Cracking apart

One of the biggest current problems with our politics is that the political systems that emerged in the first part of the 20th century, and which dominated the long post-war boom, have now cracked apart, but new systems have not yet taken their place. The process of adaptation, though, has evolved faster in places with more proportional electoral systems.

On the left, the traditional social democratic parties of the centre-left have been disabled by the collapse of the post-war boom and the steady decline of the labour movement. There are good reasons for this. As Hilary Wainwright summarised,

“the world of a mixed economy, where the profits of a productive capitalist sector could be taxed and redistributed to provide universal welfare, social security and a public infrastructure for the benefit of all, no longer exists.”

The collapse of that world shunted all of our mainstream parties towards neoliberal views of the world, some more whole-heartedly than others. While neoliberalism is a contested term, we can follow Will Davies’ work in characterising it as form of politics in which state actors follow a “modernising” agenda that broadens the scope of markets, using the rhetoric of “competition” to target institutions that lie outside of the market, and to marketise or abolish them.

Both conservative and centre-left parties adopted versions of neoliberal policies in the 1990s and beyond, as seen in the rise of the concept of “New public management”.

The changing political landscape

In a paper published in Open Democracy in 2002 Ian Christie described three political scenarios: a squeezed “shared values” world of social democracy; a “high stakes” neoliberal world which produced losers as well as winners; and the emergence, or perhaps re-emergence, of parties based on what he called “natural orders.”

Christie characterised the ‘natural orders’ groups as spanning

“both left and right in the traditional classification of political alignments: it contains protests by local and national interests against the homogenising, top-down capitalist forces that are shaping the values, tempo, environments and organisation of modern societies. What links all of them is the non-Enlightenment view that there are natural limits or imperatives that science, progress and secular rational humanism cannot ignore.”

Building on this work a decade and a half later, it is necessary to pull apart the “natural orders” parties of right and left.

Notions of rights

Both are based on place, but while the populist versions are based on authority, the left versions (for example: Greens, Podemos, the Momentum element in the British Labour Party, the early Syriza, and so on) are constructed around notions of rights. This can even be thought of as a literal construction, of the right to the city, and of the occupations of public space that marked the indignados, nuit debout and the Occupy movement.

And every political debate about migration has at its heart a person and a place, a place where they are either permitted or excluded. In other words, the whole centre of political gravity is in the process of moving from the top of the chart, where labour (top left) contested with capital (top right) the share of an expanding global economy, to the bottom of the chart, where the division is about differences in place and values.

The current arguments in the British Labour Party, for example, are between those looking back to versions of the party above the line, and new activists who look at a “natural orders” version of the party. Some of the most successful parties in the bottom left quadrant have combined progressive politics with a nationalist agenda, such as the Scottish Nationalists or Together for Yes in Catalunya.

[Update: And looking at this through the lens of any of the UK’s recent elections—from 2019 onwards—it is clear that the Conservatives have managed the transition from Neoliberals to Exclusionary Populists and hardly broken stride, and that the championing of Brexit has been the engine for that.]

Money and energy

In short, then, we are moving to a new form of political alignment based on geography rather than social class. The expression of this political alignment is about forms of identity, but its base is in the realignment of the productive economy around the city. This is where the money is, and because of the strong age cohort effects associated with the emerging post-materialist values, this is also where the energy is.

What are the implications of this for a future politics? The transition from a crisis is always ugly. It has become a crisis because previously accepted economic and political arrangements have broken down, and the social agreements that underpinned them are now contested. Nonetheless, it is possible to see some emerging themes.

1. Demographics coupled with a deep shift in values suggest that in the medium term politics will be fought out over identity issues. Sara Robinson argued in 2016 that the Sanders presidential campaign, which attracted disproportionate support from younger people, may have been four years too early. In the UK, given the age profiles of Remain and Leave voters, the 2016 referendum probably represented the last chance that Leavers had of winning such a referendum. While American and British politics have recently featured radical campaigns staffed by young people and led by figures with their political roots in the 1970s it is only a matter of time before a Millennial political leader breaks through who is able to link this younger base with the language of a 21st century politics.
2. Existing political parties with an older base will continue to manipulate the electoral system, legally and less legally, to delay the moment when they are overtaken by demographics. In the UK, existing and proposed changes to voter registration have the effect of making it harder for younger and poorer people to vote. In the U.S., gerrymandering of electoral boundaries will continue, along with anti-democratic practices designed to suppress voting. So will policies designed to benefit older citizens, who are more likely to vote, at the expense of younger ones. But how long for? As the Millennials and Centennials take their political moment, such studied inter-generational discrimination will be harder to maintain and harder to justify.
3. Some parts of some governments will try to shore up the neoliberal agenda, but they will have decreasing success. By “neoliberal agenda,” I mean political attempts to benefit corporations by the continuing marketisation and financialisation of public assets and public services. It’s possible that the EU’s political survival might depend on it moving away from the Lisbon agenda, since its emphasis on “competitiveness” and growth, with related pro-business behaviour, is one of the features that drains political support and permits populist and nativist politicians within its borders to flourish.
4. What happens over time to the declining number of voters in the “cultural backlash” group? This is a political question. It is possible to think that the populist moment is likely to peak a decade after the crisis, as Funke et al have argued. Some policies supported by urban progressives should also appeal to younger voters outside of the urban core: obvious steps include improving the quality of labour markets, reducing financialisation, increasing mobility, and increasing trust in governance. Ageing will change the balance around cultural expectations as well. But without some acknowledgement by political actors and institutions of their interests, there is likely to be greater confrontation and political violence, as Peter Turchin suggests.
5. Alliances of cities will bypass national governments to promote more progressive agendas that are more aligned with the values both of their citizens and their business leaders. The C40 group of cities is an early example of this. At the same time, these alliances are likely to broaden beyond the current group of “global cities,” and for this reason. There are many signs that the largest cities in the richer world have reached their peak; housing costs are too high for young people to settle, and rents discourage diversity and cultural experimentation and renewal. But the likely beneficiaries are cities with decent local labour markets that have not peaked; in the UK, for example, this might include Bristol, Manchester, or Leeds. Indeed, expect to see this become a standard urban development strategy. The effect, though, will be to make these urban alliances broader and deeper.

Image credit: Wikipedia

• Jeff Bezos doesn’t want the world. He wants to go into space. An epic profile of the Amazon boss in Atlantic magazine.

• On which subject, it’s getting tougher being an internet giant. Politicians, regulators and journalists are finally catching up.

• It was all the fault of Netscape. It was liberating, 25 years ago, when the world’s first commercial internet browser was launched.

