Britain after Brexit, The Ramsay Murray Lecture 2022

okay good evening everyone good evening everyone i'm roger mosey the master of sewing college and i'd like to welcome you to this year's ramsey murray lecture being held in person at the quarry white house auditorium in the college and here with us we have an array of sewer knights including some current students members of the public and distinguished academic visitors and they are supplemented virtually on youtube by some hundreds of people joining us online you're very welcome too and um everyone i hope will enjoy this lecture and the ramsey murray lecture is the latest in a series that we owe to the bequest of lieutenant colonel alexander ramsey murray who was a loyal alumnus and his brief for these lectures was agreeably broad in that they should be on a subject of military or historical or general interest which gives us a lot of choice as it happens in recent years we've been on something of a world tour in 2015 bridget kendall talked presently about putin's russia in 2016 theodore scotch poll lectured about obama's legacy under the looming shadow of donald trump in 2018 frank gardiner spoke about the middle east and then last year rana mitta added china to our itinerary now i must admit that we had decided against the eu and brexit in the years immediately after the referendum because we thought there was too much daily headline coverage and too much instant analysis but we felt now that with the pieces beginning to settle this was a perfect time to look closer to home and to examine the topic of britain after brexit there is nobody more qualified to do so than our lecturer professor anand menon he is the director of the uk in a changing europe a collection of academics who try to throw light rather than heat onto this most incendiary of topics he is also professor of european politics and foreign affairs at king's college london you dallas have heard him on the radio and seen him on tv programs including question time where he has a role of explaining to overexcited partisans that the issues aren't as simple as they claim or sometimes just that they're wrong on his twitter biography maybe because of that he describes himself as a bitter and twisted observer of politics but also cites the sketch writer quentin letts describing him as a slightly matey politics dom now professor menon is going to speak to us for just under an hour and then there'll be a chance for questions from our audience here in the auditorium um i should add that one other thing about anand is he is a fan of leeds united and he was talking about that actually on bbc news only last night now you may know that leads have a crucial match at arsenal this weekend and i am an arsenal fan so to be on the safe side the question answer session we were chaired by our senior tutor dr mike sill who is a leeds fan and now professor menon i should say my own bloody son's an arsenal fan so uh you know you can't it's a bit sad thank you so much for that kind welcome it's always a great pleasure to be in cambridge i mean that advisedly because i live in oxford and whilst it's a pleasure to be in cambridge it's an absolute pain in the bum to get to cambridge i feel like i've crossed several continents today already uh in getting here and congratulations to all of you for having nothing better to do on a friday night than listen to an hour on brexit uh you must all have very very empty lives uh so brexit actually is a moving target uh and brexit's impact on britain is a moving target uh i sort of hoped when you know we got the deal and stuff that i could just keep doing the same lecture over and over and over again until i died or retired because that was it but actually something new happens all the time and this i mean i'm not entirely up to date not least because the elections last night are part of britain after brexit and we can talk about that in questions if you want but what i'm trying to try and do in this lecture is give you an overview of what brexit has meant for the economy for a certain number of public policies in this country for the structure of our state and finally for our politics brexit is a bit like throwing a very very big rock into a very very still pond and the ripples go out in all sorts of directions and they keep going out and that's what we're finding now the number of unintended consequences of both leaving the european union and of the process by which we did so and the latter is every bit i think as important as the former in terms of legacy are going to be with us for the foreseeable future brexit might be done but brexit isn't going away anytime soon i've structured this lecture to get myself onto safe ground at the end i'm a political scientist so i know nothing about economics so i'm going to blag my way through some thoughts when you see me visibly react relax as we get towards the end it's because i'm finally on home turf and i'm feeling now obviously it was all meant to be very very easy and straightforward uh we were going to leave the european union and things would pretty much continue as they always had for a variety of reasons whether it was car makers whether it was because the lies that we needed they needed us more than we needed them but the early rhetoric about the economics was don't worry not much is going to happen the reality as it turned out was slightly more salutary in the sense that quite quickly it became clear that actually very little would continue in economic terms as it had before and actually one of the things about brexit is it started to impact on our economy from well before we actually this is some work that was done by a very good economist called john springford who works for the center for european reform and he tried to model what brexit had meant for the british economy as we were negotiating our exit so nothing structurally had changed we were still in the single market we were still in the customs union and what he did was he used a technique called a doppelganger took a basket of currencies that historically if you go backwards you can see it had behaved like the uk's economy and then when we got to brexit saw what those economies did and compared them to what our economy did and as you will see a gap opens up quite quickly john's calculation was i think uh that by about by about 2019 uk gdp was already a couple of percentage points lower than it would have been had we stayed within the european union now there are conflicting explanations for this one explanation is the massive devaluation that happened on overnight uh on the night of the referendum itself that was partly to do with it partly two was expectations that is to say essentially experience something of an investment strike in this country where companies not unreasonably rather than plowing millions of pounds into investment into the united kingdom at a minimum said hang on a sec before we do this it might be as well to know what their trading relationship with the euro look like so by the time we came to leave the single market in the customs union there were already economic impacts being felt and ironically enough that's one of the reasons why the sort of off predicted cliff edge of brexit favored by so many remain commentators didn't happen the simple reason was we didn't feel the cliff edge because we slithered quite a way down that cliff before brexit actually happens the office of budget responsibility reckons that i think it's about 20 percent of the impact of brexit has already been felt which leaves us of course with the other 80 percent and that's what i want to talk about briefly now these were our forecasts that we did i think in 2018 2019 on the left are the expected impacts of boris johnson's brexit deal on the right are the additional impacts we would expect in the event of no deal now the column on the right is still useful if only because if worse comes to worse with the northern ireland protocol and the european union ends up suspending the trade deal we signed with them we might end up in that territory they're in a slightly attenuated form but the obvious thing to say about that graph i'm going to say quite profound and technical technical now is those numbers are quite big okay the economic impact there is no getting away from the fact that all things being economic impacts of leaving the european union will be significant this is not to say that the uk economy will shrink this is output lost this is an estimate of what would have been the case had we remained within the european union a very important distinction to bear in