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The EU and Brexit: immigrants or jobs?

If there had been no EU to join, eastern Europe would be a string of pre-2014 Ukraines.

John Lichfield, The Independent, 23 March 2014

It is perfectly possible to claim, as various Brexiteers have done in the United Kingdom, that the European Union is far more ambitious and intrusive than the organisation that would be required just to administer a Europe-wide free-trade area, but it was never intended to be merely a trading bloc. Its founders saw it as a vital bulwark against a return of the dictatorships, and even more importantly against a resurgence of the rivalries between the European great powers that had fuelled most of the big wars of the previous four hundred years. Get them all in the same club, and maybe they won’t want to fight any more.

This is not the only reason that no great power has directly fought any other great power for seventy-three years now: some of the credit must go to the fear of nuclear weapons, and some more to the new international rules embodied in the United Nations. But it certainly helped, and it’s hard to deny that the EU was indispensable in offering a safe haven to all the would-be democracies of post-communist eastern Europe after 1989. Membership not only involved the promise of prosperity, but an obligation to uphold democratic principles and the rule of law. A mere free-trade area would not have done that, and Europe (and maybe the world) would be a much uglier place if the EU did not exist.

The people have spoken. I think the EU is going to break up.

Donald Trump, interview in The Times about the UK referendum, 25 June 2016

You look at the European Union and it’s Germany. Basically a vehicle for Germany. That’s why I thought the UK was so smart in getting out.

Donald Trump, interview in The Times, 16 January 2017

The EU, I’m totally in favour of it. I think it’s wonderful, if they’re happy. If they’re happy — I’m in favour of it.

Donald Trump, The Independent, 23 February 2017

There’s no point in trying to make sense of it all. He changes with the weather. But the perception in the EU is that Trump is hostile to the organisation’s very existence, and it had enough troubles already. One-third of French voters supported the anti-EU National Front in the presidential run-off election of May 2017, and Germany’s strongly pro-EU chancellor, Angela Merkel, saw her party’s vote drop by 8 per cent to less than a third of the total in an September 2017 election that also saw the Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) win one-eighth of the votes and gain seats in parliament for the first time. In Italy, the Five-Star Movement, also sceptical about the EU, is running neck-and-neck with the Democratic Party in the opinion polls, with an election imminent. The Spanish government is distracted by the attempted secession of Catalonia. Poland and Hungary are both governed by nationalist parties whose authoritarian style and strongly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim bias put them at odds with the EU more often than not. And, of course, the United Kingdom is flouncing out of the EU, impelled by a wave of ‘Little Englander’ nationalism.

The twenty-eight-country union has clearly seen better times, and its ambitions for an ‘ever-closer union’ are on hold for the moment, if not forever, but most of its troubles do not derive from the same sources as those that put Donald Trump in the presidency in the United States. Apart from Britain, and to a lesser extent France, there is little evidence that working-class voters in deprived post-industrial areas in Europe voted differently than they had in previous elections. Immigration as a hot-button topic was more prominent everywhere than it was in the US election because of the big surge in Syrian and other mostly Muslim refugees (1.3 million) who arrived in European countries in 2015. The fact that the EU asked its eastern European members to take some of the refugees caused particularly strong resentment there, mainly because these countries had almost no previous experience of immigration, and local nationalist politicians ruthlessly exploited the issue. The spectacular rise in Germany of the AfD (which has some neo-Nazi links) was largely due to its strong showing in former East Germany, where employment and wages remain sharply lower than in the rest of the country, even a quarter-century after reunification. If there was an overall ‘Trump effect’ underlying all this, it was remarkably well hidden.

We must build a kind of United States of Europe … (and) we must begin now. In these present days we dwell strangely and precariously under the shield and protection of the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb is still only in the hands of a State and nation which we know will never use it except in the cause of right and freedom. But it may well be that in a few years this awful agency of destruction will be widespread and the catastrophe following from its use by several warring nations will not only bring to an end all that we call civilisation, but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself … Our constant aim must be to build and fortify the strength of the United Nations Organisation. Under and within that world concept, we must re-create the European family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe. The first step is to form a Council of Europe. If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join the Union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.

