Back on the day of the referendum, four and a half years ago, a curious thing happened as I took my children to school. At the time there was a spate of newspaper features about children saying things that were supposedly profound, which were clearly just them parroting their right-on parents: “Gender is just a word we give to things” or “no human can be illegal, mommy”.

I used to have a regular chuckle at these absurdly pompous New York Times features, and then, on the morning of the vote, my seven-year-old daughter said to me: “Daddy, I don’t want to leave the European Union”. I half-smiled because it had actually definitely happened, and she didn’t get it from me; I just assumed she was repeating something her teachers had told her.

But it was only half a smile, because having been a full-on Eurosceptic for many years, at that point I was riddled with doubt. And as the Brexit process has “advanced”, those doubts have soured into regrets.

People often marvel at how reluctant others are to change their minds about political issues, but politics is hormonal. After the achingly dull 1994 World Cup final, in which Italy lost to Brazil on penalties, researchers found that testosterone levels among Italian men watching the game had fallen by almost 27%. That is why football fans frequently cry in defeat; it’s the body’s response to the shock of defeat, and I imagine something similar is going on with our politics. Realising that your long-held beliefs are mistaken is troubling and emotionally draining, and so few change their minds over big issues — even when, in some cases, the bodies start piling up.

My Eurosceptism was on a fundamental level about the nation-state, which I considered (and still do) the best means of organising society. I’m naturally suspicious of bodies beyond the control of voters, not because I believe in the wisdom of “the people”, but because of the human tendency to self-interest. Technocratic elites are also prone to groupthink; they form their own orthodoxies because they tend to be sociable and so beliefs become markers of belonging and status.

I also thought that democracy was impossible in a body as large as the EU because of the lack of a demos. The euro has been disastrous for countries such as Italy and Greece, but the people in charge — Charlemagne’s descendants — didn’t regard the Greeks as their countrymen. (And if you’re reading this on a train in the north of England, I appreciate that nationality is not a guarantee of solidarity, but it is maybe a requisite.)

I was well-informed about the European issue. I remember reading once that Eurosceptics were much more knowledgeable about the issue than the general public, and took it as confirmation of rightness — as it turned out, the entirely wrong conclusion.

I looked forward to Britain leaving, and genuinely thought we would enjoy better relations with our neighbours. No more bickering, as had been a constant of the Nineties when I was first politically aware. I had voted UKIP in the European elections, which ironically gave people outside the mainstream their biggest voice in politics, far more than the Westminster system. Four months before the referendum I had started working for Eurosceptic Tory MP Owen Paterson; the original remit had been to help with a think-tank he was setting up, but everything got swallowed by the Brexit referendum, as with all British politics in the coming years. So I ended up writing speeches about the EU and reading a vast amount about its workings.

More from this author

Welcome to the new Middle Ages

By Ed West

And as I did, I began to have far more serious doubts. I learned, some time later, that climate sceptics also know a fair bit more about their issue than the public at large: more knowledge tends to correlate with more bias, because you learn what you want to learn. The same with Euroscepticism, because in reality the subject was, to use that centrist cliché, far more complicated than anyone could imagine.

It wasn’t just that the British newspapers had told lies about the EU down the years — we all knew about the bendy banana stories, caricatures of a system which was nevertheless genuinely ridiculous. Rather, there were deeper distortions, so that Brussels was blamed for a lot of things that were just unavoidable market forces, technology and globalisation; likewise Westminster politicians used the EU as an excuse to avoid doing things they didn’t want to do.

There are advantages to leaving, of course, in regulatory matters and lawmaking, and we all knew that sovereignty would be a trade-off with short-term economic certainty. But the more I read about it, the more it seemed like there was no form of exiting the EU that wouldn’t bring enormous drawbacks, larger than the limited benefits.

And the problem was that Brexiteers wanted contradictory things; some of us wanted to put the brakes on globalisation, and to have a more egalitarian, high-wage society; others wanted more economic freedom. Clearly those two things contradict each other. Some wanted EEA membership; some wanted out altogether.