mind one because the simple fact of growth doesn't make these forecasts wrong but second because even if leaving the european union has that scale of impact growth foregone is very very hard to pick up on politically it's quite a sophisticated argument to make if you're the sort of person that routinely sits and looks at comparative growth charts in the financial times you might get a sense of that going on if you're a normal voter however this is actually even though it's a large effect it's quite a subtle effect and so the sort of realization that some people thought would dawn on the uk population is not about to happen anytime soon when i get to the politics i'll i'll come back a bit more to what's going on with the british public now where do these losses where do these impacts come from this is the treasury forecast of the impact of brexit that was leaked to the media the reason that looks a bit dirty that's the photocopy of the thing that buzzfeed got leaked to them back in if my memory serves 2017 and there are two or three things about this diagram that i want to point out to you firstly if you look at the diagonal blue shadings underneath the zero that is the impact of non-tariff barriers and that's worth bearing in mind because the government spends a lot of his time talking about tariffs we haven't got tariffs with the european union we're scrapping tariffs on trade with a load of countries we've signed generally speaking tariffs are pretty low when it comes to global trade the tariff reduction program that we've seen not least as part of the wto has been relatively successful there is not much to do in the area of tariffs where the costs arrive when it comes to international trade and non-tariff barriers things like filling in customs declarations things like complying with different standards regimes make uk and they're a lobby group so it's in their interest maybe to hype up these figures but their estimate for the simple cost to uk manufacturing of filling in customs forms for trade with the european union was a cost of between seven and 12 billion pounds annually that's what non-tariff barriers are all about they're all about the sort of hidden costs of complying with standards of dealing with paperwork at borders in contrast there's a natty tool here that i've never used oh look at that if you look at the bit above the line that little bit there the black bit is what the treasury expected the gains of regulatory freedom to be okay so we have the ability to regulate by ourselves what are the expected net economic benefits for the treasury in 2017 they were very small now let me say a couple of things about that firstly that doesn't make them pointless we already have a far better agricultural policy particularly in environmental terms than we had when we were living within the common agricultural policy i mean let's face it if we're leaving the european union if you can't get a better agricultural policy than the common cultural policy you should just pack up and go home because it is a bit of a horror show okay so there are there are other ends than macroeconomic outcomes to regulatory policy and it is perfectly plausible that by setting our own regulations by not having to worry about negotiating with 2017 one of which is france you will end up with better regulations that are more tailored towards the specific structure of your own economy the second thing is it is perfectly plausible that particularly in new areas of economic activity fintech robotics driverless cars whatever it might be we get to we get to regulate first and we get to regulate better than the european union which might bring in investment that is lost to the european union while they take three years to decide on the directive it is perfectly feasible we don't know that it's a gamble the second thing i would say about the bit above the line i'm not even sure you can even the other bit above the line that bluey bit is what the treasury expected the net benefit of signing trade deals with every single one of those countries would be so cumulatively if we signed free trade agreements with all of those countries underneath the line the net economic benefit will be that tiny little shaded blue bit above the line again there's far more to trade deals than simple economic benefit i mean one of the things that actually list trust is doing quite well at the moment is creating a coordinated foreign policy that involves not just signing trade deals with countries but signing security relationships as well if you look at australia and orcas plus the trade deal there's a coherent package there that makes a lot of sense in political and strategic terms but it is simply false to argue that by signing loads of trade deals we will somehow compensate for the economic impacts of leaving the european union because it is virtually what is impossible to see how that can be the case and the key reason for that of course is the trade volumes are very very closely linked to geography countries trade more with other countries that are near to them we're not going to set up with new zealand the sort of car manufacturing arrangements we have with bmw for fairly obvious reasons okay so that's that's what's going on in uh economic terms and in real life so this is uh services you see already that there is an impact on our imports to imports from and exports to the european union there are some strange things happening with trade that we can't quite figure out yet so if you look at trade overall look at our imports from the european union our imports from the european union have fallen relative to pre-brexit levels our exports to the european union are pretty much back to the levels they were at pre-brexit and pre-covered and that is a puzzle and it's a puzzle for this reason the uk government has not yet put in place all the checks it should put in place on imports from the european union so actually european union exporters can export to us pretty easily at the moment without facing the full gamut of checks that uk exporters to the european union are already facing so intuitively you would expect to see imports holding up better than exports that hasn't been the case we don't quite know why yet several suggestions one of which is that uk exporters have decided rather than face the risk of continuing with the uk market that is important but not that important why don't we find other markets and save ourselves the hassle of setting up a paperwork department to deal with trade with the uk when they start imposing those checks the other thing that's quite interesting that a recent paper we published for privilege last week uh illustrated is that while our exports to the european union have held up well the composition of those exports has changed quite fundamentally the small firms have been driven out of our export market to the euro all firms are no longer exporting in anything like the same numbers as they were pre-brexit and the answer to that is fairly straightforward isn't it small firms don't have a compliance department they don't have customs agents on hand they don't necessarily have the manpower to fill in the forms that you need to trade with the european union so trade is changing but it is still very very early days and of course there's an awful lot of noise because of covid that being said the llc have forecast the medium-term impacts and this is a forecast with all the necessary riders and caveats that it comes with but by their model over the course of the next 10 to 15 years the impact of brexit will be of the order of two to three times the impact over and you see the covert with the blue line covert is a very short sharp shot to the british economy but we are recovering fairly quickly from it whereas brexit is a long slow drag on the uk economy that over time will amount to more than covered we pause with relief at this point because that's the economics done now going back to that issue of regulatory freedom for many euroskeptics particularly conservative eurosceptics the point of brexit was to free us from the over-regulation the bureaucratic nightmare that was the european union but actually if you listen to david davis or john redwood or any of those people you would have thought that we leave the european union what we are going to do is basically slash and burn regulation actually what's happened is something rather different so on the left is the evidence that we have of the uk turning into what we like to call singapore on thames on the right is an alternative because actually it transpires that by leaving