Winston Churchill, University of Zurich, 19 September 1946

It took a while, although the logic of a united Europe was compelling. If you don’t want a Third World War fought with nuclear weapons, you have to deal with the structures that produced the first two, and the proximate cause of both of them was the ambitions and fears of the rival European great powers. But the United Kingdom, although it had been one of those warring great powers for 400 years, saw itself as something apart: Churchill wasn’t planning for Britain to join this new organisation he was advocating.

That attitude persisted in the United Kingdom for a long time. Although Britain’s century as the world’s greatest power had expired long before, it still had its empire (or most of it), and it had a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, the other great English-speaking country, that it valued more highly than its European ties. The Council of Europe was created in 1949, and its first venture into the real world of economic integration was the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. That expanded into the much more comprehensive European Economic Community (popularly known as the Common Market) in 1957, but the United Kingdom still did not consider joining.

By 1961 the EEC was growing a lot faster economically than the UK, and the economic argument succeeded where the geopolitical argument for joining had failed. London finally realised that its interest was best served by being part of this new trading bloc, and applied for membership — which was vetoed by French president Charles de Gaulle in 1963 on the grounds that Britain did not have ‘a European vocation’. De Gaulle vetoed a second British attempt to join in 1967, and it was only finally allowed to join years after he had resigned. But he was right about the British attitude: it was love-hate from the start.

Having finally joined the EEC under Conservative prime minister Edward Heath in 1973, the United Kingdom demanded a renegotiation of its terms of membership and held an in/out referendum on EEC membership under a Labour government two years later. It demanded another renegotiation of its membership terms under Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984. It insisted on opting out of the planned single currency when the countries of the European Union (as it now styled itself) signed the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993. And another Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, demanded another renegotiation of the terms of membership, in what is now called the European Union in 2013, and promised yet another referendum once the results were known.

If you were looking for a single word to describe this behaviour, ‘ambivalent’ would certainly spring to mind. ‘Petulant’ also has a strong claim. But why, out of the European Union’s now twenty-eight countries, has Britain always been the most disaffected one?

All the countries on the west coast of Europe lost their overseas empires in the decades after the Second World War, and Britain is not the only one to cling to delusions of grandeur in the aftermath. France, too, has a highly inflated view of its own importance. But the French understand the cost of European disunity much better than the British, because they have paid a higher price for it.

It has to do with the fact that Britain is an island. Almost every other European country except Switzerland and Sweden has seen serious fighting on its own soil in the past hundred years. Many of them have seen it several times, and about half of them have been partly or wholly occupied by foreign troops for long periods. By contrast, Britain has not been successfully invaded for almost a thousand years.

Britain is not alone in seeing the follies of the EU bureaucracy and resenting the cost of the compromises that have to be made to keep the enterprise alive. It is alone, or almost alone, in seeing European unity purely as an optional project, to be reassessed from time to time by calculating its economic benefits and weighing them against its political and emotional costs for Britain.

Emotional costs? Yes, and this is where the petulance comes from. There is a fantasy, still quite prevalent in England, that the country could have a much more satisfying future as a fully independent player unshackled from the dull and stodgy European Union, living by its wits as a swashbuckling global trader. To which one can only say: Good luck with that.

If this were all that is going on, other people in other countries would not be paying the Brexit phenomenon much attention. ‘Middle-Sized Country Makes Large Mistake: not many hurt elsewhere’ is not a very exciting headline. The interest lies in the possibility (or rather the fear) that the outburst of populist anger that led to the Brexit phenomenon will not be confined to Britain — and indeed we already have Donald Trump’s astonishing rise to power in the United States to underline that fear. So it’s worth spending some time on what actually happened in the United Kingdom, bearing always in mind that it could just be a local aberration.

There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families … It is our duty to look after ourselves (first) and then, also, to look after our neighbours.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 1987

If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.

