It has now been more than four years since the Brexit vote and it is only this week (late December 2020) that its dramatic saga appears to be coming to an end. Whilst many political pundits will look into the next decade to anticipate what Brexit Britain is yet to mean, I wish to look back and briefly comment on the processes leading up to the vote in 2016. A question many pre-occupied themselves with immediately after Brexit was why people decided to vote Leave? Why did people vote away something that was so seemingly in our interest? How far was it to do with general ignorance, technological influence from Cambridge Analytica, a distrust of the Establishment? These questions are still yet to be fully answered. However, less analysis has concentrated on why Brexit took place at all. Why was a topic that barely occupied any space in the electoral consciousness in 2010 thrust into the political mainstream in less than five years. The myth, propounded by many on the Brexit side, that it was the inevitable outcome of a conflict between the Metropolitan Elite’s situated within the Westminster bubble and the left-behind victims of globalisation in deindustrialised areas needs to be discarded. It is simply wrong and is an ill-informed and lazy assumption to hold. What I want to articulate, therefore, is a theory for why the idea of “Brexit” came into mainstream political discourse. To start, an historical understanding of what drives political events is required.
The historical understanding of major political events naturally differs from one historian to the next. Whig, Marxist and Liberal histories are perhaps the most well known modes of historical endeavour. They all have a teological bent and suggest that major political events are inevitable outcomes of underlying social and economic processes. In other words, the superstructure of society — including the political realm — is determined by an economic sub-structure. The 1832 Great Reform Act is seen as the first inevitable step on the road to true democracy, the fall of the Soviet Union being the inevitable triumph of Capitalist ideology and free-market democracy. These histories assume the occurrences of political events are the function of social realities, whether those realities are ideas or a clash of material interests. Essentially, Brexit and historical events like it are simply extensions of underlying processes that work their way from the bottom up, not the top down. In contrast, the doctrine of the primacy of politics, articulated by the likes of Cowling, Namier and Hilton, asserts that political outcomes depend upon personality and contingency and furthermore, those at the top are more likely to determine, not reflect, social developments. According to Hilton, the only way in which people in a population who don’t know each other communicate is through a public forum: T.V, Newspapers, Radio, Books, Opinion Columns, Periodicals. These various mediums act as the nexus of public interaction: acting in its entirety as a sort of intellectual market where ideas and views are expressed and listened to. Thus, it follows that if one particular political grouping with its own specific rhetoric triumphs over another, this will disseminate downwards and have a profound impact on how the population both thinks and behaves. The majority of people don’t think for themselves in the political arena — much of their political discourse and belief is inherited by those propagating it from the top. To think that Brexit was the inevitable outcome of a clash between the Establishment, experts, the metropolitan types, and the victims of globalisation and deindustrialisation is, thus, simply wrong. It assumes a natural trajectory to historical development, when no such thing exists. Brexit, like most other political events, was a contingent event and by no means a necessary one.
In 2010 the issue of the European Union did not even feature in the top issues facing the British electorate, yet only five years later it was deemed the third most important issue. Soon after, Britain voted to leave. Why? How did an issue rise to such prominence in such limited time. Cowling’s conception of politics offers a compelling answer. High politics for Cowling could be envisaged as a pyramid traversed by horizontal lines. At the apex, stretching across all parties and shades of opinion, he saw 50–60 politicians and opinion formers who make things happen in the world of politics. They operate in a dialogue, often tacitly, with one and other rather than with those situated beneath them in the hierarchy. The group in relation to Brexit would include the likes of Dacre, Cameron, Farage, the Eurosceptic Conservative MPs, Johnson, Gove, Corbyn etc. The Eurosceptic rhetoric disseminated by the likes of Dacre and back bench Tory MPs was entertained by Cameron in 2015 for electoral and party political reasons. It was able to monopolise the intellectual market. It was continually aired on TV, Radio and written constantly about in partisan Newspapers. It was able to quickly capture the attention of the nation. To an extent Brexit had been won even before the referendum had been called due to Cameron’s tacit acceptance of Eurosceptic arguments and ideas. Brexit’s eventual victory owed a large debt to Johnson too. His decision to come out in favour of it was purely based on political calculation — writing two articles before making his decision. The latter brings into play another key point about High Politics. It is not about ideology or ideas but manoverment amongst competitors to reach the upper echelons of governmental power. Of course, many politicians are principled and follow a set of conceptual ideas. However, they will never succeed in the British political game unless they come to terms with the system in which they are obliged to function and which brings its own imperatives.
An isolated case of Euroscepticism among sections of the Conservative party and the media managed to infect the majority of voters from 2010 onward. The rhetoric of Brexit did not disseminate from the bottom upwards, but rather from the top downwards.