the european union yes there are some areas and i mentioned the sort of new technologies on the top left where we might be more liberal in our approach to regulation than the european union but in a whole swathe of areas if you look at the right we are regulating as much as if not more than the european union uh so there is evidence there's a sort of irony about this that in the short term at least we've left the european union in order to make ourselves more like france to give ourselves the regulatory space to intervene in the economy on a scale which we couldn't do when tied for instance by eu subsidy laws now the jury's still out on this obviously it's very very early days i know it feels like it's been a lifetime but actually in the history of the brexit undertaking this is very very early days not least because obviously we've had covert getting in the way of any coherent government program okay but one thing that has shifted and i think is absolutely fundamental for this is that the conservative party has changed the conservative party today is not the conservative party whose members produce the fresh start group which came out with all those ideas i don't know if you've seen there's a very famous pamphlet written by rob truss etorque et al called britannia unchanged which sets out a very radical deregulatory agenda for britain but the conservative party now is a very different one to the party then and that i think is one of the reasons why we haven't seen moves in that deregulatory direction what i would say though is there is every chance that there will be the mother of all fights over the economic agenda within the conservative party at some point steve baker who's one of the leading sort of hayekian deregulators in the parliamentary conservative party has is on record as saying the battle over economic policy will be a battle for the soul in the future uh but at the moment at least that part of the brexit agenda is very much not what we might have expected beforehand one part of the brexit agenda that has been very much like we would have expected beforehand is immigration and immigration what happened was we left the european union we ended free movement and the government as it promised instituted this new points-based immigration system and the results have been quite remarkable what we've seen since we left the european union is a massive increase in the levels of immigration from non-european countries okay uh with a corresponding fall off of immigration from eu countries the net total immigration is not back to pre-reference pre-brexit levels but the scale of non-eu immigration is far far higher than it was beforehand and at the same time the other interesting facet about immigration is despite this huge rise in non-eu immigration the views of the public continue to become steadily more positive it's a secular trend across any surveys you'd care to look at that when it comes to immigration the british people are becoming more positive about both its economic and its cultural impact over time despite that rise i was talking about earlier and the other side of that point is the british public no longer think of immigration as being a massively salient one of the things we don't talk about enough i don't think is the fact that in the general elections of 2017 and of 2019 we did not mention immigration now those of a certain age will remember that every election since probably since 2001 immigration has been one of the top three issues and it stayed there solidly all the way through but after brexit for some reason the british people were no longer concerned about immigration and you cannot discount the fact that one of the explanations for that is that taking back control meant just that but this actually wasn't a keep them out vote this was a it's slightly odd to be in a situation where a major country like britain can't get to decide who comes within its borders and who which is a strange situation in comparison to any other countries and it does appear that post post post brexit the british people are willing to live with relatively high levels of immigration happy in the knowledge that actually is up to the uk government to decide there's another reason that i'd love to see someone do some work on it's a pet theory of mine which is about the geography of immigration so pre-brexit when you've got immigrants from the european union coming here a lot of them went to relatively poor parts of the country to do a lot of the jobs that uk citizens didn't want to do so you've got the boston phenomenon okay where you've got east europeans coming to picks off fruit in an area where public services were already stretched where standards of living were already falling which led to huge amounts of resentment under our points based system which has a salary uh threshold 25 000 pounds to come in you need to have a job offer more immigrants are going to cities so these these 25 000 plus immigrants aren't going to boston anymore they're going to relatively affluent parts of the country they're going to affluent parts of the country where the population is young diverse cosmopolitan and liberal so i think one of the reasons we're seeing this change is that the places where they don't want more people coming in aren't getting those people coming in and the places where i mean you get a few thousand extra immigrants in london no one notices certainly no one cares uh that i think actually that the the sort of geography of this phenomenon is absolutely fundamental to what's going on but it is worth stressing that when it comes to immigration brexit has led to recognizably different politics that recognizedly different policies and a sea change in the situation before and another area where we have at a minimum a new rhetoric even if we don't have new policies worthy of them yet is when it comes to the question of regional inequality one of the curious things about the brexit referendum was it made us look at ourselves in the uh if you remember those sort of days after the referendum and everyone's talking about the left everyone suddenly realized that really quite unhappy with their economic situation which gave us a shock to a lot of people in the south which is a reflection on the people in the south i have to say uh and i remember a mate of mine at home in west yorkshire saying you can't move around here for bloody journalists coming up here and he sort of royally said to me it's only a matter of time before we get david attenborough on the streets of wakefield doing something on you know the reproductive system of the leave voter or something but there was a whole load of stuff that we could easily have been aware of had we wanted to be aware of it that we weren't aware of and post-referendum we suddenly started becoming aware of it and there was a real socio-economic dimension to the brexit vote i don't know if you remember when rory stewart was standing to be mayor of london i mean rory is as you all know very quirky and he was interviewed i think it was by the evening stand in the evening down and said rory what's your favorite pub in london and he said being rory pratt all right go figure i want to come back to that in a second that's the that's the leave remain vote and we heard him do this in the office and i was saying what the hell is he going to have about and then on twitter he was suddenly sort of submerged under a bunch of corbynites calling him a liberal a literis metropolitan because he liked prep and we thought this is weird so i got the i got the researchers in the office to look at this and if that's so the yellow bits are remain and the blue bits are leave they are the locations of press which is quite neat isn't it if you think about it and pratt does set up in places that are young and cosmopolitan and booming and metropolitan and actually they are the very areas that voted uh to remain you put it another way in slightly more social sciencey terms there is a correlation between median wages and your propensity to vote leave so in other words there is something socioeconomic about the brexit vote i think you know lazy talk about the left behind misses out a lot not least the fact that the biggest chunk of leave voters were relatively affluent tory voters they weren't the left behind on the housing estates of wakefield or middlesbrough but the left behind on the housing estates of wakefield and middlesbrough went out and expressed their dissatisfaction with the status quo i remember giving you one more george osborne story i remember about halfway through the referendum george