Sally Tomlinson

Five years on, it's still a mystery to most of us why the the Brexit referendum was allowed to happen, why it came out as it did, and how the British government managed to convince themselves that, having held it, they were obliged to act on it, even though there was no sane way to disentangle all the things in British life that had EU membership built into them, starting with the Irish border.

Professors Dorling (a social geographer) and Tomlinson (an expert on the complicated relationship of race, ethnicity and education) look into the whole sorry story with a focus on the way it all relates to perceptions of (innate) British "greatness", which of course all turn out to be predicated on distorted folk-memories of colonialism, Trafalgar, and the two world wars.

The book is a bit scattershot in its approach: there is some interesting stuff about how the inertia of the education system kept on teaching us about imperial glory well into the seventies, about who actually voted "leave", and about the relationship between inequality, privilege, wealth, the Tory party and the billionaires who funded the advertising for the "leave" campaign. It's all very topical — including a final chapter added in the second edition that brings the story up to summer 2020 — and wittily presented. But it rarely goes into very much detail, and it doesn't really come up with a single clear explanation for why it all happened. Probably because there isn't one, or if there is it will only start to become clear when the dust has had a bit longer to settle.

As it is, it tells us little more than that there were a few rich people who had a personal interest in leaving the EU, a few ambitious politicians prepared to identify with any cause that would advance their careers, and a very narrow vote that was largely determined by the different level of motivation to go out and vote between "leave" and "remain" supporters. Most of that we almost certainly knew already.

What I did find unexpected was Dorling's analysis of the referendum voting, where he points out that most commentators, trained to reading election results in terms of which areas are red and blue on the map, forgot that this was a vote based on aggregate numbers, not the local outcomes in voting-districts. According to his reasoning, it was not decided by the famous "working-class leave vote" in places like Stoke and Sunderland that so spooked the Labour Party, but by middle-class people in prosperous (Tory) districts in the South and South-West of England, where the population and the turn-out were both much higher. In the North, most working-class people didn't bother to vote at all, but there was generally — as you would expect — a higher level of turn-out among "leave" supporters than among people who supported the status quo, resulting in all those districts changing colour on the map.… (plus d'informations)