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.
The late Tony Judt pointed out that, when confronted with disruptive change, people look to their political “representatives to protect them”. Yet in the decades leading up to the Brexit vote, British politicians typically treated citizens at the sharp end of globalisation with disdain. The political elite did this because their values, electoral interests and social affinities weren’t in-sync with these voters, but instead were increasingly aligned to the metropolitan middle classes, the part of society most supportive of globalisation.
This trend became self-reinforcing. Seeing that politics wasn’t for them, many blue collar and provincial voters stopped participating in elections. As a result, the political field was left open for further metropolitan entrenchment, with the effect that liberal globalisation became still more dominant.
UKIP’s insurgency during David Cameron’s time at Downing Street partially broke this cycle. For many of those excluded from the political mainstream, this party gave expression to their demand for change. However, the real rupture came with the EU referendum. The ‘left out’ parts of the electorate saw this as an opportunity to force the ruling class to take notice of them and bring about a new political settlement. As the sociologist Lisa McKenzie puts it, leave’s victory made these citizens “visible for the first time in generations”.
This development is tenuous, however. Because they were on the margins for so long, many of those who backed leave feel a visceral mistrust of mainstream politics. Whether it comes via parliament or a second referendum, Brexit’s cancellation would merely confirm what those who were ‘left out’ still suspect: that politics isn’t interested in what they have to say.
And if Britain stays in the EU, recent history shows that there’s a good chance many leave voters would withdraw from democratic politics, which would allow the metropolitan middle classes to have the run of the political game once more. As Elliott argues, therefore, it is certainly plausible that cancelling Brexit would allow power to flow back to those vested in the status quo, making its resurrection highly likely. That wouldn’t be good for British democracy.