osborne gave a press conference where he said we need to be very careful about this because if we vote to leave the european union then house prices will fall and the city of london will be damaged i remember getting a text from a mate saying has he switched sides that just sounds like the perfect outcome you know to us up here you know so but people started thinking about it now brexit for me was about many things it was partly about this sort of howl of rage about the economic status quo that george osborne was keen to sell to people and couldn't really understand when people voted against it but have a look at that these are the top 10 richest and poorest areas in northern europe and we get loads of them except they're all except one yellow there is a regional economic inequality issue in this country that is far greater than that in any other in fact three years ago when i last checked the figures the gap between the most productive and the least productive part of the uk was on a scale equivalent to the gap between the most and least productive parts of the eurozone as a whole so this is a genuine issue and as i said brexit has led us to talk about it more all of a sudden you know whether it's theresa may talking about the just about managings or boris johnson talking about leveling up this has become a key political priority in rhetorical terms we wait to see if people if there is going to be real delivery on these new priorities but here again i would suggest is an area where the public policy landscape has been quite fundamentally shifted and in this case quite clearly as far as i'm concerned shifted for the better because we should have been talking 20 30 years ago as a result of brexit let me switch to my third area which is the the uk itself and there are three things i want to talk about here firstly brexit destabilized evolution it destabilized evolution because devolution whether we realized it or not at the time was predicated on eu membership eu membership meant the scots and the welsh and northern ireland and england could have autonomy in certain regulatory areas but it didn't matter because members of the single market in the customs union meant everyone cohabited perfectly happily within that whole as soon as you leave the european union however it becomes intensely problematic because at that point you face the issue that if the scots want to have different regulatory standards to the english you might need to check stuff going from scotland to england or vice versa so the government dealt with this with the internal market bill which i'm happy to talk about in questions but i don't want to talk about in any great detail now but enough to say that the referendum and its outcome has placed our devolution settlement under has meant that it no longer functions in that kind of way that it functioned beforehand which was we never noticed it we had a duval situation but we never noticed it at all now we are noticing it now the scots are chafing about what's been happening as a result of brexit to it but i want to talk more about the politics of the union for the moment and firstly i want to talk about northern ireland because northern irish politicians as a result of brexit were confronted with a whole host of totally unpalatable policy choices there's arlene uh i'm very happy to answer questions about the elections that have been counted over the weekend and their implications if you want because i think they're going to have real uh and arlene's dilemma exists because of this this is what has come to be known as the northern ireland trilemma and the northern ireland trilemma is you can only have two of those things you can't have all three of them so the whole of the uk can exit the european union on the same terms it can exit the single market and the customs union but then you would have to have a border between the north and the south of ireland which would be the external customs and regulations both the eu and the uk agreed very early on in the brexit process that this was unacceptable for reasons i hope i don't have to go into putting a border between the north island would be inflammatory given the history of the province so you could do it another way around you could say okay we'll have a whole uk brexit so the whole of the uk and leaves the european union on the same terms we avoid an irish border but we attenuate the single market and customs union exit that's to say we don't you know we do something about that so that's not quite as clear-cut as some brexiteers might want it that is theresa may's backstop theresa may's backstop effectively kept the united kingdom as a whole within elements of the single market with the a i think you can say what you like about theresa may but her commitment to the union shaped her approach to brexit decisively that backstop existed with the aim of ensuring that the whole uk left under the same terms and you avoided that border in ireland the problem was of course that the pro that people in her party wouldn't accept this because it was compromising on single market and customs union for them was the purpose of brexit in the first place and so we ended up with a brexit where we've left the single market in the customs union we have no irish border but we don't have the whole of the united kingdom leaving the european union on the same terms why because northern ireland is in a unique situation i remember i was talking about regulatory divergence earlier one of the issues the british government has got to face is if we decide to regulate high technology goods differently to the european union let's say it seems likely we decide that we are going to have a more liberal approach to gene editing technology than the europeans because the europeans are fussy and they're ruled by the precautionary principle and they're totally risk-averse which is why they're also rubbish let's just say we decide to go out there and be a little bit more ambitious than them that's fine we can do it but it might well lead to a situation where goods manufactured in great britain cannot legally be sold in northern ireland because northern ireland falls under the rules of the single market so there are trade-offs and all sorts of messy trade-offs involved with this but ultimately we are in a situation and those who rail against the protocol are absolutely right the utterly bizarre situation of having a trade and regulatory border within a country and it is having an impact on trade with northern ireland uh what you're finding is that north-south trade is increasing quite rapidly east-west trade is declining obviously if you stick a border in trade is going to change and that is what's happening with the protocol but what isn't necessarily happening with the protocol is that the northern irish are absolutely up in arms about it in fact over time and if you look on our website uh katie hayward and david finnemore have been doing polling in northern ireland and what you find is the number of people in northern ireland who are relatively relaxed about the protocol is going up for many people in northern ireland actually the protocol is a unique opportunity because northern ireland is the only territory in the world he says thing wrong are you no okay good it's the only territory in the world that has open access to both the eu and the uk market than the gb market and then it's an opportunity for northern ireland one of the reasons why some people in france didn't like the protocol i know i keep picking on the french i'm sorry is uh is because they thought it would give northern ireland an unfair advantage northern ireland might become a manufacturing hub that can exploit access both to great britain and to the european union in a way no one else could and businesses in northern ireland some of them at least are picking up on that opportunity so actually the protocol is nowhere near as unpopular in northern ireland as some politicians here would lead you to believe but this is where things get more dangerous attitudes on the protocol split down sectarian lines and this is an issue there's no going away from the fact that if the point of the good friday agreement was to overcome sectarian divisions in northern ireland the protocol is serving to inflame those sectarian divisions again for the understandable reason that for unionists the increase in north-south trade the reduction in east-west trade is the precursor to the creation of an all-island economy which itself is the precursor to a vote on the unification of the island of ireland now i think we're still a long