• Impossible not to mention Brexit this week. The historian David Edgerton suggests that one of the causes is the decline of British business and British finance.

• Masculinity is morphing. We knew that. GQ has been talking to some of the men who are morphing it.

• In Hong Kong, women are redefining their role through the street protests. A fabulous visual Twitter thread (one of several) by Hong Kong activist @uwu *wears a scary mask*.

• Right here, right now. If you didn’t see it, Fatboy Slim remixes his classic dance track with Greta Thunberg’s UN speech. Video, 2’19″

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“The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” (Thornton Wilder)

They say that your syntax always finds you out. Metaphors can be just as revealing. As George Lakoff observes, metaphors are the devices we use to frame the way we think about the world. In politics, according to Lakoff, it the competition for the frames–effectively, competition between the metaphors–that resolves electoral and political competition.

Tax, for example, is harder to raise when it is a “burden” and not an “investment in the common good”.

Cameron’s view on austerity, according to his memoirs, is that he and his Chancellor, George Osborne, should have cut deeper and cut faster when they came to power. Here’s the extract from the book, quoted in Politics Home:

My assessment now is that we probably didn’t cut enough.

We could have done more, even more quickly, as smaller countries like Ireland had done, to get Britain back in the black and then get the economy moving. Those who were opposed to austerity were going to be opposed — and pretty hysterically — to whatever we did. 

Given all the hype and hostility, and yes, sometimes hatred, we might as well have ripped the plaster off with more cuts early on. We were taking the flak for them anyway. We should have taken advantage of the window of public support for cuts when it was open.

(My emphasis). I haven’t read the book, but this line from it has been widely quoted, from The Times to the Telegraph to the Independent to the New Yorker. Plasters, for American readers, are Band-Aids.

Counter-productive

This suggests that, whatever he’s been doing in his expensive faux-shepherd’s hut, he hasn’t been keeping up with the recent economics research. The International Monetary Fund, not normally regarded as a hotbed of radical thought, has concluded that austerity was counter-productive (pdf). The stated intention of the policy was to reduce debt to free up productive capital that was being “crowded out” by public spending (spot the metaphor).

But even on its own terms, this is wrong. The IMF research found that public sector cuts shrink the private sector faster than the public sector. If we’re doing metaphors, it turns out that the public and private sectors are co-dependent species. One of the associated mysteries to this is why George Osborne thought for a moment that he might be a suitable successor to the IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde.

Austerity and UKIP

Nor has Cameron been catching up on his politics research. Research at Warwick University published on the LSE blog found that exposure to austerity had a significant effect of UKIP’s share of vote in the years running up the referendum decision. It was of course, the share of UKIP vote that spooked Cameron into calling the referendum:

Estimates indicate that, in districts that received the average austerity shock, UKIP vote shares were on average 3.6 percentage points higher in the 2014 European elections and 11.6 percentage points higher in the most recent local elections prior to the referendum, compared to districts with little exposure to austerity.

The impact of austerity is estimated by the research as having increased the Leave vote by 9 percentage points.

On the High Street

The third thing he hasn’t been doing is getting out much, or getting out beyond the pleasant crescents of Notting Hill and the tree-lined avenues of Witney. Because the other effect of austerity has been to wreak havoc on the High Street. The conventional wisdom is that this is the result of online shopping, and obviously online has had an effect.

But austerity, with the flatlining household income and economic growth it caused, has had a bigger impact–and this on top of the online effect, happening anyway. The sums: analysis of data from the Office of Budget Responsibility by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the impact of austerity in 2018-19 alone to the overall economy is £100 billion, or £3,600 per household. Retail has high fixed costs, and small downturns in income can tip it over the edge into being unprofitable. This doesn’t just matter if, say, you used to work for Maplin. It matters because a thriving high street is a public good that extends well beyond shopping.

In short, Cameron has had a decade to think about this, and two years since resigning as an MP to think about nothing else. His conclusion: austerity, which as it was wrecked his economy and his Referendum, should have been pursued even more vigorously. It is the conclusion of a fool, or a zealot.

Empty metaphors

Here is the metaphor again:

‘we might as well have ripped the plaster off with more cuts early on’

As a metaphor it sounds good, at first hearing. It is tough, dynamic, and decisive, etc. But as a figure of speech, it is also completely empty. In one line we have an accurate summary of David Cameron’s Prime Ministerial career, maybe his whole political career.

So what’s the metaphor about? Well, that’s the problem. Let’s walk it back through.

Plasters go on cuts to help them heal. You take them off after the cuts have healed. How you take them off is a tactical decision: do you go quick, and a brief moment of pain when the hairs are pulled up? (This may also be a male metaphor). Do you go slow, and ease it loose? The strategy is about the healing. The skin has had time to knit itself back together over the cut.

So when Cameron says he should have ripped the plaster off more quickly, the question is, what is the plaster being ripped off from. Of course, “cuts”–by government–are a metaphor too. So maybe this discussion of plasters is actually the return of the repressed.

In other words, the entire metaphor is empty. If he’d been being honest, he’d have been talking about amputation instead, As I said at the beginning, your metaphors find you out.

Tactics and strategy

Of course, Cameron and Osborne were obsessed with tactics, constantly mistaking them for strategy. This led them to the process where their reputations have been trashed by the outcomes of their politics.

Anthony Barnett’s assessment, in his Brexit book, The Lure of Greatness, was succinct. “Cameron is one of those politicians who enjoys unlimited personal ambition untroubled by the burden of larger purpose.”

Falling stock

In the intervening couple of years, Cameron’s stock has fallen. The assessment this week of David Cameron’s career by Ian Dunt, on politics.co.uk, is brutal:

Cameron promised to match Labour spending, until he didn’t think it beneficial and turned fiscal hawk. He promised to get the Tory party to stop “banging on” about Europe, until that wasn’t useful either and he announced a referendum. He was green until he wasn’t. He was liberal except not really. He was relaxed about immigration but against it. He loved multiculturalism but insisted it had failed. There was simply nothing there. None of it meant anything. He was a tactic where a strategy should be.

We’re all still paying for the price for this, literally and metaphorically. And Cameron? He’s still doing empty soundbites.

The long wave theorist Peter Turchin has turned his attention to Brexit. So, although I had not planned to turn my attention to Brexit again for the time being, it’s probably worth noting what he has to say.

Turchin is best known for his ‘secular cycles‘ theory of long-run political change. By ‘long run’, we’re talking cycles of 100-300 years. He is an evolutionary biologist, and started by wondering if the same resource pressures that shaped species rise and decline generally might also apply to humans. His first approach to this, written with his colleague Sergey Nefedov, researched pre-industrial societies (pdf). When that seemed to work, he started to look at industrial societies as well.

