Originally published in Italian as ‘Brexit, cinque anni fa ‘Riprendiamoci il controllo’ era solo uno slogan. Ora è una dottrina’ for Il Fatto Quotidiano 23 June 2021
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the life-changing referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.
Before the referendum, the EU was a marginal, if not secondary, issue amongst voters. In 2015, voters considered the economy, the NHS, immigration, social welfare and education as more important issues in defining their voting behaviour than the EU. Moreover, a year before the referendum, YouGov published a poll in which the majority of respondents reported wanting to remain in the European Union, notably the highest majority since YouGov first launched a tracker on EU membership. But the European question swiftly evolved into a Trojan horse full of conflicts that had always existed beneath the surface. The EU was praised for all of the country’s successes by those who wanted to remain within it. Equally, the EU was blamed for all of the country’s problems by those who wanted to leave it. Instead, there was little or no discussion of the basic pros and cons of EU membership.
In post war Great Britain, there grew an increasing number of people who really felt quite lost. People who already feel lost feel like they have nothing to lose. They also have no desire to listen to warnings. Dominic Cummings, Director of Communications for Vote Leave, understood this extremely well, and made use of it. He captured this sentiment through his infamous slogan ‘Take Back Control’. It was a slogan that could be followed by the preposition ‘of’. You could then insert whatever you wanted: laws, borders, seas, farming, the NHS. From that moment Vote Leave’s story of a future outside the EU- a romantic narrative that promised a strong United Kingdom, one that was confident, independent, sovereign (regardless of the fact it already was sovereign), became the bestselling story. It neutralised the negativity of the portmanteau ‘Brexit’.
Five years on, Take Back Control is not buried in 2016 along with chokers, off-the- shoulder tops, tributes to Harambe and the other artefacts from that year. Instead, it continues to dominate British politics. The slogan is so effective that the Conservatives still use it in their speeches. It represents the first step in their decennial mission to reinvent themselves, and snip off the ‘nasty party’ label.
Recently, in a profile for The Atlantic, Boris Johnson spoke about how he wishes to combat the defeatism he believes has always characterised Great Britain. To Johnson “people live according to a narrative”- therefore the object of politics is not to debate about facts, but instead to offer the public a story they can believe in. This can help us to visualise, five years on, not just how the referendum delivered unexpected results, but also how it catalysed a realignment in Great Britain that has changed the shape of politics in the country forever.
Now, Take Back Control has evolved into ‘Levelling Up’- the latest slogan referring to the Conservative’s decade-old attempt to stimulate prosperity in deprived areas in the UK, largely focused in the north of England. Levelling Up is effectively a mechanism to finish the work that began with Brexit: to cement support for the Conservative party in former Labour seats that voted for Brexit.
Levelling Up is, in essence, a form of pork barrel politics: seats that were recently won by the Conservatives are coincidentally first in line for money from the ‘Levelling Up’ fund, even if, like Rishi Sunak’s own seat, Richmond, they are less deprived than other areas lower down the list. The Conservatives’ message within Levelling Up is thus clear and cogent: if you vote for Boris Johnson his government could feed money into your local area in return. Provided Levelling Up actually follows through on its promises, new Conservative voters will be under the impression that they have ‘taken back control’. In this way, the story Johnson sells becomes ‘believable’. By marrying up aspiration with cash, not too unlike what New Labour did with its spending projects, new Conservative voters can see there is a pay-off to changing sides, and will be likely to remain loyal to the Tories.
But the great irony is that it has been Conservative governments which played a large role in creating this pervasive feeling of powerlessness. The deindustrialisation of the British economy and the collapse of trade union power encouraged by Margaret Thatcher devastated entire communities in the North of England, the Midlands, Scotland and Wales- leaving these areas without jobs, opportunities, and hope for a better future. Cameron’s austerity wounded the poorest parts of the UK. The child poverty rate, a rate Gordon Brown worked tirelessly to push into negative numbers, rose in symbiosis with the years of Conservative government since 2010 and continues to rise.
Equally, many groups in British society do not have the feeling that they have taken back control, since the UK voted to leave the EU.
Young people in the UK feel ignored by the political establishment, deprived of opportunities and the freedom to live a life where borders aren’t a constraint, that which lies at the very heart of EU citizenship. The referendum also intensified dangerous debates regarding immigration, rewarding those who scapegoat immigrants and punishing people of colour and migrant workers, who have notably experienced a rise in racist and xenophobic attacks since the referendum.
Peace in Northern Ireland also hangs in balance with the swathe of problems stemming from the Northern Ireland Protocol. Within a year, two leaders of the governing DUP resigned. In Scotland, support for independence skyrocketed since Brexit, enabling a future outside the UK to be less like a scare story involving lots of tartan and tweed and spats over North Sea Oil, and more like a way to ‘take back’ that EU citizenship most Scots never wanted to be deprived of. Nicola Sturgeon remains unwavering in her commitment to asking for a further referendum on Scottish independence, and with the SNP still performing well in elections, it is becoming increasingly likely that Boris Johnson, albeit with great reluctance, may have to concede it to her.
This chaotic picture of the United Kingdom are the saplings of discord whose seeds were planted in the 2016 referendum. And this is not a climate where a progressive party can easily prosper.
The referendum has broken the progressive coalition that once existed between the socially liberal middle classes and economically liberal but traditionalist working classes. In 2021, Boris Johnson’s popularity has not stopped rising- despite the serious mistakes in his approach to the public health emergency throughout the pandemic that cost lives, despite his near constant lying, despite his ministers’ clientelism and ‘chumocratic’ hiring system, despite his endorsement of a whitewash of institutional racism and indifference to the lives of people of colour. And now, against a Conservative government that is seemingly happy to abandon fiscal prudence and instead spend money to guarantee votes, progressives appear even more irrelevant to voters. ‘Take Back Control’ was a slogan in 2016- but now it has become more of a doctrine.
The British progressive movement has a mountain to climb to reconnect with voters and form a new electoral coalition, not unlike many social democrat and socialist parties in a world rocked by populism. To find their way back onto the path to victory, progressives need a convincing story that can unite a rapidly fragmenting country.
The prevalence of Take Back Control in the UK manifests that the political power of emotion cannot be understated: the story that you sell, counts just as much as the facts.
Translated from Italian to English by Charlotte Tosti, 11 August 2021
Charlotte Tosti 