way off either the poll or it voting for the unification of the island of ireland but the political sensitivities are there already and they're starting to play out and they're playing out they've played out in the elections yesterday and will play out over the next few months and i'd suggest that the next few months are absolutely fundamental for northern ireland partly because of the arguments we're going to have over the protocol partly because these elections are very badly timed in terms of marching season in july so everything is quite fraught and of course the other aspect of the issue of protocol is that if you look at 84 on the top line three across from the left faith in the british government in northern ireland absolutely tanked as a result of the brexit process the way it's been handled uh the uk government has managed to please virtually no one so you know at a minimum if i can put this politely brexit and the resulting brexit process has shaken the kaleidoscope of politics in northern ireland quite profoundly we don't know yet where the pieces of that kaleidoscope are going to settle but they're not going to settle in the same place they were beforehand and that is leading to a great deal of uncertainty on the island and of course the other part of the uk where brexit has changed things is scotland and what you see there is you get a bump in support for independence in scotland during the brexit process the scots voted to remain the scots and the scottish government exploited this ruthlessly the idea of we've been dragged out of europe against our will by the bloody english okay that's a line that worked quite well uh politically for the snp but the yes camp hasn't pulled ahead and the yes camp hasn't pulled ahead because one of the things that's happened in scotland as a result of brexit is you've had a fundamental realignment of politics so essentially there are two divisions in scotland there is a division between leave and remain and there is a division between yes and no from the referendum of 2014. and what we see over time is the gradual coalescence of two camps so people who voted no in 2014 but voted remain in 2016. hang on let me get this right so i do mine it's a friday evening all right i should be in the pub so what's happened is that people who support independence now tend to support remain people who don't support independence now tend to support leaf because the remain camp has become so powerfully associated with independence within the european union what you find is a lot of people who supported independence in 2014 but wanted to leave the european union are now reassessing their support for scottish independence because for them it means going back in the european union that they so your coal does that now make sense sorry that was i got completely garbled uh so you have this coalescence going on within scotland the one thing i would say about this before turning to the the easy chunk of this lecture thank god uh is independence is a different offer now to 2014 and it's a different offer now because of the kind of brexit we've had that is to say this smp now not only has to sell the case for independence but it has to sell the case for independence that if they are genuine about joining the european union will imply a customs and regulatory border between scotland and england it will mean infrastructure on the m6 where now there's just that flag you're going to have checks people are going to get pulled over they're going to be asked what they're doing with the stuff in their in their van now i suspect that might be quite a hard sell but that's one of them so in a sense that the paradox about brexit is that for many scots it's made the emotional case for scottish independence significantly stronger but it's made the practical case a far harder sell so it's a minimum there you're going to get a lot of very angry people who can't get what they want because what they want is now far harder to do practically than it was beforehand so you get a fair degree of bubbling dissatisfaction but for those people who are saying oh brexit means the scottish independence is inevitable i think well i wouldn't be absolutely certain about that because it'd be a very very complicated thing and of course there is i would guess no prospect of that referendum happening in the near term because the uk government will simply re scottish government the authority to hold that referendum the other thing that brexit has changed this is the most interesting bit now so if you're falling asleep this is a bad moment is it's changed the dynamics of our politics quite fundamentally and it's done so in a very interesting way that is a line what that line is is a very strong correlation between whether you were a social liberal or social conservative and how you voted in the referendum i'm just going to unpack that and explain it to you brexit mobilized a different division in our politics traditionally our politics had been structured along right grounds and we all know what left right means it's about levels of taxation amounts of investments in the nhs levels of redistribution all those sorts of things was that was the structuring divide in our there had been another division in our politics if you read the superb book brexit land by rob ford and maria sobolesca they they show very convincingly that division has existed since the 60s and 70s but what the referendum did was it catalyzed that division it gave it form and it gave those two tribes names on the one hand you have so so the social liberal social conservative divide pollsters get it get it by asking questions like do you believe in the death penalty do you believe in gender equality do you believe in gay rights do you believe that children should be should be disciplined more severely so the smacking debate is part of sentencing for prisoners those sorts of issues that aren't directly related to the economic division but are all about your cultural values and your world the more socially conservative you are the more likely you were to vote for brexit now there are several interesting things about this one is a different division so it reshapes politics two social conservatives don't all believe the same things about the economy so you can be so you can be a social conservative and believe in a generous welfare state in high levels of taxation you could be a social conservative and believe in a minimal state and very low levels of taxation and i'll come on to that because that's absolutely fundamental to the future of our politics but if you're sitting there saying what the hell is he going on about about world views i'm going to try another approach another very strong i'll let you read that while i have a glass of water there is a very strong correlation between whether or not you like mrs brown's boys and whether or not you voted leave me people who like mrs brown's boys are likely to have backed leave people who don't like mrs brown's boys are likely to have backed remain i assume most of you are aware of mrs brown well if you like go home and watch it after there's an irony out of this because actually mrs brown's boys sort of actually the message of mrs brown's boys is very socially liberal behind it all but actually that's slightly missed from these figures but that's that's just to give you a taste of the fact that this is about world views it's not about your your specific policy preferences it's about whether you feel secure or insecure it's about whether you feel that the world is out there to get you or the world is out there to help you and one of the indicators of this is your view of this tv program now that is the division okay and that is a division that has reshaped our politics to the point where we saw in 2017 and even more markedly in 2019 people like me found myself saying things you never in your wildest dreams thought you would have to say like labour win canterbury labour wing kensington the tories win wakefield okay these are the sorts of things i've never thought you'd end up saying but the reason we've ended up saying it is because party competition has switched to an extent not wholly the two interact and actually the local election results show that interaction quite clearly between people who are voting on the left right taxes and people who are voting on the basis of brexit or not brexit what boris johnson did in december 2019 was he essentially put together a leave coalition 75 percent of leave voters voted conservative in december 2019. i think from memory 82 of the people who voted conservative in