The Turchin model

Before we get to Brexit, it is worth just referencing his model. I’ve written about this here before, so this is a quick refresh.

The approximate dynamics of the model are captured here, in a 2013 paper.

(Source: Turchin, ‘Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability’, in Cliodynamics, 4(2))

When it is shown like this, it looks a bit like the universal answer to everything, but in Turchin’s defence, he and his researchers have modelled the relationships here to the point where they are quantifiable. Turchin explains it this way in the paper:

The theory represents complex human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with socio-political instability built in via a web of nonlinear feedbacks (Figure [above]). The focus on only these four structural components is not quite as oversimplified as it may appear, because each component has a number of attributes that change dynamically in response to changes in other structural- demographic variables.

If you want to know more, it’s worth spending time with the paper, which then uses the framework to model political instability in the United States, historically and in the present. But it’s worth noting that “relative wages”, under the ‘Population’ heading, tends to be an influential variable.

The over-supply of labour

When he points this framework at Brexit, it does produce some interesting analysis. The first is about the supply of labour compared to demand–i.e. the oversupply of labour.

(Source: Peter Turchin)

As with the United States, which has been a central focus of Turchin’s recent work,

“[t]he main causes were immigration, the entry of massive numbers of baby boomers and women into the labor force, [and] the export of jobs overseas.

This chart, though, is something of a proxy: it uses the unemployment rate as an indicator of under- or oversupply, and takes 4% unemployment as the threshold of this. Maybe this is good enough. The big dip in the couple of years before 1990 is the overheated economy that was the ‘Lawson boom’, which didn’t end well.

Union decline

There’s a related chart, which looks at the density of trade union membership over almost the same period. Correlation isn’t causation, etc, but we know from other work that effective trades unions are one of the best ways to maintain real wages. Union membership peaked just after the 1970s, the decade when the real share of wages in the UK economy was at its highest and inequality was at its lowest. After that, as a result of Thatcher’s policies, trades unions were subjected to sustained legal and political attack (up to and including violent attack by state agents).

Chart: UK trade union membership

(Source: Peter Turchin)

Relative wages

And just to finish off this, here’s the outcome of those two charts: the relative wage over the same 60-year period show a steady decline, by about one-third, from the mid 1970s onwards. Relative wage: “median (typical) wage divided by GDP per capita, which tells us what proportion of gains from economic growth goes to the workers.”

Chart: UK relative wages

(Source: Peter Turchin)

Turchin’s article also has a 180-year chart on changing social norms around all of this, based on voting share at general elections. There are problems with this perspective (the voter base changes over time, parties fracture and recombine) but the long-run point he’s trying to make is that we see a shift in social expectations in the 1910s and 1920s as the Labour party emerges, and then again in the 1970s and 1980s as Thatcherism rewrites the social contract. For my money, this misses an important historical point, in the mid 1940s, when the Labour post-war landslide creates the welfare state.

In fact, one of the interesting features of these long run landscapes is that there are financial crises approximately every 40 years, and political crises following them along at a distance of about a decade.

But, but, but.

Although Turchin’s piece is full of comparisons between the UK and the US, which he sees as fellow travellers, certainly when compared to France, there are significant differences between Trumpism and Brexit. Of course there are similarities: as British leaders go, Johnson is at least as far to the right of previous Prime Ministers as Trump is when compared to previous Presidents. The willingness of these politicians to bend themselves to help Putin’s geopolitical ambitions is striking. Bannon and Farage slither between the two countries, washed along on dark money, whispering snakes in shady grass.

But there is also a very important difference between the politics of the two countries, which is not explained by real wages.

Politics of interests

For all of the excesses of Trumpism, it remains a politics of interests. It identifies a base of political supporters and finds ways to reward them, through policies which benefit them directly or offer them a sense of worth. Yes, it is refracted through the gridlocked American political system, which allows the rewarding of interests to extend to changing the rules of the system (e.g. through gerrymandering or voter suppression). But, at heart, it is still a political process that a political scientist would recognise.

This is simply not true of the politics of Brexit.

The significant aspect of Brexit is the detachment between political rhetoric, political means and ends, and political purpose. During the referendum campaign, there was some relationship between the narrative that was constructed and the interests of a group of voters. The sunlit uplands of leaving the EU (“the money’s coming home to save the NHS”, and so on) may have been mendacious, but it appealed to voters who had been systematically squeezed, at a personal level and at a community level, by austerity.

Indeed, one of the depressing things about a recent report in The i talking to Leavers in Skegness was the clear and present sense that the morale of the community had been so brutally worked over by our political class that anything–anything–would be better.

Delusions

I’m not going to spend time on the delusions about a no-deal Brexit on 31st October that seem to be shared by the right-wing cabal intent on pushing it through.

OK, then, briefly: A ‘no deal’ exit is not the end of the Brexit negotiations, but the beginning; Britain will take a bigger hit that the EU, not the other way around; there’s a reason why countries trade on the best possible terms with their geographical neighbours; negotiating trade deals outside of larger trading blocs is harder, not easier; the currency markets will be unforgiving; the cost of food will go up. There will also be weird, unanticipated glitches, which will end up on the news bulletins, because the UK and EU exist in a complex relationship of regulation, markets, and supply chains.

Not that any of this matters in the politics of Brexit. The Conservative party has become a party of English nationalists, with a pungent stripe of hedge fund disaster capitalism running all the way through. The Union can go hang, and business? Well, f*ck business. This is not the politics of interests, as it is normally understood. And there’s no easy way to explain this if you use the Turchin model to look at the politics of Brexit. All it tells us about are the pre-conditions.

Betting the house

So what other explanations might offer themselves?

The first is a political one: that if your party is in long-run decline, with a shrinking and ageing base holding onto declining values, you might as well bet the house on one last spin of the wheel. But in practice most parties in this position don’t do this: they work out a strategy that can re-compose their base, rather than doubling down on them.

The second is a moral one: that 30 years of runaway financial markets have detached the elite from the social norms and values of the mainstream, and that the elite find that aligning themselves personally and politically with the interests of hedge funds is vastly rewarding. As Wolfgang Streeck observed, corruption is one of the signs of the end of capitalism.

The third is psychological: that the end of Empire has finally caught up with people who grew up in the shadow of Churchill. This is the politics of people who, as the Irish writer Fintan O’Toole has argued, have constructed an imaginary oppression, in which the masters of Empire and victors in two World Wars are now, somehow, the colonial subjects of the EU. This now fuels their political imaginary, and, indeed, a whole set of imaginary politics. They are the Don Quixotes of 21st century politics.

