How Brexit was made in England
| Author | Dan Wincott,Ailsa Henderson,Charlie Jeffery,Richard Wyn Jones |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148117730542 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles - Part Two |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117730542
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2017, Vol. 19(4) 631 –646
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1369148117730542
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
How Brexit was made in
England
Ailsa Henderson1, Charlie Jeffery1,
Dan Wincott2 and Richard Wyn Jones2
Abstract
The Leave majority recorded in England was decisive in determining the UK-wide referendum
result. Brexit was made in England. We take this as a prompt to challenge the conventional Anglo-
British mindset that animates most studies of ‘British politics’ and has shaped public attitudes
research on the United Kingdom. We explore the persistence of distinctive Eurosceptic views in
England and their relationship to English national identity prior to the referendum. We then model
referendum vote choice using data from the Future of England Survey. Our analysis shows that
immigration concerns played a major role in the Brexit referendum, alongside a general willingness
to take risks, right-wing views, older age, and English national identity. Therefore, Brexit was not
just made in England, but Englishness was also a significant driver of the choice for Leave.
Keywords
Brexit, British, England, English, national identity, public attitudes
Introduction
In the 2016 Brexit referendum, the United Kingdom as a whole chose to Leave the
European Union (EU) by a narrow margin: 51.9%–48.1% of those who voted. There was,
however, a much more decisive 7-point margin in favour of Leave (53.4%–46.6%) in
England. Given that it is home to 84% of the United Kingdom’s population, the vote to
leave in England outweighed substantial Remain majorities in Scotland (62.0%–38.0%)
and Northern Ireland (NI) (55.5%–44.6%). While Wales also had a Leave majority
(52.5%–47.5%), with less than 5% of the United Kingdom’s population, it did not play a
decisive part in the overall outcome (see Table 1). Brexit was made in England.
So we take England as our unit of analysis, asking why the commitment to leave the
EU was so strong there. As will become clear, our answer (building on previous contribu-
tions by Henderson et al., 2016; Jeffery et al., 2014; Wyn Jones et al., 2012, 2013) has to
do with the importance of national identities in England—Englishness and Britishness—
in shaping attitudes to the EU.
1Politics and International Relations, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
2Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Corresponding author:
Dan Wincott, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3XQ, UK.
Email: wincottd@cardiff.ac.uk
730542BPI0010.1177/1369148117730542The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsHenderson et al.
research-article2017
Special Issue Article
632 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(4)
These analytical choices—of England as a territorial unit of analysis and national
identity as a key explanatory variable—might seem obvious, even prosaic. After all,
academic research has long emphasised nationalism as a core component of
Euroscepticism (Hooghe et al., 2002). Yet, to focus explicitly on England and its national
identities goes against the grain of conventional understandings of UK politics. While
the politics of NI, Scotland and Wales have long merited sustained attention from spe-
cialists (recent examples include Gormley-Heenan and Aughey, 2017; Hunt and Minto,
2017; McHarg and Mitchell, 2017), with few notable exceptions (e.g. Aughey, 2007;
Kenny, 2014; Wellings, 2012), England does not receive the same treatment. Rather, the
complexities of a state with four component units become simplified into the study of a
‘British politics’, a process which has the effect of veiling the characteristics and impact
of England, the biggest part of the United Kingdom, at the same time as marginalising
engagement with the other parts of the UK. This effect occurs because the dominant
approach is based on what might be termed a triple effacement. First, NI is bracketed out
as too difficult and different. British politics is then studied using data that are dominated
by respondents based in England, hiving off Wales and Scotland as the domain of coun-
try specialists. Third, data that are in fact overwhelmingly English are not analysed on
an all-England basis—indeed, the country’s name is seldom even mentioned. The effect
is to efface England too through the dominant British politics approach to the analysis of
UK politics. Through this triple effacement, forgetting NI, pushing Scotland and Wales
to the analytical margins, and veiling England, we end up analysing the United Kingdom
as a fictive country: Anglo-Britain.
While academic analysis has been slow to recognise the significance of politically
mobilised national identities in England for the United Kingdom as a whole, the antennae
of some political leaders have been more sensitive. David Cameron’s 2015 general elec-
tion campaign was nuanced to appeal to national sentiment in England (Jeffery et al.,
2016), as was his doorstep speech the day after the 2014 Scottish independence referen-
dum. Even earlier, the then leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage,
had recognised the potential for mobilisation in and for England, as Ford and Goodwin
(2014: 90–91) have reported:
There is a rebirth of identity politics in this country … [w]e’ve seen it in Scotland and it’s
happening in England but no one has noticed. It’s little things. It’s the turn-out at Remembrance
Day parades. They go up every year! A younger generation, an under-45 generation is hungry to
know about their history and what their grandparents did and where they come from. It’s very
interesting. It’s actually bloody happening.
On 23 June 2016, to paraphrase Farage, it actually bloody happened: English national
identity was mobilised by the Brexit question. This article examines how. In a first step,
we review recent work on the Brexit referendum in which English and other national
identity variables have featured (e.g. Clarke et al., 2017a; Clarke et al., 2017b; Goodwin
and Heath, 2016; Goodwin and Milazzo, 2017; McAndrew, 2016; Ormston, 2015). It
finds that they reveal some of the problems of the ‘mainstream’ British politics approach
treatment of England. Most appear to be reluctant to treat England as a unit of analysis
and are uncertain about how to explore the role of national identities in England. Second,
we explore the pattern of opinion in England on European integration, comparing it with
attitudes in other parts of the United Kingdom. We show that Eurosceptic attitudes have
a longer history of distinctive links to England and Englishness; these connections did not
just appear out of the blue in June 2016. In the final section, we present a model of the
To continue reading
Request your trial