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
