Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union

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The contradictions multiply. Tombs is deeply committed to the two central and intertwined propositions that have propelled Britain towards its deeply uncertain fate as a semi-detached adjunct to that continent. The first is that sovereignty is an absolute concept; it “can be given up, but not shared”. The second is that “there was only one meaningful Brexit, which was to leave the Single Market, the Customs Union and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice”.

Now presumably you voted one way or another in the referendum. As you were writing your book, The Bluffer’s Guide to Brexit, were you trying to be as disinterested as possible? The point that’s important is that this was not just about immigration. In some areas—say Lincolnshire and East Anglia—it related very much to immigration from the EU. But in lots of other areas that was not the case. These are places that have been economically depressed since the deindustrialisation and decline of the manufacturing industry in the 1980s and 1990s, i.e. well before the current wave of immigration from eastern Europe. It’s much more deeply rooted. It relates not just to the social impact of immigration but also of deindustrialisation, trade, technological progress, and so on. Also, some sense of the broader social/cultural impact of Brexit which, of course, is far too early to say. It will, in any case, vary a lot by person and, therefore, I included a novel. A novel is just one person’s very subjective account of how Brexit affects some fictional characters, indirectly rather than directly. But I think that’s the best that you can do at the moment.Leave were very, very good at pushing emotional buttons because people do vote emotionally. No one’s got the time to sit down and look through political manifestos, unless they’ve really got nothing else to do. People do vote with their hearts. He understood this. The author is an expert, deft and fluent guide to the story. He brings clarity of explanation to even the most tortuous twists of the tale while offering penetrating and frequently caustic commentary on the consequences, many of them never intended by their architects. Bale brings clarity to the most tortuous twists of the tale, offering frequently caustic commentary on the consequences

Then there’s a political economy question—whether leaving the EU will, in some ways, make it easier to solve some of these issues or whether it will make it more difficult. That, we don’t know. What we wanted to do was have a first cut at showing what drove the outcome of that referendum in 2016 and what it might mean for British politics from then on. It was very, very early in the game and many of the other books—Robert and Maria’s and a couple of the books that we’re going to come to—are far better at reflecting in a calm and cool way what was going on. But we just wanted to put down our first thoughts on what was happening to the British electorate because of Brexit, and what that might mean. Except this time the EU is the bad guy. Waterloo Station has been renamed Maastricht Terminus and Trafalgar Square Delors Square and so on. Those bits are funny, as is Lestocq, who is this overweight, asthmatic, very much the non-hero.

How to Vote

The price to be paid for this honesty, though, is that for most of the book Tombs is writing less as a scrupulous historical scholar and more as a political polemicist. The difficulty is that the two sides of his persona never really cohere. He makes, for example, a good historical case that the declinist narrative of the 1950s and 60s that led Britain to see membership of the common market as its only route to salvation was exaggerated. But he then bases most of the book on a very similar trope of Europe as “a declining Continent”. What the historian challenges, the polemicist embraces. This is by Tony Connelly who has been RTE, the Irish TV channel’s, man in Brussels for a decade and a half now. Unlike Krastev’s book, it’s quite dry, but the reason I chose it is that Brexit and Ireland is one of the biggest and least understood issues. It’s more understood now, but, at the time of the referendum, it was hardly mentioned by anybody in the campaign. Brexit Unfoldedis a must-read for anyone who cares about what happened following the momentous decision Britain took in the 2016 referendum. Grey is not a neutral observer, but his analysis is scholarly and balanced. He writes with engaging clarity as he navigates through toxic headlines and political slogans. It will be a long time before this illuminating account is rivalled.” Jonathan Dimbleby, broadcaster and author

That’s the weird doublethink that interests me about V for Vendetta. He blows up parliament and in the film it’s beautiful. There are fireworks and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. It’s logically totally ludicrous, but it’s an amazingly powerful scene.He’s clearly given a lot of thought to this stuff, but you don’t have to be a trade expert to find out that the EU doesn’t have a tariff on Chilean wine, and that the tariff on Australian wine isn’t 32%. You’d think that a member of the European Parliament would know that, but you’d be wrong, in this case.