Young supporters at a Bernie Sanders rally. Photo: Stephen Brashear / AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The ability to define the problems around which politics revolves is a vital means of exercising power. Not only does it set the terms of discussion, it also reconfigures existing divisions and alliances. The Brexit referendum is a classic example. It presented EU membership as the most important political issue of our time - yet the decision to hold it was entirely contingent. The public weren’t clamouring for a vote on the topic. EU membership was ranked the 9th most important issue in opinion polls last year. Cameron decided on a referendum to try and settle Conservative Party factional strife. He assumed Remain would win comfortably, but soon lost control over the narrative. He became trapped by the relentless thirty-year campaign of racist and Eurosceptic media messaging from which he’d previously benefited. Slogans such as “take back control”, allowed the Leave campaign to frame the issue, setting up a chain of equivalence between the EU, immigration, low wages and declining public services. As attention was focussed ever more narrowly upon this line of argument even Remain voters embraced its terms. Post-referendum anti-Brexit protests have shown many young people equating the EU with cultural diversity and freedom of movement. The thousands of dead migrants in the Mediterranean have slipped further out of view. In this article I want to think further about how the referendum might be reconfiguring existing generational divisions. I think Understanding how political generations are produced and shaped will be key to the emerging Left responseunderstanding how political generations are produced and shaped will be key to the emerging Left response.
The divergence of voting patterns between age cohorts has already been well noted. One opinion poll indicated 75% of 18 to 24 year olds voted for remain, while only 38% of 50 to 64 year-olds did the same. Despite early reports that Brexit was the fault of feckless young people’s failure to vote it now looks like the turn out of 18 – 24 year-olds was 64% rather than the 36% originally cited. Headlines such as “Brexit: The Boomer’s Final Betrayal” feed into a longer narrative of older generations pulling up the ladder, removing the rights and freedoms they themselves have enjoyed. Overall, voting patterns make it clear that the longer you had to live with the effects of Brexit, the less likely you were to vote for it. Around the world, the declining economic prospects of younger generations have been the wellspring for resurgent Left projects. Podemos in Spain and Bernie Sander’s campaign in the US provide two examples of this. In the UK, however, there is a real danger that the way the referendum was framed recompose a generational divide based on divergent economic interests into a generational culture war. Such a war would suit only the interests of the Right.
We can begin to understand this if we position Brexit within an ongoing crisis. In 2008 we saw the collapse of neoliberalism’s economic settlement. Now we are experiencing the collapse of the political settlement that went along with it. In a perceptive referendum post-mortemBoth cohorts need a new economic settlement., Alan Finlayson identifies neoliberal globalisation as the obscured driver of both sides of the Brexit vote. He distinguishes between globalisation’s economic and cultural effects using this to draw up a grid of four groups in the UK with differing attitudes to these impacts. Out of these there are two cohorts that are central to the hopes of the Left. The first consists of those unhappy with the economic effects of globalisation but happy and embedded within the cultural diversity it brings. Think young metropolitans with precarious working and living conditions. The second cohort are those who have also suffered economically from neoliberal globalisation and who also find its cultural effects uncomfortable. Think older voters from the Britain's de-industrialised smaller towns. Both cohorts need a new economic settlement, and this should be the basis of an alliance between them. But the referendum has turned their heads in different directions. A significant proportion of Labour’s deindustrialised heartlands voted Leave alongside a third cohort, who have done well from globalisation economically but feel nostalgic for a fantasy version of our Imperial past; basically the Tory shires. This new alliance must be kept from solidifying. The other task, however, is preventing something hinted at in the pro-EU protests; city based youth aligning with the much smaller urban cohort who are happy with both neoliberalism’s economic and cultural effects. A generational analysis is useful for picking this mess apart but only if we think more deeply about how a political generation forms.