december 2019 will leave there's a very strong coalition of leave supporters and that's why our electoral map looks as weird as it now does now there is very little sign that that fundamental division in our society is going away significantly more people now claim to have a brexit identity than claim to have a party political identity so if you did party political conservative and labor combined that would be i think around the high 30 percent as compared to that which is hovering around 70 to 18 we are now polarized by brexit and those polarizations go deep a friend and colleague of mine sarah hobolds at the lse did these sort of experimental surveys about three or four years and the findings were very striking so what she found for instance that well over 50 percent of remainers would refuse to rent a room in their house to a leaf supporter around the same number of remainers would be very or quite upset if one of their kids married a leaf supporter i mean there's a word for this and it's america i mean it's it's it's a deep profound cultural divide and it's a deep profound cultural divide that is still there and of course even though this this this came into being and people got labels and identities because of brexit it's not just brexit it's about whether footballers should take the knee it's about whether or not you should keep statues of cecil roads it's about levels of immigration it's about whether you should send people to rwanda there are all sorts of issues that trigger this divide and one of the reasons why boris johnson is keen to talk about brexit and keep touching on these issues is it holds that coalition together but there are signs that things are getting a little bit more complicated so firstly yes we remain divided down the middle on brexit there's been a shift wrong has pulled ahead a little bit of uh right this is a tracker that you gov have done since the referendum about whether or not it was the right decision or the wrong decision but people a lot cleverer than me who study these numbers in great detail will maintain that actually the reason why wrong is pulling ahead is not because loads of people have suddenly seen the light that leave voters oh my god what have i done there is very very little evidence of people changing their minds on brexit as you'd expect if this is a worldview thing it doesn't change like that this is deeply part of your psyche and your identity and it doesn't just shift like that those numbers are changing because of demographic churn i can put it brutally voters were older so some of them are dying young people are disproportionately likely to support remain so more of them are entering the electorate and now taking part in surveys and that as far as we can tell is the reason why the numbers are changing but the numbers are still to all intents and purposes split down the middle however more people now think that brexit is being handled badly which is shaping perspectives of the government so yes we support the government because it breaks it down but it's not got brexit done very well so that's a pressure on the boris johnson coalition and that is just lee voters for the first time ever pre-party gate a majority of lee voters thought that boris johnson was performing badly as prime minister so there are signs incipient signs that the coalition he did so well to put together is starting to fray slightly at the seams and you see this in polling uh that minus 20 are the numbers the proportion of levers that have stopped supporting boris johnson's conservatives so things are moving things are shifting uh and ultimately i think what the brexit debate and hence politics in the short term is going to hinge on is how brexit is portrayed going forward by which i mean this that is the ipsos salience tracker ipsos asked people every month what are the most important issues facing the country today and what you will see i'm sorry that's very very small and incidentally if anyone wants to slide is that inflation in the economy are going up kovit has obviously come down brexit has gone down as well this is a warning sign for the government because you remember i said a few minutes ago that a leave coalition might be united on immigration or statues or brexit but it is very divided on economic policy the more salient economic issues become the harder it becomes for boris johnson to hold that coalition together if you think about that coalition that coalition is traditional shiratoris who want low taxes aren't that bothered in the about spending more for universal credit or necessarily investing more in public services and people in the red wall who quite like generous benefits who quite want higher taxation particularly if those shy tories are paying them and quite want investment in infrastructure and the rest holding that together will be very very hard indeed if the economy becomes the major issue the one thing i would say about this though is in order for that to really work you probably need a labour party that is willing to talk about brexit a little bit that is to say kirsten has clearly made the decision that actually we lost on brexit boris johnson is going to win on brexit we should just never mention it so for instance remarkably enough the labour party haven't appointed anyone to shadow jacob rees-mogg as brexit opportunities minister why because they don't want anyone out there talking about brexit but it does seem to me we can discuss this in questions if you like that actually if you want to win the battle of economic competence one way of doing it is to argue that the particular flavor of brexit that was negotiated prime minister is contributing to what is the biggest single issue confronting the country today according to the people themselves that is going to cheer you up on a friday night but uh that's where we stand in terms of our optimism about the future of the economy but that is worth looking at we're that is a mapping on the traditional left-right axis of where voters and mps plus others you can see in the middle stand on key economic issues and what you'll find is that conservative voters are increasingly economically to the right of the median voter this is why there is trouble ahead for boris johnson if the next 18 months are 18 months discussion about economic policy because it will become increasingly hard not just to rally that divided electoral coalition around a single economic message but it will be very hard to rally his own mps around it because of course within those figures is hidden the fact that whilst there are a number of traditional you know for the uh redwoods the liz trusses sort of traditional thatcherite tories there are also now in the parliamentary conservative party a number of people whose futures depend on red wall voters being happy and that requires a whole different approach to economic policy to that being propounded by some of their more traditional tory colleagues so in a sense this isn't the debate about economics isn't a debate about brexit but brexit still haunts it uh brexit is over but brexit hasn't quite finished with us yet i can put it that way and it will continue to reshape us as a country moving forward and it will do so in loads and loads of expected and unexpected ways some of the things i've talked about today if you'd asked me five years ago i would have said i'm not sure a brexit issue the impacts of brexit have been very very unpredictable at the moment the key issue for me is how brexit is treated as a political issue whether the government succeeds in treating it as a cultural issue or whether because of the cost of living crisis it comes to be seen as another element of the economic crisis that's going to hit this country over the next six 12 months next six to 12 months will matter not only in terms of people like me who have to read and write about brexit but i think will fundamentally shape the development of our politics over the thank you very much [Applause] um for the q a we have one of two new toys that most excites me um in college the other one the medics know all about um but it's all really extreme i i've got a real hesitation about we were having a little tussle earlier on about which of these yeah you guys could throw it around well i don't think two leeds fans ought to be chucking it about because we might be gary spake and we might not be nitro and they don't know the words to careless hands i think only two of us three of us might get that one um so we're open to questions that was great talk i'm sure there are lots of people wanting to come in and then it is