In fact, all three of these explanations have truth in them, and as they play out each reinforces the others ever more stridently. But they also suggest that we are in a political moment that is fragile and temporary, and one that needs to spin ever faster to sustain its delusions. Each of these three, on its own, could be the clue to how this fantastickal politics will self-destruct. It is a moment of political theatre that will unravel when something, or someone, breaks the fourth wall. The spell can be broken.

Thanks to Ian Christie for alerting me to Turchin’s Brexit article. The image at the top of the post is by Our Future Our Choice.

Don’t take my word for this. Take the word instead of the former Conservative MP Matthew Parris:

She is mean. She is rude. She is cruel. She is stupid. I have heard that from almost everyone who has dealt with her.

Of course, that implies that might be a 2×2 here. What might the opposite of ‘stubborn’ be? And ‘stupid’? Well, let’s draw it.

If Theresa May is in the bottom left box, who might be in the others? A friend who used to work in Whitehall suggested that we could track our last four Prime Ministers this way. Blair is Smart and Flexible; Brown, Smart and Stubborn; Cameron, Stupid and Flexible.

All of these might be horses for courses. Smart and Flexible might create new political openings, but it also leads to the Third Way and the Iraq War. You can see how Smart and Stubborn might lead to the brooding suspicion that often characterised Gordon Brown’s political style, but it was effective in reducing child poverty levels and was also, probably, the reason why Britain’s banks  remained solvent and open during the financial crisis. (Osborne might be in the same space, which led to his over-commitment to austerity in the face of the evidence, and endless Cunning Plans that were apparently going to destroy the Labour Party for a generation).

In terms of the Brexit catastrophe, we would have been better off had Cameron been Stubborn and Stupid and May Stupid and Flexible. Cameron would then have been less cavalier about a referendum, and May would have had more than a single Plan A that she is clearly over-identified with and over-committed to, in the face of overwhelming Commons defeats that a Flexible politician would have learned from. By “catastrophe,” to be clear, I mean the huge costs of all of the consequences of proceeding with the referendum, from the re-normalisation of racism, to the damaging effects on present and future household prosperity, to the collapse of British influence and soft power as a result of becoming an international laughing stock.

In case people think I’m making a political point about intelligence, Churchill was also Smart and Stubborn, which was a useless set of characteristics during the 1930s, when he was on the backbenches obsessed with the India question, but valuable during the 1940s as a war leader. Macmillan was probably Smart and Flexible, which meant that he was able to persuade the Conservative Party that de-colonising winds were blowing through Africa.

And Jeremy Corbyn is probably Stupid and Flexible, perhaps because he delegates the things he’s not interested in to his colleagues.

Of course, a 2×2 is a model, and “All models are wrong. Some are useful.” There are some politicians that don’t fit in as tidily; John Major’s pragmatic party management, perhaps. And of course, Donald Trump is all over the map.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia.

I’m presenting on Britain’s fault-lines at an event organised on the theme of ‘FragmentNation’ by Kantar, my employer, this week. This is an extended version of the article I wrote for the event booklet.

The main dividing lines in British society have been clearly outlined in successive elections. The Brexit referendum in 2016 and the General Election in 2017 laid down the markers: younger vs older, core cities vs towns, country, and the rest; and to some extent, more educated vs less educated (this last one may involve some double counting because of the rapid expansion in university education over the last three decades.)

These, of course, are largely English numbers, because England represents such a large part of the whole. Scotland is also different, culturally, socially, and politically. (And, also, Welsh-speaking Wales.) In contrast, ethnic groups are less distinctive in this mix, partly because of their over-representation in the core cities.

Clockwise from left: The Brexit election map, showing strength of vote and population density (yellow is remain); analysis of the effect of education and age on voting decision. Sources: map, Chris Green, Oxford University;  statistical analysis of education and age, The Stats Guy.

Even with such nuances, however, the story is almost too simple, and put like this, it takes us to simplistic places. Some commentators, such as Robert Peston in his book WTF, have jumped to the conclusion that British politics has become identity politics, with all the volatility that this would suggest. He is not the only one.

I argue here that, instead, these fault-lines originate in real and deep differences that have emerged in Britain over decades rather than in the few years since the financial crisis. Three long-run changes have combined:

• The rise of the globalised and financialised economy;
• The restructuring of advanced economies around services; and
• A long-run shift in values.

To the extent that technology is a relevant part of this story, it is as an enabler, both for economic change and as a transmission vehicle for new values, and as an accelerator, creating new forms of social exchange.

Different values

It is the shift in values that commentators see first when they try to put the pieces together. We are in the middle of a long shift in our dominant social values, from “modern” values to “post-materialist” values, to borrow the language of the social researcher Ronald Inglehart. Modern values are about hierarchy, authority, and conformity; they capture accurately the social and economic world of much of the 20th century. From a consumer perspective, the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” could have been invented as a slogan for the moderns.

In contrast, post-materialists value autonomy, creativity and self-expression. These values are often associated with Millennials (22-39 years old, in 2018) and are also seen in the older Generation X (40-54 in 2018). They were seen for the first time in The Beat Generation of the 1950s; the early adopters were the “soixante-huitard” student protesters, seen notably in their values and slogans. These values have steadily gained social traction with each succeeding generation; they are the values of the emerging experience economy.

Although measuring adherence to sets of social values is not an exact science, in western Europe and north America these two different and competing sets of values are now split more or less evenly—but the post-materialists are in the ascendant and the moderns are dying off. This may, of itself, be an explanation for our current political volatility, since such 50/50 values splits in society are always dangerous times.

Global Britain

The second fault-line is around globalisation, financialisation, and de-regulation, associated largely with the economic reforms of successive Conservative governments from 1979 to 1992, and mostly therefore with the Prime Ministership of Margaret Thatcher. There is a huge literature on this, but for our purposes it is the effects that are important: a restructuring of the British economy away from manufacturing and towards services, especially financial services; a significant upwards shift in asset prices, especially house prices, and a one-off jump in levels of inequality that has not been reversed; an opening up of the British economy and society; and a further concentration of the wealth and influence of London.

One effect was to reward existing asset holders, especially house-owners, a cornerstone of Thatcher’s political strategy. But, as Stein’s Law tells us, something that can’t go on for ever won’t go on for ever; rewarding one generation comes with a cost for the next generation.

