Last week, Anand Menon, a professor of politics at King’s College
London, won plaudits on social media for his no-nonsense performance on
Question Time, a popular BBC political show, and his blunt explanation
of what a no-deal Brexit entails.
“It means that all the laws governing our interaction with the EU — whether you can fly, whether you can shop, whether you can trade, whether you can travel — cease to exist,” he said. swiftly dismissing a suggestion by one panellist, who equated it with walking away from a deal to buy a car that you weren’t convinced by.
He was equally candid in his assessment of the second referendum. “Whatever you think of [the referendum] it was a remarkable moment in democratic history that people that hadn’t voted ever or for a very long time did so and they would, with some reason, feel hacked off.”
Besides what would happen if the result of a second referendum were 52 to remain and 48 to leave on a lower turnout. Would that settle anything?
Questions and facts around Brexit are something Mr. Menon deals with on a daily basis as the director of ‘U.K. in a Changing Europe’ — teams of researchers carrying out Brexit-related research up and down the country, in an attempt to give factual grounding to an emotional debate.
Funded by Britain’s Social Research Council, it is based on a similar project that had been set up ahead of the Scottish referendum. It has grown from a part-time one-person role for Mr. Menon to 25 teams across the country researching to provide the public with factual analysis.
“We report what the research says... in that sense we are not looking to support leave or remain or a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit,” he told The Hindu in a recent interview. “Sometimes, you of course end up taking a position — and our analysis is pretty unequivocal that leaving with no deal will be damaging. We are not afraid to stand up and say that, and we do end up with fights with people who say we are biased, but my response is that ‘if we are wrong, tell us why we are wrong’?”
Their approach has garnered considerable public interest — some one million people visited their website over the past few weeks.
Mr. Menon admits that he’s conflicted over the issues and the aftermath of the referendum. Born to a Malayali family who moved to northern England in the 1960s, he grew up in Wakefield, a West Yorkshire former mining town that has known its fair share of deprivation, and which voted heavily to leave the EU in the referendum. An image of a harmonious Britain cruelly thrown out of balance by the referendum — put forward by some Remain supporters who were caught off guard by the result — is not one that he shares. During the miners strikes of the 1970s, he recalls seeing the wives of miners on the streets begging for loose change.
“You’ve just realized what a nasty divided country we’ve always been,” he recalls telling someone surprised after the referendum result. The role that deprivation played in the referendum cannot be discounted or glossed over, he argues. “There are people who don’t like the EU — the added element of the vote being a collective two fingers at the establishment whether its Brussels or London
”
The sense of alienation has been made worse by an electoral system that means that unless you vote for one of the two big political parties it doesn’t count for much. “Protesting against the two big parties has been very difficult for people and the referendum provided an opportunity to do that.”
The real success of the leave campaign was in drawing the link between immigration and the EU, says Mr. Menon, noting that until the referendum, the EU had not been regarded as a salient political issue though immigration had been.
But on this count, research published by ‘U.K. in a Changing Europe’ this week has a remarkable finding: a sharp and sustained drop in those who see immigration as a salient issue to around 20%.
Mr. Menon says this remains an open question but what the research has further shown is that people across the country now have strong Brexit identities that trump their political ones, mirroring what has happened across the world, from India to the U.S.
“The politics of identity, the politics of culture are competing with the traditional politics of the left versus right and that is what was mobilised by Brexit, and it was mobilised very strongly. You see the same in the US and India – a coalition between the wealthy and poorer voters who share social values but aren’t on the same side of the spectrum when it comes to the redistribution of wealth….I hear people in the UK talk about Brexit triggering populism and I say to them: Modi was the precursor of nativist politics and to understand populism you have to understand it is not just global and not just Western.”
He sees strong parallels between the forces that drove Brexit and the endurance of the BJP. “It may well be the case that many of the issues that led people to vote leave had nothing to do with the EU but it doesn’t mean they were not legitimate — and you may not like the fact that people are voting BJP but you can understand the fact why people [were] fed up with Congress. There was corruption; there was this sense of entitlement. Why wouldn’t people react to that and say a plague on all your houses and let’s vote for something different?”