As for democracy, the dull truth is that international institutions have to be remote and undemocratic. As global trade has become more complicated, so the rules and bodies behind them have had to become more arcane; governing and rule-making in the 21^st century has to be beyond the understanding of most people (journalists included).

All the arguments I had previously used to justify leaving, in particular the hope of entering a sort of half-way house with EFTA, I just no longer believed. All that was left was the emotional reasoning; the elephant was in charge, while the rider was basically asleep.

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What if Leave and Remain switched sides?

By Ed West

As Richard Nixon aide Kevin Phillips once said, politics is all about knowing who hates whom, and the European question was driven by social antagonism.

In my case — and many others — this wasn’t towards the EU, its emblems or even the fabled “eurocrats”. The EU flag did and does fill me with indifference. The inevitable superstate the continentals were heading towards probably suited people in Lombardy, Alsace or the various other provinces of core Europe in which gradations of language and culture existed in one continuum. It just didn’t suit us, for reasons of geography and history.

The antagonism was towards other British people, a certain sort of London politico type who reads one of the quartet of the Guardian, Economist, FT or Times, who sees themselves as being on the right side of history yet was wrong about the euro, probably wrong about Iraq, identifies with radicalism but is passionately snobbish towards the provincial and non-academic, and has naked class interests at heart. The sort of person who loves Europe but is in reality far more interested in American politics, and almost certainly went to Oxbridge and likes to tweet about “the lack of diversity at my alma mater”.

Having said that, I’m also repulsed by a certain type of Tory Eurosceptic – purple-faced golf club bores who opine about “what this country needs” and “you can’t say anything anymore”. I don’t trust them, either. And the more I listened to the Brexiteers, the more I came to the belief that they were living in cloud cuckoo land, and were going to sink the economy and also endanger conservatism for a generation.

Suggested reading

Get ready for Fortress Europe

By Aris Roussinos

That social hatred has increased since, to levels not seen in England in generations. And even as I have come to conclude that the Remainers were right all along, I also dislike them more than ever. That same insufferable London type has become even more insufferable, knowing that on the big question they are right but totally unconcerned about the root causes of other people’s unhappiness, and how in particular low-skilled immigration helped to break the social contract. (Of course there are benefits to free movement, but class and income-wise the costs and benefits are incredibly lopsided.)

And yet annoying or unappealing people can be right — indeed they often are.

Since that vote our politics has become more emotional and visceral, giving birth to a new sort of public figure, people like Arron Banks, Jolyon Maugham and a dozen other political celebrities, without whose daily presence we would all be much happier and better people.

It’s characterised by MPs like Mark Francois prattling on about D-Day – because it’s always the bloody war for these people — and David Lammy, once a seemingly normal, level-headed man but now transformed into a hysteric comparing Brexiteers to Nazis while — hilariously — writing a book about the dangers of “tribalism”.

Certainly we are more tribal, and the referendum has caused British people to identify in tribal ways unseen since the 17^th century, Remainer and Leaver are far stronger affiliations than Labour or Tory were. It has, paradoxically, been a very parochial affair, and even the EU flags flying from London windows are in this context symbols of a particular British identity.

Yet to some extent it has made many British people feel fully European for the first time, me included. On holiday last year I felt deep regret at the thought of separation from our fellow Europeans, especially while in Holland, with which Britain has an especially strong connection.

My sense of being a European has also grown as the potential menace of the Chinese, Russian and Turkish regimes has become clearer. Most of all, though, has been the realisation this year that American political culture is an irredeemably corrosive and dangerous force.

At the time of the vote, I replied to my daughter that it was more complicated than she realised, and I’d explain to her when she was older. She’s now at secondary school, old enough to understand far more about the world, and if I’m honest I’m now none the wiser.