There’s a further element to this part of the story. Without going too far into the nuances of Conservative politics, all of this represented good news for the element of the party that believed in economic liberalism, and bad news for those who were socially conservative. As Frances O’Grady wrote after Thatcher’s death,

Thatcher’s social instincts were always nostalgic conservative… [But she] helped create the amoral yuppiedom of 80s excess and an explosion of cultural resistance.

This same conflict played out again in the Brexit vote, but the balance of the politics was reversed.

Margaret Thatcher walks the site of the former Head Wrightson engineering works at Thornaby, Middlesbrough, in 1987. (Image: Teeside Archive). Middlesbrough voted 65.5% Leave in the Brexit referendum.

The new service economy

The third faultline is around the rise of the service economy. Again, this was prefigured forty years ago. Daniel Bell wrote The Coming of Post Industrial Society in 1973; Alvin Toffler wrote The Third Wave in 1980. In the UK (as in the US and France) services now represent around 80% of the economy. This matters for several reasons, but the most important one is that it has created a new type of relationship in the workplace; identity politics is rooted in a new type of social class.

The rise of services is as important as the decline of manufacturing, for three reasons. The first is that it is harder to find productivity gains in the services sector, so wage growth is flattened. Successive cohorts of young people are earning less money as they come into the workforce than the previous cohort. The second is that—drawing on the work of Enrico Moretti on the US economy–density, proximity and knowledge seems to be critical in creating value from services. (In other words, almost everything that has been written about the internet and the death of geography is wrong).  The cities that win are typically larger, and have better universities. The third is that an important part of the value that a services worker brings to work is their own knowledge and personality, as Scott Lash and John Urry argued in their book Economies of Signs and Space. Business value walks out of the door whenever workers leave work.

The critical point is that this is as true for retail workers and baristas as it is for software programmers and advertising creatives, as Mike Judge reminded us in a memorable couple of sequences in his film Office Space. Employers end up paying for something they have little control over. One reading of the so-called “gig economy” is that it is an attempt by business owners to use technology to manage this problem away. The series of legal cases about the status of such workers (Uber,  Pimlico Plumbers) is a sign of the conflicts over this.  

The landscape of FragmentNation

The combination of these three deep shifts has created the landscape of the FragmentNation. The core cities are increasingly different from everywhere else; London is floating away on its own. The wave of globalisation has had polarising effects because it has produced mirror image effects across generations.

For older generations, it has improved their wealth, while undermining the social values they cherish. For the younger generation, it has reinforced the more open values of the post-materialists but wrecked their economic prospects. One political outcome: for the first time in well over a century, neither of the main political parties represents the business class or the traditional financial sector in the UK.

For brands, this is a complex world to navigate, but in a polarised world, they have to choose. One result has been the rise of strong corporate statements of purpose, of a kind that would have been unthinkable when I was a financial journalist in the 1980s. This makes business sense, because cities are both more aligned with post-materialist values, and they are also where the money is.

The game of chess has a wonderful word in it: zugzwang. It is a German word, which describes the situation in which one has “a disagreeable obligation to move.” Any move, in other words, worsens the position.

For some reason this came to mind while following the Brexit moves over the course of the last week, and then again when I’d heard that Theresa May and David Davis had had to go to Brussels for pre-dawn meetings to fit in with the busy schedules of Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk.

Here are some quick notes on all of this. Some of these are obvious to anyone who has been paying attention (which broadly excludes most of the Conservative party).

1. The EU is good at negotiating…

You can’t out-negotiate the EU. One of the reasons for this is that—given it’s a 28 country institution going on 27—negotiation is the only thing it does most of the time. So, on each of the substantive issues so far, the UK has blustered and the EU has won. It’s a bit like watching a club level chess player going into a game with an International Master or Grand Master and suddenly discovering after the routine of the opening moves that they are in a hopeless position. And this has, so far, been the easy part of the game.

2. … because it looks after its own

One of the reasons the EU hangs together is that it listens to its members and represents their interests when they conflict with others. In the current EU world, Ireland always trumps the UK. The EU wasn’t going to do anything that created the possibility of a hard border between the North and South. (Incidentally, I read pieces a few weeks ago that said that Ireland’s hardball position on the border was somehow undermined by the balance of public opinion in the North. Wrong: the audience for Ireland’s position was the other EU leaders and the EU negotiating team. In fact, the Conservatives keep making the mistake of thinking that public opinion matters.)

3. Ireland’s position was entirely predictable

I’m not going to spend time on this, since it is entirely obvious, but it ought to have passed the attention of Downing Street and the rest of them that the Irish Constitution contains an aspiration towards a united Ireland that used to be completely hard line and was toned down a bit as a concession as part of the Good Friday Agreement. The change had to be agreed by referendum. And that Ireland’s main political parties were formed around their positions towards the civil war that followed Ireland’s independence. The most trivial analysis of actor interests tells you that no Irish politician could agree to a hard border with the north, and remain in politics.

4. All of May’s options were bad

What this means is that May’s position was zugswang, caught between Ireland, the government’s DUP “partners,” and the hard Brexiteers in the Cabinet and the press. Of course, she’d made all of this worse for herself with unhelpful talk of “red lines” earlier on, and the timing of the moving of Article 50, both designed with party in mind, rather than UK interests. Ian Dunt walked through May’s options this in excellent detail, but in summary, they were:

1. Keep going with the Hard Brexit model, with the re-formation of the hard border between the north and south of Ireland, and have the EU decline to move on to the trade talks;
2. Try to square the EU by moving the customs border into the sea, and have the DUP bring down the government;
3. Move away from the Hard Brexit position, but in such a way that the barking Eurosceptics didn’t have enough rope to hang her.

4. The politics of indecision

For May the third option is the least worst of these three bad options, and it’s also in the interests of the EU as well, so it has played ball by praising her political skills to give her some cover and inventing a phrase—”regulatory alignment“—that lets her be vague for a bit longer. It is the least worst for several reasons. One of the reasons is that it leaves everything open for the time being; for all the talk about politics being about making decisions, often, especially when it comes to internal party politics, the best thing to do is not to force a decision. Of course, everyone else knows this as well, which is why the hard right are already on manoeuvres.

5. The weakening Brexit position

Among the other reasons why it is the least worst option is that it is the only option on which May might get support from Labour and the SNP if the hard wing of the Conservative party tried to force the matter. (Of course, this is not a great position for a party leader to be in, especially since the Opposition parties might leave her to swing if they thought the alternative was collapsing the government). It is also becoming clearer that the consequences of a Brexit without reasonable levels of migration are not good for the economy, the health service, fruit picking, the state of Britain’s university research, soft power, etc etc, however much experts gets derided for pointing these things out. (Of course, the reason for the timing of Friday morning’s meeting was because Junker had to fly to Japan to sign a vast trade deal).