The deep-rooted nature of these identities adds to the problems around the route forward for Britain. There is little evidence that people have changed their positions on Brexit — the slight shift which has tipped the scales from slightly pro-Leave to slightly pro-Remain has come not from people changing their minds but from those who didn’t or couldn’t vote last time round saying they would in a future referendum. “We live in an age where people interpret evidence through the prism of prior belief. Throwing facts at people is not going to get them to change their mind,” he says.
However, it doesn’t make what U.K. in a Changing Europe are doing any less important. “The evidence we provide doesn’t say you should be for or against anything. Part of the Brexit debate is that it involves trade-offs between politics and economics: how much of an economic trade-off are you willing to make to free yourself from the EU is a personal thing that can’t be determined by research. But what can be determined by research is the nature of that political freedom, how constraining the EU is, what trading with China and the U.S. would add, and the economic costs,” he says. “If you are going to support a no-deal Brexit be honest that it’s going to be hugely disruptive.”
The same applies to the consequences of leaving, and the potential for trade with countries like India to fill the gap. “We export more to the Republic of Ireland than we do to Brazil, China, Australia, South Africa and India combined,” he notes, adding that while the loss to growth from exiting the single market and the customs union would be between 3% to 5% for the U.K., an FTA with the U.S. that scrapped every tariff that currently exists would lead to an uptick of just 0.3% to 0.4%.
However, economic costs aren’t everything. He recalls discussing the independence movement with his grandmother. “She used to say we would rather live on rice than steak and chips under the British. Of course it’s not at all the same situation — a colony is a very different situation to a member state. But it shows our willingness to make an economic sacrifice to achieve a political objective. What I aspire to is people being honest and what some Remainers do is underestimate the degree to which some people are willing to say: if there is economic damage we will live with it.”
Read more: ‘Deprivation played a key role in the Brexit referendum’ - The Hindu
“It means that all the laws governing our interaction with the EU — whether you can fly, whether you can shop, whether you can trade, whether you can travel — cease to exist,” he said. swiftly dismissing a suggestion by one panellist, who equated it with walking away from a deal to buy a car that you weren’t convinced by.
He was equally candid in his assessment of the second referendum. “Whatever you think of [the referendum] it was a remarkable moment in democratic history that people that hadn’t voted ever or for a very long time did so and they would, with some reason, feel hacked off.”
Besides what would happen if the result of a second referendum were 52 to remain and 48 to leave on a lower turnout. Would that settle anything?
Questions and facts around Brexit are something Mr. Menon deals with on a daily basis as the director of ‘U.K. in a Changing Europe’ — teams of researchers carrying out Brexit-related research up and down the country, in an attempt to give factual grounding to an emotional debate.
Funded by Britain’s Social Research Council, it is based on a similar project that had been set up ahead of the Scottish referendum. It has grown from a part-time one-person role for Mr. Menon to 25 teams across the country researching to provide the public with factual analysis.
“We report what the research says... in that sense we are not looking to support leave or remain or a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit,” he told The Hindu in a recent interview. “Sometimes, you of course end up taking a position — and our analysis is pretty unequivocal that leaving with no deal will be damaging. We are not afraid to stand up and say that, and we do end up with fights with people who say we are biased, but my response is that ‘if we are wrong, tell us why we are wrong’?”
Their approach has garnered considerable public interest — some one million people visited their website over the past few weeks.
Mr. Menon admits that he’s conflicted over the issues and the aftermath of the referendum. Born to a Malayali family who moved to northern England in the 1960s, he grew up in Wakefield, a West Yorkshire former mining town that has known its fair share of deprivation, and which voted heavily to leave the EU in the referendum. An image of a harmonious Britain cruelly thrown out of balance by the referendum — put forward by some Remain supporters who were caught off guard by the result — is not one that he shares. During the miners strikes of the 1970s, he recalls seeing the wives of miners on the streets begging for loose change.
