As Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford argue in their new study – Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2020 – British politics has been profoundly restructured since the 2016 referendum. Latent divides in the electorate between ‘identity conservatives’, ‘identity liberals’ and ‘ethnic minorities’ were quickly transformed into potent fractures between ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ which have fundamentally reshaped political competition, most obviously in England and Wales but also in a different way in Scotland.
This book comprehensively marshalls both contemporary and historical survey data to fill out and explain this picture of change, and has been justifiably hailed by luminaries of UK political journalism as well as political science. You really do need to read Brexitland to grasp the changes in British politics in the twenty-first century, although I shall argue that it has significant conceptual and analytical limitations.
Paradoxical change
At the heart of the changes which Sobolewska and Ford address is the paradox that in the more diverse and liberal society which Britain has become over the last half-century, what they call ‘ethnocentrism’ has become more rather than less politically salient. They argue that conservatives have ‘activated’ the ethnic identity of a shrinking ‘school leaver’ white majority, while opposing liberals have mobilised and expanded the anti-racism of growing graduate and minority populations. The Conservative Party had already mobilised ethnocentric white voters following Enoch Powell’s and Margaret Thatcher’s interventions in the late 1960s and 1970s, but David Cameron’s attempt to ‘detoxify’ the party in the 2000s, amidst growing new concerns about immigration, opened the way for UKIP to powerfully link the issue with the UK’s EU membership after 2010.
