Is Brexit actually going to happen?

[kabbes]

It’s not that difficult, teuchter

People are dissatisfied and this dissatisfaction led to them voting for Brexit.

Why are they dissatisfied? My contention is that this is rather related to the facts that their wages have been suppressed for 30 years, their public services have been underfunded, privatised and scaled back, their security of employment has been ripped up and their social cohesion has been undermined.

The direct cause of all those things is neoliberalism.

Hence it is a desire to unwind neoliberalism that led to the Brexit vote, regardless of whether or not individual voters articulate it like that or not.

 

[Poi E]

Do you think the 75% remain in Lambeth, Hackney and Haringey was aimed at neo-liberalism?

 

[kabbes]

Do you think the 75% remain in Lambeth, Hackney and Haringey was aimed at neo-liberalism?

I think the 25% vote for Brexit in those areas probably was.

 

[Poi E]

Poorly phrased. How is the Scottish remain/poorer London borough remain vote explained?

 

[pocketscience]

I don't speak to many leave voters in real life and I don't claim to have a representative sample but that seems more representative of the views that I hear, or see in writing online. I never see anyone talking about 'unwinding neoliberalism' except on here or in wordy articles linked to from here.

Maybe you just live a sheltered life?

Try this:

 

[butchersapron]

Do you think the 75% remain in Lambeth, Hackney and Haringey was aimed at neo-liberalism?

Is anyone arguing that the remain vote was a vote against neo-liberalism?

edit: actually don't bother, not getting dragged back into this on this particular thread

 

[mojo pixy]

Poorly phrased. How is the ... poorer London borough remain vote explained?

I have nothing to say about the Scottish ref., but I'd say there's no way to know in those London boroughs exactly who voted for what in the EU ref. They are poor boroughs, but they also have a great many extremely wealthy residents due to the last ~20 years of gentrification and massively rising house prices. So who was it in Hackney, Lambeth and Southwark that voted Remain? Who voted Leave?

Who didn't bother to vote at all?

Fact is there's no way to know - but judging by the national picture I'd say it's a mistake to assume that in those three boroughs it was the poorest who voted Remain.

 

[kabbes]

Poorly phrased. How is the Scottish remain/poorer London borough remain vote explained?

• Other factors were more important to them?
• They are doing alright out of neoliberalism?
• They were fearful of the potential effects of change? (Rightly or wrongly, of course. As this thread demonstrates, there is a lot of confusion out there regarding what the predictions of economists actually mean).
• They are staunch Europhiles?

Take your pick.

 

[bimble]

I don’t know how to link from phone but there’s an interesting new study, showing really tight correlation between people & areas most impacted by specific austerity welfare cuts since 2010 and people voting for ukip. It’s called ‘did austerity cause brexit?’.

 

[Crispy]

I don’t know how to link from phone but there’s an interesting new study, showing really tight correlation between people & areas most impacted by specific austerity welfare cuts since 2010 and people voting for ukip. It’s called ‘did austerity cause brexit?’.

I just came sprinting to the thread to post it

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econo.../cage/manage/publications/381-2018_fetzer.pdf

 

[SpackleFrog]

since when has an electorate ever been 'generally satisfied with society as it currently is"?

YEAH. Fucking moaning proles.

 

[DexterTCN]

I don’t know how to link from phone but there’s an interesting new study, showing really tight correlation between people & areas most impacted by specific austerity welfare cuts since 2010 and people voting for ukip. It’s called ‘did austerity cause brexit?’.

hold your thumb on the hyperlink until it comes up with options, select 'copy'. go to urban and hold your thumb in the reply box until it gives you options again and select 'paste'.

 

[kabbes]

Oof, that’s a hell of a 100 page read. One for the commute or the weekend, I think. Thanks for posting it.

 

[MightyTibberton]

Austerity and cuts like bedroom tax directly led to Brexit, academic research suggests - Politics live

There's a brief write-up in the Guardian, but it's on the live blog so you'll have to scroll to find it. . .

 

[Crispy]

It's not too bad kabbes. Only 50 pages is the actual paper. The rest is diagrams, data and appendices.

I'll paste in some of the diagrams:



(figure 2 shows the same data by colouring in maps)



So what you're seeing here is that socioeconomic status didn't particularly make you a UKIP voter, until 2010-2013, when Austerity started to bite. Fig. 4 shows that inflection very clearly. Except for pensions of course.



Here's correlation between the impact of specific cuts to benefits and the correlating rise in UKIP votes:

Conclusion: Piss people off by taking away their benefits and services, and they'll vote Leave.

 

[kabbes]

I like their approach. Look for the step change and ask what the prevailing influences might have been, then test them.

 

[Crispy]

Step 1: Austerity
Step 2: .....
Step 3: Brexit

Whether they go into depth on Step 2 will mean reading the whole thing...

 

[teuchter]

It’s not that difficult, teuchter

People are dissatisfied and this dissatisfaction led to them voting for Brexit.