soft so if it's thrown towards you don't panic but it's a microphone and for the streaming audience that's important don't ask questions then you left with me and roger [Applause] just got to get the right way up now can i uh start by uh thanking annan for a very enjoyable lecture uh and indeed congratulating him on his great personal success in building up the uk and eu organization but it's a difficult question about that organization i'd like like to ask i mean a lot quite a large number of tory mps and i think all of the pro brexit academics i know would regard the organization as a partisan remainer organization i know anand himself doesn't intend that uh and my question really is how is it i mean does it does he agree either that's the perception that is that perception correct and how did um uh how did the organization get itself in into that position if it is correct but let me just add to that just before anand comes in to say i think it affected anna's lecture here at least the economic uh i'm in economy so that that's the i kind of get most excited okay thank you let's get let's get into the answers and keep the questions short okay just on this that the economics bit just struck me as a sort of partisan pro remainer tables were put up about treasury forecasts with no mention of the fact of just how controversial and indeed contested those projections were not least by research from uh from this college and um uh a projection from anand's colleagues was put up that exports of the eu would fall by can we listen respond 38 percent yes you you just let me finish the sentence and you can go away your heart's content um a table 38 fall in exports to the eu and then later on the chart showing that actually exports of the eu have recovered actually fine they're they're as high as they were before the election but with no comment on that you know no no nothing nothing to say oh goodness were those were those forecasts very biased please there was another hand just in front of you i think oh it was just be just behind you so if you pass it to jess then come in oh there we are good answer can i can i do graham first just because there's quite a lot yeah i mean the treasury forecasts were contested for the most part the contest station was simply this is traditional remainer treasury economics there wasn't much i know there was the odd bit but actually there wasn't much in the way of alternative around secondly it's interesting to note that uh with the passage of time the obr still maintains its four percent figure uh maintained it as recently as a couple of months ago and they have adjusted for events since so actually government economists are still sticking to those mainline forecasts we now have empirical evidence we put out a paper last week that showed food prices have risen and attributed fairly clearly to brexit i'm very happy to send you the paper and to talk to you about it thanks i i follow your work okay all right uh i mean i'm i'm aware of the danger of us going around in circles as we do very very happy to talk to every drink about i think i i'm fairly confident i agree with you on our forecast i made it clear that it was a but the fact of the matter is that many of with with some exceptions the import export thing i talked about as a mystery is a genuine mystery but it is interesting to note that the main forecasting organizations are sticking to their forecasts and the obr renewing them same answer every single time can we have the next question now please jess do you want to ask your question i just can i just do the other bit which is the remainer bit i mean people like shouting and both sides shouted us i mean the the the tory mps who criticize us for being remainers often fail to mention the fact that we brief the rg several times significant acclaim from them at the times during the brexit process uh that's how politics is i mean remain and second referendum groups berated us quite often during the referendum and indeed still do i think one of the issues and this is an interesting thing to have a larger discussion about is the fact that you are slightly tainted in the current political debate for the simple fact that you are based within a university that people jump to conclusions about you because you are based inside a university so actually i would have preferred us to be based somewhere outside of the university sector actually to do our job but i would maintain that we have engaged with all sides of this debate that actually in private many of those people who give the renter quotes to the daily express about me are very very happy to talk these things through and i just see a lot of this as just part of the normal rough-and-tumble politics rather than any systematic sense that these people won't work with us or listen to our stuff if there's a matter they're particularly interested in jess you've been very i suppose you could call me naive but i'm going to come in here um i thought that was brilliant and i hugely enjoyed that lecture and i'm not an economist at all so i'm not going to ask any difficult questions about that i was interested in i think it's your third slide from the end you you uh noted that 20 shift in downward shift in conservative voters in a particular side you had and i could see where those voters were coming pluses and minuses on other party voting and i wondered what's happening in terms of the spread of votes and that sort of change in you know is it are we forever locked into this two-party system it was something changing as a result of those different affiliations or voting practices i mean i think i mean the honest answer we don't know do we because polls are imperfect and local elections are even more imperfect as guides to national voting behavior uh if i was to sort of extrapolate from past experience what i'd say is polls that show a rise in support foreign say and you're getting a lot of that at the moment 50 of those people tend to vote labor when it comes to a general election because people understand the electoral system but it is the problem is we all want to know but we don't have the evidence to let us know is the honest answer to this you can look at last night you can pass it in all sorts of ways but actually the key question for me is whether or not kyocerma is making progress amongst leave vote and if so to what extent last night's elections were absolutely appalling as a way of getting into that they were appalling as a way of getting into that partly because relatively little of the north voted they were all appalling for getting into that partly because we were skewed by the baseline of 2018. so you know stama did possibly worse than 2018 but certainly better than 2019 but where that leaves us we don't know and that key question for me which is whether leave voters see brexit still as a thing in its own right or see it as something that they wanted to produce practical positive outcomes for them i think that'll be absolutely key to the next election i just don't think there's any way of knowing that from last night's election so i'm afraid you know this is the brilliant thing about politics is we can talk about it every day for five years thank you thank you very much for very interesting talk i'm not an economist i have two questions i'd be happy if you answered i have nothing against economists i'm just like scared of it no nor am i normal i'm just like that's not where i'm coming from my first question is would you say something about the war in ukraine and how that will impact on what you've said so far and the other is you did very kindly offer to say something about the election in northern ireland all right on ukraine several things to say about ukraine i suppose one is we released some polling last week that showed a majority of the british people including a majority foreign rightly of remains supporters think our response to ukraine has been better because we're not in the european union so in public opinion terms that's that secondly i think i think what ukraine shows is that broadly to a point the government were right that in order to work closely with the european union we don't need a formal foreign and security policy relationship with them that is to say we can coordinate from outside we've coordinated quite well we passed that remarkable bit of legislation about sanctions that basically lets us mimic eu sanctions on the basis that they've done the due diligence for us uh i think you know i think also what what ukraine shows is that the the integrated review wasn't just that the uk is serious about becoming