Prime Minister Theresa May, 2017

Whoever Britain’s third female prime minister should turn out to be, she’s almost bound to be nicer than the first two. It would be hard to beat them on the negative-empathy front. But there is a significant distinction between these two women, Conservative prime ministers though they both were.

Margaret Thatcher was a disciple of Hayek and the Chicago School, and her politics was the right-wing, ‘small government’ economic orthodoxy of the Anglosphere in the 1980s. She did not love the European Economic Community, but she recognised its importance as Britain’s major trading partner. Indeed, she was the moving force behind the creation of the EU’s ‘single market’, consolidated in 1993, that removed most of the non-tariff barriers to trade among EU members (at the cost of some extra ‘red tape’ to ensure that all EU members complied with the same quality and safety standards in their products).

Thirty years later, Theresa May is not greatly interested in that arcane old stuff about the economy. Her politics is nationalist, even tribal. Her priorities are preserving the English ‘national identity’ from erosion by too many immigrants, and recovering ‘British sovereignty’ (presuming that it has been lost) from Brussels and the European Court of Justice. Or at least those are the values she adopted in order to become prime minister in the aftermath of the ‘Leave’ victory in the Brexit referendum of June 2016, and she has ruthlessly subordinated the United Kingdom’s economic interests to those higher goals. She is definitely the right prime minister for Brexit, if you like that sort of thing.

Yet it is typical of the haphazard, almost accidental, nature of the 2016 vote to leave the EU that Theresa May did not campaign for Brexit in the referendum. She kept a very low profile during the campaign, hoping to keep her position as home secretary in prime minister David Cameron’s government if Brexit lost, but positioning herself to switch sides and emerge as a leading candidate for the prime ministership if Brexit won and Cameron was forced to resign. When she did speak (in private), she warned against the dangers of leaving the EU. Speaking to the staff of the Goldman Sachs investment bank in London at a closed meeting on 26 May 2016, one month before the referendum, she said:

I think the economic arguments are clear. I think being part of a 500-million[-person] trading bloc is significant for us. I think … that one of the issues is that a lot of people will invest here in the UK because it is the UK in Europe [my italics]. If we were not in Europe, I think there would be firms and companies who would be looking to say, do they need to develop a mainland European presence rather than a UK presence? So I think there are definite benefits for us in economic terms.1

But Brexit won, and Theresa May trimmed her sails to catch the new wind. Cameron had given his cabinet ministers permission to campaign for either side, but he led the Remain campaign himself, and quit immediately as soon as the Leavers won. Despite the allegedly consultative nature of the referendum and the narrowness of the Brexit victory — 51.9 per cent Leave, 48.1 per cent Remain — the result was interpreted by the Conservative Party as an irrevocable decision that required a new prime minister and cabinet dedicated to carrying out the ‘national will’.

The Conservative members of parliament who had led the Brexit campaign, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were so astonished by their success (and in Johnson’s case at least, so terrified by it), that they had not prepared any follow-on campaign for the party leadership in the unlikely event of a victory, and in less than three weeks May had snatched the prime ministership against feeble opposition. To do so, however, she had to become the hardest-line Brexiteer of them all — which also means a hard-line English nationalist.

English nationalism is a strange, awkward beast that has only recently emerged from its long submersion in the broader context of a British national identity: it’s only in the past two decades that the English flag, the cross of St. George, has been on display even at football matches. The other three nations of the United Kingdom — Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland — have always had their own identities, and latterly, in Scotland’s case, even an active separatist movement seeking Scottish independence. For most English people, however, ‘English’ and ‘British’ were virtually synonyms. They were, after all, 90 per cent of the British population.

The end of the British Empire was probably bound to be accompanied by the gradual re-emergence of an explicitly English identity. It took two or three decades, but it’s been back since the 1990s — and whereas the other British nationalisms mostly define themselves against the English (Northern Ireland is a more complex case), English nationalism naturally defined itself against the larger ‘European’ identity that the country had also taken on when it joined the EU in 1973. English nationalists who really put their hearts into it (most people didn’t) became Europhobes who saw the EU as a monolithic threat to their own identity and traditions, even though it actually accommodates several dozen other national identities and traditions with a fair degree of success. And the Europhobes, as conservatives and traditionalists, found a natural home in the right wing of the Conservative Party (still familiarly known by its 17th-century name, the Tories).