Third, the “no-deal” option is clearly a fantasy, as was pointed out recently by a Parliamentary committee. Fourth, the pro-Brexit ministers are looking more shambolic by the moment: David Davis has had a terrible week, Liam Fox looks more and more like he’s signifying nothing, Boris is now completely visibly incompetent, even to the Conservative press. In other words, there’s still a chance that by the time she has to deal with them, they will be completely discredited, at least outside of the Express and the Murdoch newspapers.

6. Dying off

Of course, the longer it goes on, the notional Brexit “majority” dies off (I mean this absolutely literally), and the large costs of getting to a deal that’s clearly worse than continuing membership of the EU become more visible. At the moment I can’t see the event that allows politicians to break with the “will of the people” schtick about the referendum, and start saying this, but maybe that doesn’t matter. One of the things that I have learnt from futures work is that trends have a habit of configuring events in unexpected ways. The collapse of UKIP and its vote also means that Labour MPs are less worried about those of their supporters and voters who also voted Brexit. This was probably over-stated as a problem, looking at the numbers, either because politicians are prone to unthought-through hysteria about such things or because the PLP was using it as a stick to beat Corbyn. Maybe we have to leave and then rejoin again once the Imperial fantasists have isolated themselves.

7. British exceptionalism

One of the elements of this that was mentioned to me by Ian Christie is the extent to which the Brexiteers suffer from a misplaced sense of British exceptionalism. This is doubtless a legacy of Empire (see the discussion of Churchill, below), but from the outside it looks only like a misplaced sense of cultural superiority. Top Brexiteer Iain Duncan Smith might be an exemplar of this: this is the man who told Channel 4 News that Ireland was playing hardball on the  border issue because there was a Presidential election coming up. (Wrong at level of fact and interpretation.)

This evident sense of effortless superiority may be one of the reasons why the British have so far neglected to prepare for any of the negotiations in any meaningful way. Or, come to that, have wasted so much time and political capital on what amounted to the opening moves. Brendan Behan’s satirical song ‘The Captain and the Kings‘ strikes a chord here.

By the moon that shines above us in the misty morning night
Let us cease to run ourselves down and praise God that we are white
And better still are English, tea and toast and muffin rings

One of the curiosities to me of all of this is that having spent a lifetime watching the left suffer from magical thinking, which is always a sign of weakness, is that magical thinking is now the redoubt of the hard right. Michael Clifford caught this well in the Irish Examiner: “These people are obviously highly reluctant to address the real world lest it interferes with their delusion of grandeur.” As Ian Christie noted, one of the results is that the UK is suffering from an advanced version of the “sophisticated state failure,” diagnosed in the research of Carnegie Europe.

(J D Wetherspoon alienates younger customers with his views on Brexit. Image: Wetherspoon)

8. The coming Conservative split

The endgame for this as far as the Conservatives are concerned still looks like a split party. This still comes as a surprise to those of us brought up to think of the Conservatives as ruthless political operators when it came to winning and maintaining power. I haven’t checked the numbers, but there are probably at least 60, and perhaps up to 100, who would willingly leave in protest against a soft Brexit. They are probably perfectly aligned with the views of the Conservatives’ ageing party membership, but not with anyone else.

This has a logic of its own: the whole Brexit/EU question is a fight that’s been going on in the Conservative party ever since Churchill failed to square off the EEC in the early ’50s with his 19th century view of Britain as an Imperial power. (I also mean this literally: Churchill’s political views were formed while Victoria was still on the throne.) Brexit represents the culmination of that 65 year old feud: no more fudging is possible, there’s no more road to kick the can down. As for the rest, they are probably versions of centre-right Christian Democrats who could probably re-align themselves with the Conservatives’ traditional business base, currently broadly unrepresented in the UK political system. This would all be ugly, it will go on for some time, and—to end on another useful German word—will offer endless opportunities for schadenfreude.

There are at least five reasons why Brexit is too complex to deliver. The most likely outcome is a transition period that continues until the political demographics have changed.

The news that Labour has resolved its policy on Brexit is welcome for short-term, medium-term, and long-term reasons. It is also smart politics, because it is becoming increasingly clear that Brexit is too complex to deliver. Richard Murphy made this suggestion on his blog recently. And when I say, “too complex to deliver”, I don’t mean “too complex to deliver in a two year window plus a transition period”. I mean too complex because Britain has become institutionally and economically interlocked with the rest of the European Union. It can check out but it can’t leave.

The first reason is that the relationship between Britain and the EU is fantastically intricate. Just after Article 50 was triggered Buzzfeed published a memorable list of the 30-odd things that Britain had to do resolve Brexit, and it was immediately clear, reading the list, that all of them were complicated and that the government didn’t have a clue what to do about well over half of them. Since then, these issues have kept on getting more complex. Euratom, for example: it’s both essential to Britain’s nuclear power industry, and it requires accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

Henry VIII

The second is the “Henry VIII” clauses in the repeal Bill. They give far too much discretionary power to the Executive, and are repellent in terms of the balance of powers which is implicit in Britain’s unwritten constitution, the idea of Parliamentary sovereignty, or the rights of British citizens. Yet they are still probably insufficient to get the necessary legislation through Parliament.

The third is that the infrastructure required to manage anything but staying in the customs union and the single market won’t be in place any time soon, or at least that’s what I see when I read news reports about HMRC’s IT rebuild. The IT system that is being written and rewritten as we speak was scoped before the Brexit vote, and is now having to be modified. To say the least.

[HMRC] says more than 20 agencies are involved at the border, with new IT systems needed in everything from VAT, to alcohol and tobacco warehousing, to databases on trader registers… Passport and visa, or work permit, checks will be needed for EU drivers who travel into the UK. At present, there are no visa requirements because of the free movement of people under EU law.

Knowing the UK’s track record on big complex public IT systems, what could possibly go wrong? And that’s before we get onto the hard infrastructure that would be needed.

Derision

The fourth is that it turns out that all those regulatory agencies which the EU has in place, and which we have been contributing to through our payments, are difficult to set up from scratch. Then they need to design a set of European-compatible rules (because that’s where most of our trade goes), and they also, of course, need to recruit whole swathes of technically knowledgeable regulatory staff. I guess there might be suitable recruits in Europe if we don’t have enough good people here.

The fifth is that any agreement still needs to be ratified by the EU27, in accordance with the negotiating principles set out by the Commission. One such is the requirement for an open border between the North and the rest of Ireland, which is set in British and Irish law as a result of the Good Friday agreement. The position paper published by the government was met with derision by Ireland, and with good reason. The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole caught the tone.