“You’ve just realized what a nasty divided country we’ve always been,” he recalls telling someone surprised after the referendum result. The role that deprivation played in the referendum cannot be discounted or glossed over, he argues. “There are people who don’t like the EU — the added element of the vote being a collective two fingers at the establishment whether its Brussels or London
”
The sense of alienation has been made worse by an electoral system that means that unless you vote for one of the two big political parties it doesn’t count for much. “Protesting against the two big parties has been very difficult for people and the referendum provided an opportunity to do that.”
The real success of the leave campaign was in drawing the link between immigration and the EU, says Mr. Menon, noting that until the referendum, the EU had not been regarded as a salient political issue though immigration had been.
But on this count, research published by ‘U.K. in a Changing Europe’ this week has a remarkable finding: a sharp and sustained drop in those who see immigration as a salient issue to around 20%.
Mr. Menon says this remains an open question but what the research has further shown is that people across the country now have strong Brexit identities that trump their political ones, mirroring what has happened across the world, from India to the U.S.
“The politics of identity, the politics of culture are competing with the traditional politics of the left versus right and that is what was mobilised by Brexit, and it was mobilised very strongly. You see the same in the US and India – a coalition between the wealthy and poorer voters who share social values but aren’t on the same side of the spectrum when it comes to the redistribution of wealth….I hear people in the UK talk about Brexit triggering populism and I say to them: Modi was the precursor of nativist politics and to understand populism you have to understand it is not just global and not just Western.”
He sees strong parallels between the forces that drove Brexit and the endurance of the BJP. “It may well be the case that many of the issues that led people to vote leave had nothing to do with the EU but it doesn’t mean they were not legitimate — and you may not like the fact that people are voting BJP but you can understand the fact why people [were] fed up with Congress. There was corruption; there was this sense of entitlement. Why wouldn’t people react to that and say a plague on all your houses and let’s vote for something different?”
The deep-rooted nature of these identities adds to the problems around the route forward for Britain. There is little evidence that people have changed their positions on Brexit — the slight shift which has tipped the scales from slightly pro-Leave to slightly pro-Remain has come not from people changing their minds but from those who didn’t or couldn’t vote last time round saying they would in a future referendum. “We live in an age where people interpret evidence through the prism of prior belief. Throwing facts at people is not going to get them to change their mind,” he says.
However, it doesn’t make what U.K. in a Changing Europe are doing any less important. “The evidence we provide doesn’t say you should be for or against anything. Part of the Brexit debate is that it involves trade-offs between politics and economics: how much of an economic trade-off are you willing to make to free yourself from the EU is a personal thing that can’t be determined by research. But what can be determined by research is the nature of that political freedom, how constraining the EU is, what trading with China and the U.S. would add, and the economic costs,” he says. “If you are going to support a no-deal Brexit be honest that it’s going to be hugely disruptive.”
The same applies to the consequences of leaving, and the potential for trade with countries like India to fill the gap. “We export more to the Republic of Ireland than we do to Brazil, China, Australia, South Africa and India combined,” he notes, adding that while the loss to growth from exiting the single market and the customs union would be between 3% to 5% for the U.K., an FTA with the U.S. that scrapped every tariff that currently exists would lead to an uptick of just 0.3% to 0.4%.
However, economic costs aren’t everything. He recalls discussing the independence movement with his grandmother. “She used to say we would rather live on rice than steak and chips under the British. Of course it’s not at all the same situation — a colony is a very different situation to a member state. But it shows our willingness to make an economic sacrifice to achieve a political objective. What I aspire to is people being honest and what some Remainers do is underestimate the degree to which some people are willing to say: if there is economic damage we will live with it.”
Read more: ‘Deprivation played a key role in the Brexit referendum’ - The Hindu
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