That is not to say that the Conservative Party as a whole was Europhobic. On the contrary, it was the Tories under Edward Heath who led the United Kingdom into the Common Market in 1973, and every subsequent Tory prime minister, down to and including David Cameron in 2010–16, defended British membership of the organisation. Nor was Labour, the other major party, always pro-EU: until the mid-1990s, the Labour Party’s left wing always included a strong anti-EU faction, although their motivation was less English nationalism than hostility to all ‘capitalist’ institutions and a preference for building ‘socialism in one country’. But by the 21st century both major British parties were generally in favour of British membership of the EU.

There continued to be a significant faction of Europhobe fanatics on the right wing of the Conservative Party, however, and from time to time these ‘head-bangers’ (as they were known to their fellow Tories of more moderate views) would launch failed rebellions against the Conservative Party leadership. This was more a nuisance than a genuine threat, but the first prime ministership of David Cameron in 2010–15 also saw the rise of a single-issue nationalist party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), that was taking many more votes from the Conservatives than from Labour. The Conservatives were already in a coalition with the smaller Liberal Democratic Party, as they had not managed to win a parliamentary majority by themselves in the 2010 election. With the continuing rise of UKIP, they faced the threat of not being the largest single party either after the 2015 election. So David Cameron, though personally a strong supporter of British membership in the EU, had a bright idea.

In January 2013, Cameron announced that he would hold an in/out referendum on British membership of the EU after the 2015 election. That would shut up his own head-bangers in parliament and stop them from defecting to UKIP. It would also steal UKIP’s thunder and stop anti-EU Conservative voters from defecting. Yet in all probability, he felt, he would never have to hold the referendum, because few people expected the Conservatives to win a majority in the 2015 election. The polls all suggested that Cameron would have to form another coalition with the Liberal Democrats after the election. The Lib Dems would then veto the referendum for him (sparing him the wrath of his own right wing), as they had never made any promises of their own about a referendum, and did not want one.

And if, somehow, despite all these calculations, Cameron did end up having to hold the referendum he had promised, it would still come out all right in the end, because the British people were not so stupid that more than half of them would vote to wreck their own economy. What could possibly go wrong?

Perhaps it was always impossible to unite Great Britain with the continent. Naive to reconcile the legal system of Napoleon with the common law of the British Empire. Perhaps it was never meant to be.

But our predecessors should never be blamed for having tried. Never. It’s as important in politics as it is in life: to try new partnerships, new horizons, to reach out to each other, on the other side of the Channel.

I am also sure that — one day or another — there will be a young man or woman who will try again, who will lead Britain into the European family once again. A young generation that will see Brexit for what it really is: a catfight in the Conservative party that got out of hand, a loss of time, a waste of energy, stupidity.

Guy Verhofstadt, chief EU Brexit negotiator, speaking in the European Parliament, 5 April 2017

Verhofstadt’s speech sounds like a valediction, which is a bit premature. It is not yet certain that the United Kingdom will crash out of the European Union in a ‘hard Brexit’ with no safety net, although that is what Prime Minister May was threatening when Verhofstadt spoke. It might end up being a ‘soft Brexit’ that leaves Britain in some sort of customs union with the EU, maybe even with some access to the ‘single market’, although that would require British concessions on topics such as the free movement of people that remain red lines for May at the time of writing. But leaving the EU is unquestionably an act of self-harm that will make the United Kingdom significantly poorer than if it stayed, and with no net gain in real freedom of action in the wider world as compensation for its losses. So why did slightly over half of the British voters who turned out in June 2016 choose to leave?

