Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union

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It’s this domino effect of Brexit. A simple binary Yes/No choice has so many ramifications in so many areas. And often areas people didn’t really think of.” There is, but it came on top of these broader and more well-established economic drivers. Immigration, for some people, has become a symbol of something that was there already—the fact that some communities were being left behind, the fact that people with lower skills or qualifications are relatively very disadvantaged in the UK labour market. The EU itself came about as a direct response to the Second World War and German militarism, the idea that we Europeans can’t control Germany except as part of a larger bloc. The Germans believed in that and wholeheartedly signed up, so did the French. Of the original six countries in the EU in 1957, five of them had been invaded by Germany and the other one was Germany. The UK hadn’t. It sounds facile, but it’s not. We’ve always had that, ‘we are apart, we are different.’ That has informed attitudes towards the EU on an emotional level very, very deeply. of both the EU and UK and which is both stimulating and anxiety-inducing.' - Professor Richard Whitman, Head of School, Professor of Politics and International Relations, Director of the Global Europe Centre, University of Kent Are there any articles in there that you particularly want to highlight as illustrating something important about Brexit?

In the first instance, Tombs is too true to his profession to peddle the Brexiter myth that continued membership of the EU was incompatible with the historic identity of “our island nation”. He knows that other European countries have “histories of struggles for independence and democracy at least as proud as our own, but which so far they find compatible – if with some strain – with European integration”. Including this very critical issue, namely peace in Northern Ireland. So is the circle square-able?

And Hannan would be happy with that, according to his book. He wants less regulation—and argues that if something is good enough for the US and the EU or indeed Australia, then it’ll be good enough for us. We also know, again both from theory and particularly from empirical evidence, that participation in free trade areas and, even more than free trade areas, very deep integrated economic and trading relationships like the European Union, tends to promote trade. These are the sort of things we know from history and data.

It is hard to imagine a clearer, more detailed, more dispassionate analysis of the journey and execution of the UK’s departure from the European Union than this brilliant and readable book by Chris Grey. Everyone who cares about the issue, for and against, needs this level of expertise and knowledge at their fingertips. Masterly.” Howard Goodall CBE, composer and broadcaster I t has repeatedly been said that Britain’s act of leaving the European Union, known as Brexit, is a process, not a single event. It is also the case that the two sides, Remain and Leave, remain bitterly divided fully six years after the referendum on June 23rd 2016. All this can make it hard to understand or follow the forces that drove Brexit or the changing nature of Britain’s relationship with the eu. Below is a selection of seven books that may help the interested reader to learn more.

How to Vote

It’s very revealing. I don’t think Dominic would claim that he won it himself or that he necessarily knows which of these particular things won it, but it’s a very good insight into how they were thinking. And I do think that there was a contrast with the Remain campaign which was very old-fashioned and did not apply this sort of rigour in analysis that Dominic and his team did. Then, when you get to trade in services and movement of capital, and the role of the City, things get even more complicated. Just the sheer complexity of the issues that are involved both in reshaping our trade relationship with the EU, and in working out what our relationships with other countries in the future will be, is just fascinating. This ties in with a much wider social science literature which people are also looking at in the context of Trump. It’s very important to say that Trump and Brexit are different in all sorts of very important ways, but there is a common strand. Social scientists—like the authors of the book but also authors on the other side of the Atlantic—are looking at this divide between an authoritarian view of the world and a liberal one. David Goodhart’s new book talks about people from ‘somewhere’ versus people from ‘anywhere.’ I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification, to say the least. But there is clearly this dichotomy that is not based on purely economic grounds but is also about social attitudes. Now, we cannot be certain about that for two reasons. One is a logical one which is that the past can’t, by definition, tell you for certain what will happen in the future in the social sciences. It’s not like testing a drug on an illness. There is some uncertainty about whether the future will be like the past. That’s true of almost all economic predictions. But there is a fair amount of historical record to go on.

He is very even handed and he’s very comprehensive. He makes you feel that you’re there. You’re in the negotiations with them, you feel that frenzy of a campaign, the thrill of putting one over on the opposition; of reacting to things very, very fast. He makes it exciting. A superbly written chronicle of how Britain chaotically cut ties with its closest economic partners. Chris Grey’s rigorous analysis of how Brexit unfolded should be mandatory reading for anyone who cares about politics.” Shona Murray, Europe correspondent, Euronews Now fully updated with an afterword covering each element of the Brexit debate since the end of the transition period in 2021, this new edition remains the essential guide to one of the most bitterly contested issues of our time. For what it’s worth, Foster’s analysis appears to be largely shared by Keir Starmer and his team, and it is to them as much as a wider readership that this book is directed. If they are looking for a Brexit strategy that is both grounded in reality and offers not a magic bullet but a picture of how things could be genuinely better, they could do a lot worse.Dan Hannan, in fact, tweeted his outrage at the 32% tariff on Chilean wine. One of the nice things about social media is there are all sorts of people—expert and non-expert—who immediately spot people who are talking nonsense. So this was immediately pointed out. It is. It deliberately doesn’t go into why Scotland or Northern Ireland voted this way or why Newcastle voted this way and Sunderland the other way. That’s not his brief. It is an elitist view. Often those things can be very, very dry and boring and wonky and it’s not at all. It’s absolutely riveting because he writes it like a thriller, which actually it was a lot of the time. He’s a great storyteller.