Perhaps it could have been handled better. But it’s feeble for Eurosceptics to complain that they didn’t get the Brexit they wanted, nor is it any comfort to point to root causes, or to blame Remainers for trying to reverse the vote. Ultimately, if Brexit turns out to be a mistake, it’s the fault of Brexiteers alone. After all, taking control means taking responsibility, too.

This article first appeared on 10 December, 2020

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History is published by Constable. The paperback, retitled Tory Boy, comes out in January.

Back on the day of the referendum, four and a half years ago, a curious thing happened as I took my children to school. At the time there was a spate of newspaper features about children saying things that were supposedly profound, which were clearly just them parroting their right-on parents: “Gender is just a word we give to things” or “no human can be illegal, mommy”.

I used to have a regular chuckle at these absurdly pompous New York Times features, and then, on the morning of the vote, my seven-year-old daughter said to me: “Daddy, I don’t want to leave the European Union”. I half-smiled because it had actually definitely happened, and she didn’t get it from me; I just assumed she was repeating something her teachers had told her.

But it was only half a smile, because having been a full-on Eurosceptic for many years, at that point I was riddled with doubt. And as the Brexit process has “advanced”, those doubts have soured into regrets.

People often marvel at how reluctant others are to change their minds about political issues, but politics is hormonal. After the achingly dull 1994 World Cup final, in which Italy lost to Brazil on penalties, researchers found that testosterone levels among Italian men watching the game had fallen by almost 27%. That is why football fans frequently cry in defeat; it’s the body’s response to the shock of defeat, and I imagine something similar is going on with our politics. Realising that your long-held beliefs are mistaken is troubling and emotionally draining, and so few change their minds over big issues — even when, in some cases, the bodies start piling up.

My Eurosceptism was on a fundamental level about the nation-state, which I considered (and still do) the best means of organising society. I’m naturally suspicious of bodies beyond the control of voters, not because I believe in the wisdom of “the people”, but because of the human tendency to self-interest. Technocratic elites are also prone to groupthink; they form their own orthodoxies because they tend to be sociable and so beliefs become markers of belonging and status.

I also thought that democracy was impossible in a body as large as the EU because of the lack of a demos. The euro has been disastrous for countries such as Italy and Greece, but the people in charge — Charlemagne’s descendants — didn’t regard the Greeks as their countrymen. (And if you’re reading this on a train in the north of England, I appreciate that nationality is not a guarantee of solidarity, but it is maybe a requisite.)

I was well-informed about the European issue. I remember reading once that Eurosceptics were much more knowledgeable about the issue than the general public, and took it as confirmation of rightness — as it turned out, the entirely wrong conclusion.

I looked forward to Britain leaving, and genuinely thought we would enjoy better relations with our neighbours. No more bickering, as had been a constant of the Nineties when I was first politically aware. I had voted Ukip in the European elections, which ironically gave people outside the mainstream their biggest voice in politics, far more than the Westminster system. Four months before the referendum I had started working for Eurosceptic Tory MP Owen Paterson; the original remit had been to help with a think-tank he was setting up, but everything got swallowed by the Brexit referendum, as with all British politics in the coming years. So I ended up writing speeches about the EU and reading a vast amount about its workings.

More from this author

Welcome to the new Middle Ages

By Ed West

And as I did, I began to have far more serious doubts. I learned, some time later, that climate sceptics also know a fair bit more about their issue than the public at large: more knowledge tends to correlate with more bias, because you learn what you want to learn. The same with Euroscepticism, because in reality the subject was, to use that centrist cliché, far more complicated than anyone could imagine.

It wasn’t just that the British newspapers had told lies about the EU down the years — we all knew about the bendy banana stories, caricatures of a system which was nevertheless genuinely ridiculous. Rather, there were deeper distortions, so that Brussels was blamed for a lot of things that were just unavoidable market forces, technology and globalisation; likewise Westminster politicians used the EU as an excuse to avoid doing things they didn’t want to do.

There are advantages to leaving, of course, in regulatory matters and lawmaking, and we all knew that sovereignty would be a trade-off with short-term economic certainty. But the more I read about it, the more it seemed like there was no form of exiting the EU that wouldn’t bring enormous drawbacks, larger than the limited benefits.