Not slightly over half of the entire adult population, of course — there were the usual no-shows on polling day, and the people who voted to ‘Leave’ were only 34.7 per cent of the eligible voters in the country. But there’s no point in complaining about that: as the French say, ‘The absent are always wrong.’ No point, either, in complaining about the narrowness of the margin of victory for the ‘Leave’. Cameron was so confident of winning that he didn’t bother to impose any conditions of the sort that are often placed on referendums that might involve enormous changes and determine the fate of an entire country: minimum turn-out requirements, a 55 per cent or 60 per cent majority, etc. Brexit won, and that’s that.

But the way the vote split demographically is very instructive. Almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of the voters over 65 years old supported the ‘Leave’ side; almost three-quarters (71 per cent) of the under-25s backed ‘Remain’. In terms of social class, people in the highest categories (AB) voted two-to-one for Remain; people in the lowest categories (C2DE) voted two-to-one for Leave.

There was an even sharper distinction in education: 68 per cent of university graduates voted to Remain; 70 per cent of those with junior matriculation (GCSEs) or less voted to Leave. Households earning over £60,000 a year voted 65 per cent–35 per cent to Remain; households earning less than £20,000 a year voted 62 per cent–38 per cent to Leave.2 The same gulf divided the big cities (78 per cent voted to Remain in several boroughs of inner London) from the outer suburbs and rural areas in England (where an average of almost two-to-one voted for Leave). And although ‘too many immigrants’ was one of the key messages of the Leave campaign, almost all the areas with high concentrations of immigrants voted Remain, while areas where immigrants were rarely or never seen voted strongly for Leave.

The US presidential election campaign six months later was fought on different issues and by different rules, but it is extraordinary how closely these distinctions between British Leave and Remain voters prefigure the differences between pro-Trump and anti-Trump voters in the United States in November 2016. By age, by social class, by education, and by income levels, even in terms of the urban/rural split and the dog-whistle racism and strong anti-immigrant sentiment in areas with few immigrants, American voters split in a pattern almost identical to the one seen in the United Kingdom in June 2016.3 Indeed, even the rhetorical style of the pro-Brexit campaigners was uncannily similar to that deployed by Donald Trump, although he certainly wasn’t taking any lessons from them. All this begs for an explanation, but first we need to get on with the story.

It should first be said that both sides made predictions about the future impact of Brexit on the British economy that went far beyond the available evidence. The Remain campaign persistently claimed that there would be an immediate deep recession if the country voted Leave. It is not clear if the authors of this claim really believed it, but it was dubbed ‘Project Fear’ by the pro-Brexit media and did indeed turn out to be untrue. In terms of outright lies, however, the Leave side definitely outdid the Remainers.

Of the Three Horsemen of the Brexit Apocalypse (the Fourth got lost along the way), Boris Johnson is closest to Trump in his relationship with the truth. He is well educated, well connected, and privileged — Eton College, Oxford University, a former mayor of London, and now Foreign Secretary — but he affects an amateurish, rather shambolic manner. He once told documentary filmmaker Michael Cockerell: ‘I certainly think that as a general tactic in life, it is often useful to give the slight impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on’ — and he resembles an English sheep-dog on a bad-hair day. But it is precisely this air of slightly puzzled innocence that allows him to tell barefaced lies and get away with it.

Johnson first made his name as the Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, one of the phalanx of right-wing British newspapers that has been spreading hatred and contempt for the EU for decades. He used to reduce his British journalistic colleagues in the European Union’s capital to helpless rage by distorting or simply making up stories that portrayed the EU bureaucracy as simultaneously tyrannical and incompetent. They were usually stories about ridiculous ‘Brussels red tape’, such as the one about the EU banning prawn-flavoured cocktail chips.

Fifteen years ago, Johnson wrote that some of his ‘most joyous hours’ had been spent composing ‘foam-flecked hymns of hate to the latest Euro-infamy’, the banning of the prawn chips. Except, of course, that the EU didn’t ban them. It merely pointed out to the United Kingdom that it had accidentally omitted prawn cocktail from a list of flavourings and sweeteners in current use in EU countries, whereupon Britain provided the information, and prawn cocktail flavouring was added to the harmonised EU-wide list.