or being the major player in your atlantic security that the tilt to the asia pacific wasn't going to distract attention away from uh so in that sense i think there's a degree of sucker for the government in in in brexit terms about the was it the brexit angle of the war in ukraine on northern ireland obviously we don't know in northern ireland yet but the two interesting things to watch i suppose are what happens as looks likely shin fein become the biggest party because then you might end up with a row over the protocol without an executive in place in northern ireland but the other really interesting thing is the number of voters who hear from some of the last minute polling to be shifting away from sectarian parties to non-sex area that would be a very interesting thing to watch so they're the two key things i would look for okay all right two of you over there one of whom has been waiting longer than the other one okay um and then i just i had a question which was um combining what you're saying about the immigration side of things which was really interesting and slightly counter-intuitive in some ways um with what you then said about this notion of leave and remain as these quite deep world views um so the way you characterize the leave world view was socially conservative and you gave these examples about a propensity i suppose to support the death penalty to be more keen on disciplining children that sort of illiberal authoritarian sort of attitude and then the immigration story seems to be a story that's i suppose different i mean it seemed to be a story about uh acceptance tolerance kind of openness to what has been a fairly static net level of immigration though the composition has completely changed so i just wondered if you could have think about how to reconcile those two things or whether you don't think that there's so so much intention well i think there are two broad forces at work aren't there i mean one is demographic change that is shifting you know over time we see our attitudes towards immigration shifting and becoming a country but secondly i think for me the key thing is the question of control that's one of the dividing lines between if you like the social liberal and social conservatives social conservatives aren't necessarily against immigration but they don't like an idea of immigration that you can't control and one of the things that cameron did brilliantly even though he didn't mean to was uh absolutely emphasized that idea that whatever the british government says about immigration it couldn't do anything about it the idea of setting those numerical targets over a policy area you couldn't control at a time when there was a recession going on in the eurozone so that we became the labor market of last resort for a currency we weren't in and there was nothing we could do about it was just madness because actually it was a very easy argument then by the time you get to the referendum to say they've been trying trying to do this you know no one can doubt the fact that theresa may wants to do this but they can't and i think that issue of control by the time we got to that referendum was absolutely central so i mean i was one of those people i think who was a little bit sniffy was basically when nigel farage said this isn't about being well but actually that's what i think a lot of those votes were talking about uh and so that's how i'd reconcile it i know it's you're absolutely right there are some rough edges to that argument absolutely but in terms of trying to reconcile that i think that issue of control and whether or not you have a system that you can dictate the terms of or not is absolutely fundamental the european single market as well as being a system of free movement as of goods and labor as you've shown in detail in the impact of brexit on trade and immigration it's also a system that involves free movement of capital um yeah and in article in 2017 helen thompson explains the monetary divergence between the um as a result of the financial autonomy of the city of london and i was wondering now we're seeing with covert how the moves in the eurozone to collectivize national debt it is the financial position of the uk something that is going to change significantly in the future and is the imbalance between the city of london and all the other industries in the uk going to change or are we going to see more of the same as a general rule you should assume that helen is right financial services wages in the city have gone up a lot with bonus payments over the last six months and that's one of the things that's driving wage growth rather than sort of other parts of the economy so i think in that sense it's business as usual the clock is somewhat against us i'm sorry probably got time for one more um and i want to let some of the online audience um um as it were getting word in by proxy and there's a question from malcolm burwell about uh whether or not uh brexit is just a manifestation of a populist wave sweeping the world or um is it something uniquely british i mean there are different ways to spin that aren't there i mean there's a perfectly plausible argument that brexit saved us from populism because actually it was a recalibration of our system that allowed the mainstream central political parties to carry on what brexit definitely was in part at least was an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo and where we were and that fairly clearly for me reflects a failure of politics for the previous decades that actually you know what we have if you think about the factors that went into brexit what we had is a system where our politics failed significant numbers of people in this but it never mattered because we had an electoral system that meant those same politicians were always going to win and what what brexit did i mean one of the ways i look at brexit is that we had this sort of political cartel it was a liberal broadly centrist political cartel that was socially liberal economically liberal and actually whether it was ed miliband or david cameron it obviously made the difference in some ways but broadly speaking if you're socially conservative and thought that globalization had gone too far there was no choice for you there uh you know the four million people who voted ukip in 2015 got one mp for their trouble the smp got about half that number of votes and 50 mps so what happened was if you have that sort of situation with that level of dissatisfaction it's probably not the wisest idea to have a referendum where every single vote counts equally because it gave expression to it now actually i think that it's quite nice that those people have been a chance to go and i think the sort of political mobilization around the referendum is one of the most spectacular positive things about it but what it has meant was we have recalibrated now i remain a little bit skeptical about whether some of the stated objectives of this government about leveling up will ever be achieved try to remain optimistic and at least take solace from the fact that we are now talking about stuff that our politics simply ignored for far far too long which is probably more of a sermon than an answer question i'm afraid but he's not here so he can't shake his head there's a broken computer somewhere in the united states at this moment um i with apologies to those of you who may have wanted um further questions there's an opportunity over refreshments um to ask some so um it's not a complete block on further discussion but we've kept our speaker working um hard on a friday evening and therefore it's my sad duty to call things the formal bit to a conclusion because i think this discussion could have run and run and run um i listening to your last reply i was reminded of something that's often attributed to francois mitchell to get a good word into the french just occasionally that he was against plebiscitary democracy because people like students never answer the right question and uh um that i that colours my view of of of re referenda over just about anything um it's been absolutely fascinating um you've been completely on top of lots of fascinatingly detailed data that you've rendered um explicable and open to all manner of people in the room which our donor would have been proud of and thank you thank you very much [Applause] that's just thank you so much for coming thank you

Channel: Selwyn College, Cambridge

Views: 50,864

Keywords: Brexit, post-Brexit Britain, UK-EU

Id: fDAiaXfQ_nM

Length: 78min 4sec (4684 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022