Your neighbour, who you like but do not quite trust (there’s a bit of history there) comes to you with a proposition. She’s establishing an extremely risky start-up venture with a high probability of catastrophic failure. Will you join her? Well, you ask, what are the possible rewards? Ah, she says, if – against the odds – everything goes splendidly, you’ll get the same pay and conditions you have now.

Informed choices

And this last one is the reason why surveys that tell us what Remainers and Leavers now “want”, even academically reputable surveys, are broadly meaningless. Most of these outcomes will not be settled by UK voters. And the LSE survey which got quite a lot of airplay recently didn’t put its respondents in a position where they could make informed decisions about trade-offs. The trade-offs involved in managing Brexit are too complex. If you want to get to a meaningful assessment of public opnion, you would need to do it through some kind of deliberative process.

So what’s the most likely outcome? We live in a world of complex supply chains, where part finished goods shuttle between countries, where Britain is substantially dependent on the EU as a trade partner (“Gravity theory” does work, whatever Patrick Minford thinks), and where a significant portion of British exports are in high value services which require all sorts of inter-governmental agreement to work. There’s also Britain’s worsening trade gap.

Extended transition

So the most likely outcome is the thing that Labour has just signed up for, which involves staying in the single market and the customs untion after the Brexit date, probably with some cast-iron guarantees for EU citizens who are here, and an extended transition period while people try to work out what happens next. This is one of the reasons why Labour’s decision is a sensible one: there’s no point in advocating a position that is likely to unravel in front of you.

That takes us through to 2023 or so. By that time, given the current demographics of Britain’s political values, there won’t be a majority for Brexit any more. And kudos to the comedian (Sara Pascoe?) who said on one of Frankie Boyle’s recent shows that it was so much sadder when old people died these days because it meant they wouldn’y get to see the Brexit they’d voted for so enthusiastically.

The democracy thing

Ah, yes, but what about respecting the result of the referendum? Well, what is there to be respect? By the kind of criteria usually applied to democratic decision-making, it falls quite a long way short.

The usual set of criteria is based on the work of the sociologist Ray Pahl. These are for democratically-run associations, but they extend to democratic decison making generally. There are five:

1. Effective participation
2. Voting equality
3. Enlightened understanding
4. Control of the agenda
5. Inclusion of adults

The only one of these five where the Brexit referendum can keep its head above water is [2], just about: “every member must have an equal and effective opportunity to vote, and all votes must be counted as equal”. “Just about,” because of the effects of different voter registration measures introduced since 2010.

Effective and fair

But even ignoring that, it fell a long way short on [5]: “All, or at rate most, adult permanent residents should have the full rights of citizens that are implied by the first four criteria.” EU citizens resident in the UK, who had a clear interest in the outcome, were excluded from voting. As were 16-17 year olds who would also be affected by the outcome. And also excluded were were British citizens who had lived outside of Britain and in the EU for more than 15 years, who clearly also had an interest in the result.

It also fell short on [1]: the whole reason we have rules about campaign financing in this country is to ensure that participation is effective and fair. The source of the “dark money” channelled through the DUP, and which financed Leave advertising, has still not been made clear despite Open Democracy‘s sterling investigative work.

And clearly on [3] as well: “Each member must have equal and effective opportunities for learning about the relevant alternative policies and their likely consequences.” Clearly when the advocates of one set of policies makes up stuff about the likely consequences, and then disowns it the day after the vote, this hasn’t happened.

And on [4], those people who thought we were having a referendum because David Cameron had lost control of the right wing of his party, and was therefore putting party management before the national interest, didn’t really have a say. But then, as Anthony Barnett says memorably in his Brexit book, Cameron is, or perhaps was,

one of those politicians who enjoy unlimited personal ambition untroubled by the burden of larger purpose.

A second referendum?

Does that mean we’ll have a second referendum? It seems possible; it is certainly possibly to say that people who voted Leave weren’t actually clear what “Leave” meant. At the Royal Economic Society blog, Thomas Colignatus argues that the question was unsatisfactory for demonstrable theoretical reasons. Vernon Bogdanor thinks it will happen for reasons of political legitimacy.

I’m not so sure. I suspect that the transition period will be long-ish, and may well then be extended. Politicians hate complex problems they can’t resolve, which make them seem ineffective to voters. And after a while, one of our political parties will announce, when the young pro-Europeans represent a clear political majority, that it will seek to make the Transitional arrangements permanent and get voting rights in Europe to go with our payments. I can’t work oout whether it will take a Millennial political leader (who by then will be in their mid-40s or younger) who can make a case for Europe and for universalism, or whether (as with Zimbabwe’s independence) it needs an older leader who can sell this to disappointed older voters as unfortunate but necessary. But I’m fairly sure it will be a whimper, and not a bang.

The image at the top of the post is by ilovetheeu and is published here under a Creative Commons licence.

I’m delighted to say that I have the lead article in the latest issue of the Journal of Futures Studies, which published at the weekend.

It’s called “The City, the Country and the New Politics of Place.” It connects the rise of populist politics with the development of a smaller group of high value or core urban/metropolitan labour markets as a result of the rise of the tech-led services and knowledge economy foreshadowed by Alvin Toffler and Daniel Bell. I plan to write more on this, but for the moment here’s the abstract.

Much of the current discussion of the present populist moment in politics has explored issues of social values and economic inequality. In their different ways, these are relevant, but I argue here that they are symptoms of a wider set of changes in society. The prevailing political divisions identified in the Brexit referendum in the UK, the US 2016 Presidential election, and the Austrian 2016 presidential election, suggest a sharper divide between core cities and the rest than previously, which is creating a new politics of place. The roots of this lie in the economic transformations that have occurred as a result of the so-called ‘third wave’ of industrialisation, and the transition to economies based on services and knowledge.

However, these are transformations that are incomplete. The changing nature of work, reward, and consumption that the third wave has engendered is opening up new arguments about the purpose of work. Some of these arguments would have been regarded as utopian a generation ago, but are now entering mainstream discourse. The article also proposes a schematic to understand the political changes this is creating, following the work of Ian Christie, and identifies some implications for the short-term.

The article started life as a contribution to a Symposium on post-Trump politics, but got too long for that section. The Symposium is included in the same issue of the JFS, and includes articles from some distinguished futurists.  The contents list is here.

“The Country, the City and the New Politics of Place” can be downloaded from here.

Image from Death to Stock Photo.