Why was the EU keeping such a list? Because the EU ‘single market’ allows any member to sell its products in every other country without encountering the kind of ‘non-tariff barriers’ that would be created if, for example, a local producer of prawn-flavoured chips in Latvia tried to get the British product banned because it was using the wrong kind of flavouring. To prevent that sort of abuse, a list of approved products was needed. Johnson obviously knew this — he spent a long time in Brussels — but he published the story anyway. In fact, during the referendum campaign in March 2016, he told it again, citing the ‘great war against the British prawn cocktail flavour crisp’ as part of his evidence for Brussels-gone-mad and one of the reasons he was campaigning to leave the EU.

He told much bigger lies, too, such as the one plastered on the side of his campaign bus claiming that Britain gave £350 million a week to the EU, money that would instead go to Britain’s much-loved National Health Service if the result of the referendum was ‘Leave’.

In fact, Britain gets a rebate (negotiated by Margaret Thatcher) on its contribution to the EU budget, so that it really only sends £248 million a week to Brussels. Much of that money — about £112 million a week — comes straight back to the United Kingdom in the form of subsidies for British hill-farms, British research and development, and various other worthy British causes. The net amount that Britain pays into the EU budget — much of it for infrastructure aid to poorer EU members in eastern and southern Europe — is £136 million a week. And there has never been a promise by the Conservative government to divert such a sum of money (or any other sum) to the NHS. It was pure, manipulative fantasy, but a great many people believed it. As Donald Trump once remarked (to take a quote completely out of context), ‘I love the poorly educated.’

The Brexit campaign’s co-leader was Michael Gove, another journalist, who was persuaded by David Cameron to leave his job as a columnist in Rupert Murdoch’s UK flagship, The Times, and run for parliament. He ended up as education minister and then justice minister in David Cameron’s cabinet. His hostility to the European Union, he claimed, had begun in his teens, when he watched his father’s fishing business die under the impact of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. (UK coastal waters are some of the richest fishing grounds on Europe’s Atlantic coast, and one of the prices that Britain paid when it negotiated its entry into the organisation was to let Spanish, French, and other EU fishermen fish in those waters, too.) Gove’s anger was real: in an interview on Sky News during the campaign, he described the EU as ‘a job-destroying machine’ run by ‘sneering elites’. He served as the sober alternative for those who were put off by Boris Johnson’s flamboyant upper-class-twit act, and when he denied any ambition to lead the Conservative Party, people almost believed him.

The third key figure in the Leave campaign was Nigel Farage, the founder and leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party. He began his career as a commodity trader on the London Metal Exchange, but divided his time between business and politics after the creation of UKIP in 1993, and devoted himself almost entirely to politics after his election as a member of the European Parliament in 2003. He was profoundly opposed to Britain’s membership in the EU, and his anti-immigrant rhetoric won him growing support with those sections of the English public (older, whiter, non-metropolitan, and often less well educated) who were upset by the speed at which the country was changing.

It was Farage who came up with the story that 77 million Turks were about to be given the right to travel to the EU without visas, and implied that they would then all be able to settle in Britain. It was pure nonsense, of course, but it got such a strong response from the target audience in England that it was immediately taken up by Boris Johnson and the right-wing press as well. By the end of the campaign, Farage was posing in front of giant posters showing an endless queue of Syrian refugees and labelled ‘Breaking Point’ — as if those refugees, too, would all be coming to Britain unless the country left the EU. Given the closeness of the referendum outcome, it seems safe to say that it would have been a Remain victory if Farage, and, to a lesser extent, Johnson, had not deliberately incited a racist panic in a key section of the voting population.

So the job was done — but those who did it were astonished by their own success. Boris Johnson was a political opportunist who had only joined the Leave campaign at the last moment, presumably because he believed that an honourable failure in that endeavour would give him a better claim on the Conservative Party leadership when Cameron finally retired. He seemed terrified by his referendum victory, probably because he feared that he was about to inherit the thankless and perhaps impossible task of ending Britain’s EU membership without destroying the British economy. He was very subdued on his one public appearance on the day after the referendum — which gave Michael Gove the time to stab him in the back. Having first agreed to manage Johnson’s leadership bid, Gove then declared that he had realised Johnson was temperamentally unsuited to be prime minister — and presented himself as the candidate instead.

