The Long Road to Brexit
ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 23, 2016, the ballots came in divided across the United Kingdom. The results looked more like a Bosnian election than a British one: 69 percent voted to leave the European Union in the ex-mining town of Doncaster, while in the multiethnic London borough of Lewisham, it was 70 percent for Remain. Britons’ votes in the Brexit referendum weren’t so much a response to EU membership as the expression of a new social divide.
The Brexit debate crystallized identities long in the making. The narrow final result (52 percent to 48 percent in favor of Leave) did not mean the country was willing to split the difference but that it had been split in two. Then came Britain’s 2017 general election, which marked the final breakdown of the country’s industrial-style politics, long dominated by a party of bosses and a party of workers.
The new fault lines run along differences in education and race, not the ownership of the means of production. Getting a college degree changes people’s outlooks, making educated members of the white majority vote more like immigrants and their descendants. Those who don’t have degrees haveoverrun by newcomers who exploit educated cosmopolitans’ naive tolerance. Meanwhile, a small nativist elite, fed up with being derided as xenophobic, now finds itself making common cause with retired industrial workers.