The triggering of Article 50 marks the end of the political stand-off that has been the dominant feature of British politics since the Brexit referendum last June: a stand-off between our elected representatives on the one hand and “the will of the people,” as expressed in the referendum vote, on the other. Between the end of June and the end of March, any party with something to lose has had to go along with a show of respecting the referendum result, whatever they thought of it. Scotland too, although this has a different tint there. (The obvious exception is Tim Farron’s Liberal Democrats, but in 2016-17 they have nothing left to lose.)

So politics can start up again now, with differences on the terms of Brexit, and we saw this as early as last Sunday, when Labour’s Keir Starmer popped up on the Andrew Marr show to make a robust defence of “soft Brexit”, and on Wednesday when by all accounts Andrew Neil gave May the toughest interview of her Prime Ministerial career.

It’s also the last point at which May has any control of her Premiership, and there must be a question about how many of her senior civil servants have pointed this out to her and her ministers over the last few months.

Negotiating

This is because the Brexit negotiations will stretch British governance capacity to its limits. If you doubt the balance of the negotiating expertise, it’s worth reading the two Brexit documents produced by the EU and Britain. One of them is a coherent, thought-through, credible and fairly tough negotiating position, with clear red lines. The other one looks as if it was cobbled together by advisers in Number 10 at the last possible moment, despite having had months to think about what they have to say. There’s something of the same whiff about the Great Repeal Bill white paper: there’s less to it than meets the eye. (On the capacity issues for the British government, Buzzfeed had a useful list.)

Perhaps this is also the reason why ministers have started to row back from all that hard Brexit posturing: even David Davis has had to concede that the immigration numbers might not change much, because (who knew?) there are some sectors of the economy that would collapse without them. Indeed Matthew d’Ancona suggests that the trio of Brexit ministers are now more emollient on this point, for economic reasons, than the Prime Minister.

According to a senior government source, a wonderful irony is now manifesting itself around the cabinet table in the contributions of Liam Fox, David Davis and Boris Johnson: “There’s no doubt that Theresa wants to bring down immigration. But the three main Brexiteers are suddenly becoming more and more vocal about the need to keep the numbers sufficiently high for the needs of the economy. You hear Liam saying: ‘We mustn’t do anything that threatens prosperity.’ It’s becoming more and more clear to them what’s at stake.”

Black elephants

At the same time, the FT points out (in its essential daily Brexit briefing) that now Article 50 has been triggered the newspapers–not just the usual suspects–have moved on to the ballooning crisis in the UK public sector. If ever there was a “Black elephant,” or predictable surprise, it is this: that George Osborne’s monomaniacal obsession with debt reduction and therefore austerity would create and then leave behind a huge problem for his successor to sort out, or get dragged under by it, and this would have been true regardless of the referendum outcome. This particular elephant seems to be turning into a herd.

Today the FT and [Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/31/nhs-surgery-target-operations-cancelled-simon-stevens) report that the National Health Service has axed the 18-week target for operations. This is one of the NHS’s most important waiting time targets but scrapping it is essential if the service is to survive continued austerity. Meanwhile, [The Times reports](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/forces-face-shortfall-of-10bn-after-costs-soar-wqxts8hn2) that the armed forces face a £10bn shortfall amid escalating costs for new ships and aircraft. Service chiefs are scrambling to make savings elsewhere. The Daily Mail reports that cash-strapped local councils are fording middle class pensioners to pay higher care home fees in order to subsidise others with no savings. The Sun focuses on how Britain’s police forces are now able to solve just one-in-ten burglaries.

Maybe just worth spelling this out a little further: some of these papers are strong supporters of the Government and of Brexit, and some of these issues are ones that older and more conservative voters care about.

Economy

In the meantime, the proportion of British people who think that Brexit will be bad for the British economy has increased steadily since the referendum, as Simon Wren-Lewis points out, while the views on the vote are pretty stable.

Wren-Lewis’ explanation for this is, broadly, about the British sense of fair play: we’ve had the vote, and now we need to get on with it. I think there’s a different explanation. People gauge social facts and social hypotheses differently, which is one of the reasons that it’s often hard to get people to act on futures’ insights. The vote is a social fact, and the prospects for the economy are still a hypothesis. (BritainThinks’ Brexit research project also finds that, so far, “what unites ‘leavers’ is that the economic arguments, sacrosanct to so many politicians simply don’t matter.”

The BritainThinks research finds four groups of voters on Brexit, not just Leavers and Remainers. Leavers split into ‘die-hard’ enthusiasts and ‘cautious optimists’, while Remainers are ‘accepting pragmatists’ or ‘devastated pessimists’.

Cognitive dissonance

Significantly, so far, with the exception of the ‘devastated pessimists’, three of these groups remain optimistic about the outcome of Brexit. This includes optimism about the future of our public services:

One typical ‘leaver’ said “I am looking forward to it. This is a fantastic opportunity to rebuild the country: more police, better hospitals, more schools and more teachers”, while even a ‘remainer’ observed “This is a chance to explore a different avenue for Britain.”

It’s an open question as to how long cognitive dissonance will survive pessimistic news on the economy or continuing crises in the public sector, but it seems possible that at least two of these groups might change their views. And the demographics of the Brexit vote haven’t gone away.

Old age

As Anthony Barnett reminded us, Brexit is a project for the elderly English:

Within the generations, the differences remain as striking as they were in the vote itself: there is no majority for leaving the EU amongst those under 55. Those between 55 and 64 favour Brexit by a mere 52%. It is the over 65’s who swing the outcome as they break 59% for Leave…. Brexit is government of the old, by the old, for the old – and it will perish with the old.

In fact the profile of Brexit voters looks a lot like the profile of Conservative party supporters and voters, and Brexit is clearly a Conservative party project, whatever the “Lexit” arguments. But time is not on their side, and nor is the likely range of outcomes.

A combination of being outsmarted by EU negotiators, adverse economic news, and a looming public sector crisis, including on issues such as police and Armed Forces funding that are traditionally Conservative issues, could do quite quickly do for the Government’s current reputation for competence.

One view of the whole referendum fiasco was that it was a strategy to try to hold together a party that has been fractured on Europe since the 1950s, and which looks as if it is in long-term demographic decline. You can never predict how politics will turn out. But even given the current state of the Labour party, as it wrestles with the challenge of how to move beyond the crisis of social democracy, the Brexit negotiation process and the stored up problems from the Cameron/Osborne assault on public services seems likely to be a fundamental challenge to the health of the Conservatives.

The image at the top of the post is by Alisdare Hickson, via Flickr, and is published here under a Creative Commons licence.