Even in the Conservative Party, this was seen as an act of treachery too flagrant to be rewarded, and Gove’s leadership bid quickly collapsed. This left only Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister in Cameron’s cabinet, in the running. Leadsom made the mistake of claiming she was the better candidate because May had never been a mother, and was quickly forced to apologise and end her candidacy. Two weeks after the referendum, Theresa May, who had never publicly supported Brexit, was prime minister. As for Nigel Farage, on 4 July he declared that his work was done, and resigned as the leader of UKIP, explaining that ‘I want my life back.’ The head of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe in the European Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt, called them all (including Cameron) ‘rats fleeing a sinking ship’, and there was indeed a rather rodentine air to the proceedings.4

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.

Frans de Waal, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia5

Brexit was not the result of long forethought and clever strategy. It was a train-wreck. The major players were making it up as they went along, and there was no planning even for the morning after, let along for the longer term. Moreover, although the economic and political consequences for the United Kingdom might be dire — the value of the British pound crashed by 10 per cent against the US dollar as soon as the referendum result became known, and ten months later the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, declared that she would seek a second independence referendum — it seemed to be a fairly self-contained disaster.* Who, apart from the British themselves, would be badly hurt by the country’s exit from the EU?

[* The first Scottish referendum on independence, in 2014, resulted in a 55 per cent–45 per cent majority for staying in the United Kingdom. Sturgeon’s excuse for holding a second referendum was that Scotland had voted almost two-to-one to stay in the EU, and that it was ‘democratically unacceptable’ that it should be dragged out of the EU by non-Scottish votes. However, after her Scottish National Party lost 21 of its 56 seats in the Westminster parliament in the British general election of 2017, she put the idea of a referendum on hold for at least several years.]

Yet within days, Americans were worrying aloud that if the British could do this to themselves, Americans might really elect Donald Trump. Maybe the underlying circumstances that had made such a bizarre outcome possible in the UK also existed in the United States.

It was a good question then, and the fact that Donald Trump really did get elected makes it an even better question now. What might the underlying circumstances be that make these unwelcome surprises possible? The possible answers that have been suggested include, in no particular order, free trade and globalisation; the widening gap between rich and poor, even in the developed democracies; too many immigrants; the impact of automation on jobs; the rise of social media — or, of course, all of the above. But where do you start looking, and how do you decide what weight to assign to the various possible causes of the new populism?

One clue is the sheer level of anger displayed by those who voted for Brexit, or later for Trump. There were plenty of people who knew that the populists’ promises were mostly lies — pro-Brexit voters who did not believe the numbers on Boris’s bus for one moment, Kentucky ex-coal miners who knew that neither Donald Trump nor even the Lord Almighty on stilts could revive the US coal industry — but who were still going to vote for them. In Britain, at least, they were so angry that after the referendum it quickly became the conventional political wisdom that politicians must not hold a second referendum on the terms Britain manages to negotiate for leaving the EU, nor dilute a ‘hard’ Brexit by trying to stay in the customs union or the single market, lest it trigger civic unrest (that is, actual bloody riots, though they never make that explicit) by Brexit voters who feel betrayed.

It’s hard to believe that the passions of millions of British voters — well, millions of English voters, to be precise — have actually been roused by abstract concepts such as the internal market. They are more likely to be angry or frightened (or both) about something else, with EU membership merely serving as a convenient symbol for all that. Which means that the Brexiteers are riding a tiger, because just taking the UK out of the EU will not assuage the anger of their supporters. They have to figure out what has really made them so angry. So do we.

Was it immigration that drove the anger? That is the answer most Tories have settled on, which is why the ‘freedom of movement’ rule in the EU — any citizen of an EU country can move to any other member country and live there, even set up a business there, without asking permission — became the reddest of red lines for the May government. If Britain must go on welcoming any EU citizen who wants to move there in order to retain access to the single market and a customs union with the European Union, it will just do a ‘hard Brexit’ and let those things go, regardless of the damage it does to the British economy. ‘No deal is better than a bad deal,’ as Theresa May used to repeat at frequent intervals.

