new’, ‘other’, 'open vs closed’ or more usefully
‘liberal-authoritarian’ substantially modies
the eect of left-right position on vote choice,
it is far from replacing it.
‘Core values’
To make sense of the changes in party
competition and the electorate more widely
it is useful to think of a set of ‘core values’
that structure our political beliefs. Following
Rokeach (1973), we can think of these values
as ‘core conceptions of the desirable within
society’, or our deeply held views of the kind
of society we want to be part of. Almost 60
There has been much talk of a fundamental realignment of British
politics post-Brexit. But, Paula Surridge argues, the old left-right
divisions continue to structure political behaviour, and Brexit is
part of an on-going restructuring of party competition rather than a
wholesale realignment.
years ago, Lipset (1959) identied a need
to distinguish between the economic and
social dimensions of these core values. It
is this distinction between economic and
social values which lies at the heart of current
arguments about economic vs cultural
explanations of the EU Referendum vote
in the UK, the election of Donald Trump
in the US and the rise of the ‘radical right’
more generally across Europe, taking place
across the pages of political science journals,
magazines and blogs (see, for example,
Inglehart and Norris (2017), Nidron and Hall
(2017)).
The economic value dimension closely
resembles our ‘common sense’ understanding
of the terms left and right. It is concerned
with issues of economic justice, economic
inequality and economic organisation.
The social dimension is harder to label
satisfactorily. This aspect of political values
has previously referred to as the ‘second
dimension’, ‘other dimension’ and ‘open
vs closed’. But here, in the British context,
© Press Association
Political Insight December 2018.indd 4 01/11/2018 09:02
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