Why are they dissatisfied? My contention is that this is rather related to the facts that their wages have been suppressed for 30 years, their public services have been underfunded, privatised and scaled back, their security of employment has been ripped up and their social cohesion has been undermined.

The direct cause of all those things is neoliberalism.

Hence it is a desire to unwind neoliberalism that led to the Brexit vote, regardless of whether or not individual voters articulate it like that or not.

A reaction in response to things which you or I might say are the direct results of neoliberalism is not the same thing as a desire to unwind neoliberalism. It's not a matter of 'articulation'. It's a matter of what causes individual voters ascribe to the things that they are dissatisfied with.

It's an important distinction because what happens politically after Brexit completely depends on what people think are the causes of their dissatisfaction. If people see underfunded public services as a result of 'neoliberalism' then yes they may vote for a government that actively unwinds neoliberal policies. If people see underfunded public services as a result of immigration stretching the system, or money disappearing to Brussels, or Brussels making up rules that stop us funding our public services properly, then things are different. The latter is not an 'articulation' of the former, it's fundamentally different thinking.

 

[kabbes]

What they subsequently blame doesn’t change the fundamental actual root cause of their dissatisfaction, though.

 

[Ranbay]

Step 1: Austerity
Step 2: .....
Step 3: Brexit

Whether they go into depth on Step 2 will mean reading the whole thing...

Step 4: Profit

 

[SpackleFrog]

If people see underfunded public services as a result of 'neoliberalism' then yes they may vote for a government that actively unwinds neoliberal policies. If people see underfunded public services as a result of immigration stretching the system, or money disappearing to Brussels, or Brussels making up rules that stop us funding our public services properly, then things are different.

What if they think both of these things?

 

[not-bono-ever]

Travelling atm so cannot download this just yet - Warwick are usually pretty good - does this stand up ?

 

[teuchter]

Maybe you just live a sheltered life?

Try this:

There's no doubt I'm 'sheltered' from Leave voters. I'm a middle class scot with a professional job living in London in the country's most 'remain' borough.

What am I supposed to take away from that video, made by a London-based film company following one Lexiter driving around asking people why they voted Leave, several of whom quite clearly had different reasons from her? One guy mentions immigration as the first issue, another wants Britain to be Britain again. Someone thinks austerity has been imposed by the EU.

 

[teuchter]

What they subsequently blame doesn’t change the fundamental actual root cause of their dissatisfaction, though.

I'm not saying that it does.

 

[Santino]

I'm not saying that it does.

What are you saying?

 

[teuchter]

What if they think both of these things?

Then maybe someone can provide convincing evidence that they do.

 

[kabbes]

Then maybe someone can provide convincing evidence that they do.

Like Warwick seem to have done, you mean?

(Adding an interpretation of what caused austerity, of course)

Well, they seem to have provided evidence that links austerity directly to the Brexit vote, anyway. So then it comes down to the causes of austerity to find the root cause of the Brexit vote

 

[SpackleFrog]

Then maybe someone can provide convincing evidence that they do.

I wasn't saying they do (I do think they do but how can you show evidence for people thinking two potentially contradictory things?) I just asked what it would mean to you if a lot of people held both beliefs simultaneously.

 

[teuchter]

I wasn't saying they do (I do think they do but how can you show evidence for people thinking two potentially contradictory things?) I just asked what it would mean to you if a lot of people held both beliefs simultaneously.

What it means to me? My main interest here is whether Brexit really opens a possibility for political change in the UK - which seems one of the main Lexit arguments. An indicator of the plausibility of that happening would be evidence that people voted for Brexit as a conscious first step towards unwinding many years of neoliberal policy. Because that would make it seem realistic to hope that the second step would be voting for an administration that did that unwinding. Anyone who thinks those two (potentially but not necessarily contradictory) things, by definition, is someone who believes that neoliberal policy is at the root of the problems they face, and if there are a lot of those people then there would be hope that a government could be elected on a manifesto of doing the unwinding.

Evidence that the Brexit vote is linked directly to consequences of austerity is not the same thing. I don't doubt that link. But it doesn't tell us much about what those same voters are going to vote for post-Brexit. Because that entirely depends on what they see the causes as. Not what some internet forum eggheads say the causes are.

 

[teuchter]

My analogy. Someone feels unwell. Their doctor prescribes some medication. They go to a pharmacist which sells homepathic remedies as well as the medication.

If they take the medication they'll probably see some improvement and if they take the homeopathic stuff they probably won't.

So, how do we predict what they're going to do in the pharmacy? The doctor might have stacks of evidence about the root cause of their ailment and the effectiveness of the medication, but that's irrelevant. The only information that's useful is information about what the patient believes. That's what determines what happens when they get to the pharmacy counter.

I don't want the doctor's evidence. I want the evidence that shows me what the patient believes, and this is the evidence that's harder to come by.

Who knows what people will willfully misinterpret from this analogy but that's the fun of urban.