Now, there are certainly quite a few immigrants in Britain: at least 3 million EU citizens, most of whom arrived from Eastern European countries in the past ten years, plus around another 5 million from the rest of the world who arrived over the past four or five decades. In a total population of 66 million, however, only 13 per cent of the people in the UK are foreign-born, which is in the same range as Germany or the United States (both 14 per cent), although significantly lower than Canada (20 per cent) or Australia (27 per cent). Of course, the ratio of foreign-born in big cities is much higher: 37 per cent in London, exactly the same as New York City. But there is nothing special about the British experience that would justify an extreme reaction against immigrants — and, in fact, there probably hasn’t been one.

There is a good deal of anecdotal evidence that open racial abuse against visible minorities, foreign-born or not, has increased in the UK since the referendum, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the number of racists has grown. It is more likely to mean that some people who used to be deterred from acting their feelings out in public by a general atmosphere that was intolerant of racist abuse now feel licensed to say what they really think by the violent rhetoric of some Brexiteers during the referendum campaign. The rise in abuse has certainly shaken the confidence of some immigrants, who have been made to feel that they are no longer welcome in the country, but it is doubtful that the situation has actually changed much at all.

The assumption in the latter stages of the referendum campaign that two-thirds of pro-Brexit voters put ‘controlling’ (that is, cutting) immigration ahead of any other consideration may be true, because those voters were heavily concentrated in suburban and rural parts of England where there is a kind of panic about immigration (although relatively few real live immigrants). But that is two-thirds of the 35 per cent of the population who voted Leave, not necessarily two-thirds of the entire population. Indeed, a comprehensive study carried out by the Policy Institute of King’s College London, Cambridge University, and the Rand Europe think-tank in the summer of 2017 found that most people were not fixated on immigration. Nearly two-thirds of those interviewed wanted a deal that maintained close ties with the EU, and were willing to surrender a degree of sovereignty (including control over ‘freedom of movement’) in return for favourable trading conditions that preserved British prosperity. To the extent that they worried about immigration, most were concerned about its impact on public services, and were quite relaxed about immigrants who had jobs and paid taxes.6

So while immigration was an issue in the Brexit vote, it was not the issue. How about free trade and globalisation? This was a major theme in the US election six months later, with Donald Trump promising to renegotiate or just tear up foreign-trade agreements that allegedly destroyed American jobs, but it played a very different role in the British debate. In the Brexit battle, the question was whether British trade would be better served by membership in the EU or by an independent trade policy seeking one-off deals around the world, but nobody questioned the beneficial effect of foreign trade in general. This was doubtless related to the fact that the United Kingdom’s exports amount to 27 per cent of Gross Domestic Product, while US exports only account for 14 per cent of American GDP. There has been a certain amount of ‘offshoring’ of British jobs over the years, but globalisation never featured prominently in the Brexit debate.

Did social media play a role? Maybe it did, but since it is mostly younger people who are heavy users of social media, and since the young voted heavily in favour of Remain, it seems probable that the net effect, if any, was pro-Remain.

The hollowing out of the middle class, and the consequent widening of the income gap between the rich and the rest, is a trend that has affected almost every developed country over the past two decades. So is the rise of automation and the consequent loss of jobs. Nor is there any doubt that these two trends are linked in various ways, although how closely remains in dispute. Could these be the real culprits of the story? As Sherlock Holmes used to say, ‘Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’

Actually, it’s not all that improbable that unemployment and under-employment provided the essential fuel for the populist victory, for we know that the official jobless statistics are very misleading, and that British wages have stagnated or fallen in the past dozen years for all but the top 20 per cent of earners.7 In the meantime, and before tackling the mountain of contradictions called Donald Trump, we can cheer ourselves up by examining just how deeply rooted and robust our democratic systems really are.