And the problem was that Brexiteers wanted contradictory things; some of us wanted to put the brakes on globalisation, and to have a more egalitarian, high-wage society; others wanted more economic freedom. Clearly those two things contradict each other. Some wanted EEA membership; some wanted out altogether.

As for democracy, the dull truth is that international institutions have to be remote and undemocratic. As global trade has become more complicated, so the rules and bodies behind them have had to become more arcane; governing and rule-making in the 21^st century has to be beyond the understanding of most people (journalists included).

All the arguments I had previously used to justify leaving, in particular the hope of entering a sort of half-way house with EFTA, I just no longer believed. All that was left was the emotional reasoning; the elephant was in charge, while the rider was basically asleep.

More from this author

What if Leave and Remain switched sides?

By Ed West

As Richard Nixon aide Kevin Phillips once said, politics is all about knowing who hates whom, and the European question was driven by social antagonism.

In my case — and many others — this wasn’t towards the EU, its emblems or even the fabled “eurocrats”. The EU flag did and does fill me with indifference. The inevitable superstate the continentals were heading towards probably suited people in Lombardy, Alsace or the various other provinces of core Europe in which gradations of language and culture existed in one continuum. It just didn’t suit us, for reasons of geography and history.

The antagonism was towards other British people, a certain sort of London politico type who reads one of the quartet of the Guardian, Economist, FT or Times, who sees themselves as being on the right side of history yet was wrong about the euro, probably wrong about Iraq, identifies with radicalism but is passionately snobbish towards the provincial and non-academic, and has naked class interests at heart. The sort of person who loves Europe but is in reality far more interested in American politics, and almost certainly went to Oxbridge and likes to tweet about “the lack of diversity at my alma mater”.

Having said that, I’m also repulsed by a certain type of Tory Eurosceptic – purple-faced golf club bores who opine about “what this country needs” and “you can’t say anything anymore”. I don’t trust them, either. And the more I listened to the Brexiteers, the more I came to the belief that they were living in cloud cuckoo land, and were going to sink the economy and also endanger conservatism for a generation.

Suggested reading

Get ready for Fortress Europe

By Aris Roussinos

That social hatred has increased since, to levels not seen in England in generations. And even as I have come to conclude that the Remainers were right all along, I also dislike them more than ever. That same insufferable London type has become even more insufferable, knowing that on the big question they are right but totally unconcerned about the root causes of other people’s unhappiness, and how in particular low-skilled immigration helped to break the social contract. (Of course there are benefits to free movement, but class and income-wise the costs and benefits are incredibly lopsided.)

And yet annoying or unappealing people can be right — indeed they often are.

Since that vote our politics has become more emotional and visceral, giving birth to a new sort of public figure, people like Arron Banks, Jolyon Maugham and a dozen other political celebrities, without whose daily presence we would all be much happier and better people.

It’s characterised by MPs like Mark Francois prattling on about D-Day – because it’s always the bloody war for these people — and David Lammy, once a seemingly normal, level-headed man but now transformed into a hysteric comparing Brexiteers to Nazis while — hilariously — writing a book about the dangers of “tribalism”.

Certainly we are more tribal, and the referendum has caused British people to identify in tribal ways unseen since the 17^th century, Remainer and Leaver are far stronger affiliations than Labour or Tory were. It has, paradoxically, been a very parochial affair, and even the EU flags flying from London windows are in this context symbols of a particular British identity.

Yet to some extent it has made many British people feel fully European for the first time, me included. On holiday last year I felt deep regret at the thought of separation from our fellow Europeans, especially while in Holland, with which Britain has an especially strong connection.

My sense of being a European has also grown as the potential menace of the Chinese, Russian and Turkish regimes has become clearer. Most of all, though, has been the realisation this year that American political culture is an irredeemably corrosive and dangerous force.

