What will happen to Britain if Brexit is cancelled? According to the writer Larry Elliott, the UK will return to the status quo of the last few decades. That is, the country will revert to a regime of liberal globalisation that has mainly benefited the metropolitan middle classes. Elliott makes this prediction on the basis that no-Brexit will dampen popular “demand for deep and urgent reform” and so “the real grievances of those who voted for Brexit will be quietly forgotten”.
Those who want to overturn Brexit have said it is necessary to “address the grievances of those leave voters who were protesting about the state of our politics and economy”. This suggests that, if Brexit is stopped, a reversion to the days before June 2016 isn’t necessarily on the cards. Yet there are grounds for thinking that Elliott has a point.
While ardent remainers typically cherish the economic and cultural openness of liberal globalisation, they often fail to appreciate this phenomenon’s impact on many leave voters. Since the 1980s this form of globalisation has decimated blue collar jobs and unsettled attachments to community and place. For working class northerners and so-called Middle Englanders in particular, these changes have to varying degrees been felt as losses of livelihood, esteem and culture. And that’s not all.