Five years after Britain voted to leave the European Union, many of the predicted consequences are manifest, from a sharp drop in trade with Europe to political instability in Northern Ireland and a rise in support for independence in Scotland and even in Wales. Brexit’s champions identify the comparative speed of Britain’s coronavirus vaccine rollout as one of its early bounties, although most of the decisions that led to it would also have been possible within the EU and the vaccine gap with Europe is already closing fast.
Although Boris Johnson banned ministers and officials from using the word Brexit after the country’s formal departure last year, he has recently rediscovered the political advantage of keeping its controversies alive. Under Keir Starmer, Labour has avoided blaming Brexit for any of the country’s ills, fearful of further alienating the party’s former supporters in the Midlands and the north of England who voted for it.
Meanwhile, the origins of the Brexit vote are as disputed as ever and none of the standard explanations are fully persuasive on their own. If this was a revolt against an out-of-touch metropolitan elite, it was one that was led almost entirely by creatures of privilege, most of whom had worked all their lives in politics and the media.
It may have been a cry of pain by people in deprived “left behind” parts of post-industrial England but many middle-class voters backed Brexit too, including 41 per cent of those in the highest AB demographic group. And if leaving the EU may have been an expression of English nationalism or even post-imperial nostalgia, it was also a call for Britain to retreat from the world and to focus on domestic issues.
In Crisis? What Crisis; Rejoice, Rejoice; and A Classless Society Alwyn Turner used popular culture as well as politics to tell the story of Britain in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In All in it Together, he has brought the same technique to the first part of the 21st century, lighting the long path to Brexit with telling details from Britain’s recent cultural and social history as well as its politics.
Public discontent
Turner’s story describes an erosion of trust in many of Britain’s institutions, mostly on account of the excesses and venality of the people who ran them. Bankers, politicians and journalists invited public outrage with the 2008 financial crash, the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal and the 2011 phone hacking revelations at the News of the World.
But public discontent and a feeling of being ignored by government was evident much earlier, as Tony Blair discovered in 2001 when he was confronted at a Birmingham hospital by Sharron Storer. A 38-year-old postmistress, her partner was in the hospital with blood cancer and she berated Blair about the conditions there and his failure to improve them.
“You just walk around, making yourself known. You don’t actually do anything to help anybody,” she told him.
She said later that the prime minister’s smile had triggered her.
“I saw him coming towards me, with that look he has as if everything is perfect with the country, and suddenly I felt this surge of anger,” she said.
Blair and his successors Gordon Brown and David Cameron feature prominently in Turner’s story but he identifies Nigel Farage as the most consequential political figure of the period. He describes Farage’s image as that of “a late-1970s chancer: pinstripe suit, cigar in one hand, glass of malt in the other, the kind of man who’d bunk off work to go to the races, roar with laughter at off-colour jokes, leave no corner uncut when dealing with taxes and expenses”.
Despite his background as a privately educated stockbroker, Farage appealed to the kind of working-class men who enjoyed the comedy of Roy Chubby Brown. Brown, who would greet the audience with “Ey-oop c***s” before a 90-minute succession of gags and stories about sex and sometimes race, was effectively banned from television but was hugely popular as a live performer and on DVDs.
Turner contrasts Brown’s treatment with that of Cambridge-educated Jimmy Carr, whose routine was equally obscene and distasteful, including jokes about rape and disability but who remains welcome on television as a host and panellist. But in his treatment of class, Turner also notes that figures like cookery show hosts Nigella Lawson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who would previously have been viewed as too posh for television, were now becoming national treasures.
Middle-class lout
Public school-educated Jeremy Clarkson became the nation’s favourite lout on Top Gear from 2002, the same year that Boris Johnson made his first appearance on Have I Got News for You.
“All were unmistakably upper-middle class, all were privately educated, and all shared a certain lightness of being, giving the impression that they rather enjoyed life,” Turner writes.
The rise of the posh presenter reflected the growing power of private education in Britain, with more overseas pupils further enriching the country’s most expensive schools. Only 7 per cent of the population went to fee-paying schools but they were disproportionately represented not only in the senior civil service and the professions but in popular culture too.
Turner notes that 42 per cent of British Bafta winners and 19 per cent of Brit Award winners went to private schools, as did more than one-third of British medallists in the 2012 Olympics. He identifies the shift away from working-class performers as a consequence of changes in the industry that reduced financial rewards.
“It helped if one had the security of family support, hence all those privately educated pop stars and comedians. The return of poshness, of an old order, was a function of cultural fragmentation,” he writes.
Turner’s book ends before the Brexit referendum but he says it should have been apparent for years that a critical moment was approaching. The democratisation of culture through the internet and social media had made the public more conscious of the remoteness of the elite but this growing unhappiness lacked a single focus.
Farage provided that focus, channelling popular discontent over everything from immigration and crime to austerity and globalisation into opposition to the EU.
“It was a fair target for an anti-elitist tendency to pick on,” Turner concludes. “But it was ultimately a metaphor, a symbol for everything else that appeared to have gone wrong.”
Denis Staunton is London Editor