At the time of the vote, I replied to my daughter that it was more complicated than she realised, and I’d explain to her when she was older. She’s now at secondary school, old enough to understand far more about the world, and if I’m honest I’m now none the wiser.

Perhaps it could have been handled better. But it’s feeble for Eurosceptics to complain that they didn’t get the Brexit they wanted, nor is it any comfort to point to root causes, or to blame Remainers for trying to reverse the vote. Ultimately, if Brexit turns out to be a mistake, it’s the fault of Brexiteers alone. After all, taking control means taking responsibility, too.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History is published by Constable. The paperback, retitled Tory Boy, comes out in January.

Indeed, if you look at the overall figures for the electorate in Scotland, and include those who didn’t vote in 2016 — a group that is perennially ignored in this sort of discussion — you find that 42% of adult Scots voted to Remain, another 26% voted to Leave, and 33% didn’t vote at all.

In other words, sit 10 random Scots around a table, perhaps at one of the many election-themed Christmas parties next month, and four will be Remain voters, three will be Leave voters, and three will have stayed home. The dining partner you turn to first will be more likely not to have voted Remain than to have done so.

(If this was an academic article we would now have a lengthy footnote about the need to treat overall turnout figures — and therefore statistics about non-voters — with a bit of caution. It’s not an academic article, so you’ll have to take our word for it. But even so, our basic point stands.)

The same sort of claim is often made about London — which as everyone knows is packed full of metrosexual Remainers — despite it being a city where 40% voted Leave; or, on the other side of the coin, about somewhere like the West Midlands, the most Leave-voting region in the UK, but where 41% voted to Remain. Of the 12 regions or nations in the UK, only one of them (Scotland) had a split more extreme than 60:40 one way or the other, and even there, only very marginally so.

Of course, regions are big places, which contain multitudes. You get more polarisation if you look at smaller geographic units, whether it’s the local authorities by which the referendum results were originally counted (but which are of very uneven size), or the smaller parliamentary constituencies (for which, in most cases, we have estimates). But most of those are pretty diverse, too.

Of the local authorities, for example, the majority were no more divided than 60:40 one way or the other, and just 24 (that is, 6% of all the local authority counting areas) saw a pattern of voting that was divided by 70:30 or more. Of the 650 parliamentary constituencies, 59% were at most divided by 60:40, and just 59 (or 9%) saw a division greater than 70:30.

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Places such as Boston (on one end of the spectrum), where 76% of people voted Leave, or Lambeth (at the other), which was 79% Remain, really are the exceptions. Most areas are just not that polarised. And even in these outliers, once you factor in the non-voters, the apparent overwhelming hegemony of the “winning” side is much reduced. Walk down a street in Boston, for example, and under 60% of people you encounter will have voted Leave. In Lambeth, the most Remain-voting authority in the UK, only 53% of all those who could vote, voted Remain.

We’re not saying that regional variations didn’t exist in votes and views on Brexit. Of course they did, and do, and we’ve both happily written about them in the past. But they were differences of scale or direction, and were often quite small; yet instead of being treated as such, they’ve become fossilised into a series of false binaries that now dominate far too much of our political discussion. There isn’t, for example, really any such thing as a “Leave constituency” or a “Remain city” — although we will grant an exception to Gibraltar (96% Remain), where you do have to feel a bit sorry for the 4%.

Nor are we trying to claim that Brexit does not divide Britain. It does, and in important ways. People identify as Leave or Remain, in a greater way than they do with political parties, and see the world through these lenses — just as they used to view politics through partisan eyes.

Multiple pieces of research have shown the extent to which this can make us judge people or not want them as their friends. A new study, in a book we’ve edited (and which is available for a very reasonable price) shows that the referendum vote can even affect how who you want to move in next door to you, far more so than any of the other variables that were tested.

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At this point you might, fairly, object that everyone happily refers to parliamentary constituencies as Labour or Conservative or whatever, despite the fact that not everyone in those constituencies will have voted for the winning party. You could even argue the problem is worse in Westminster elections, where because of the electoral system it is usually the case these days that the local MP is someone most voters did not back .

Yet this seems to us slightly different. For one thing, in our first-past-the-post system, a party “winning” a seat actually matters — each seat won changes the outcome, in a way that doesn’t apply in the referendum. And besides, maybe we would anyway do better to remember that while a party may win a seat, they don’t own it or all the people in it.

You might also object that we are both massive hypocrites, because we’re pretty certain that if you searched the things we have written in the past, you would almost certainly find examples of us committing these very errors. To which we can only plead guilty, and pray in our defence Luke’s gospel, chapter 15, verse 7: “I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance”.

And you could also argue that we’re over-reacting, that these phrases are just useful shorthands, and that everyone knows they are not to be taken as absolute. Sure, shorthands are fine and often essential — except we would argue that not everyone does know this, and that through repetition alone shorthands can come to be seen as true.

Too much of the discussion following the referendum has focused on the majority outcomes in areas, and not enough on the presence of minorities. That tendency has real consequences for what policies we get on things like Brexit, and whose voices get heard.

The same applies, by the way, to much of the discussion of the socio-economic or demographic cleavages in the Brexit vote. You know all the clichés: the middle class voted Remain, as did the young and BME voters and graduates; the working class, the old and those who did not go to university voted Leave.

True, the majority of each of these groups did indeed back that outcome (although again, in several cases, once you factor in non-voters even that doesn’t always hold), but there were millions, literally millions, of exceptions, who too often get written out of the narrative. There are a whole series of overlooked Brexit tribes — old Remainers, graduate Leavers, BME Leavers, working-class Remainers, middle-class Leavers — who still get almost completely ignored in most discussion.

Ditto for party divisions. We hear very little about Conservative Remainers, even though their behaviour was one of the key drivers of the outcome at the last election, and people seem to completely ignore SNP-voting Leavers (a group that, proportionately, was about the same size as Labour Leavers, and were also crucial to the 2017 result).

With Labour, curiously, the opposite occurs: we hear a lot about Labour Leavers, probably too much, and not quite enough about Labour Remainers, despite the latter making up the majority of Labour supporters in 2016, 2017 and now.

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These two errors frequently come together when discussing the relationship between political parties and the referendum. Just because a majority of people in a constituency voted Leave, and just because a constituency returned a Labour MP, this does not mean that a majority of Labour voters in that seat voted Leave. This has now been pointed out so often that it should not need repetition, but it clearly does, because people keep on making this mistake.

The most recent debunking came from British Election Study data, which showed that even in seats where a majority voted to Leave, most Labour voters in that seat had voted to Remain. Yet in turn, much of the coverage of this work then suffered from exactly the same problem of focussing only on the majority group.

In their haste to argue that this showed that Labour needed to please its Remain-backing voters, many commentators overlooked that the very same study showed significant minorities (around 40%) of Labour voters in these seats who had voted Leave. It would be a brave electoral strategy that would stick two fingers up to 40% of your support.

If you are on Twitter, we would recommend an account called @VoterBritish. It’s a bot, which is tweeting details of the thousands of people who took part in the British Election Study, one respondent at a time. Each tweet summarises key information about the individual, and then reveals who they voted for.

It constantly surprises you: you read that someone favours hanging, wants to grind down the poor, loves Brexit and favours tax cuts, but then discover they voted Remain and Liberal Democrat. (We’ve made that one up, although there probably is someone like that lurking in the data set somewhere.)

The bot is a reminder of the point we are trying to make: that the statements we often make about people in elections or referenda are, or at least should be, probabilistic, not absolute. It’s not that there are not under-pinning factors driving the way people vote, merely that voters are much more complicated than most discussion of this sort of analysis ever seems allows.

Even individual voters are complex and contradictory, so this will certainly be true of any group of voters — whether we define them by place, or profession, or past vote or anything else.

Philip Cowley and Robert Ford’s Sex, Lies, and Politics: The Secret Influences That Drive our Political Choices is published by Biteback.