"The ‘Overton window’ is a term from political science meaning the acceptable range of political thought in a culture at a given moment. [..] the window of acceptability can be moved. An idea can start far outside the political mainstream [..] but once it has been stated and argued for, framed and restated, it becomes thinkable. It crosses over from the fringe of right-wing think-tankery to journalistic fellow-travellers; then it crosses over to the fringe of electoral politics; then it becomes a thing people start seriously advocating as a possible policy. The window has moved, and rough beasts come slouching through it to be born. British politics has never seen a purer example of the Overton window than the referendum on membership of the EU. [..] The story of how that idea, self-evidently ridiculous in 1997, came to be a reality in 2016 is going to be often retold as we live through its consequences over the next few decades. One of the characteristics of the story is a distinctly British unseriousness: tragedy and farce, as so often in this country’s political life, were hard to tell apart. The climax was the referendum itself, which was promised in 2013 at a point when David Cameron was sure he wouldn’t have to deliver. [..] its main protagonist, Boris Johnson, was a man known not to be in favour of his own arguments, manoeuvring for position in the Tory leadership battle due to come at some point between a Remain victory and the 2020 general election. I don’t think there’s ever been a time in British politics when so many people in public life spent so much time loudly declaring things they knew not to be true. [..] The only country which has both more people than England and more people per square kilometre is Bangladesh. What this means, experientially, is that there is a kind of denseness to England and to Englishness; England is both very similar to itself and significantly different when you move ten miles down the road. [..] England is both a small country and a big one; that there is a lot of Deep England out there and that the various forms of Deep England feel very different from one another [..] there are pockets of unemployment, but in general there’s no shortage of jobs and the labour force participation rate is the highest it has ever been, a full 15 points higher than in the US – but it’s unsatisfying, insecure and low-paid. This new work doesn’t do what the old work did: it doesn’t offer a sense of identity or community or self-worth. The word ‘precarious’ has as its underlying sense ‘depending on the favour of another person’. Somebody can take away the things you have whenever they feel like it. [..] The reality of the modern British economy is that the thriving sectors raise the taxes which pay for the rest. The old work has gone and is not coming back. The decline in UK manufacturing is real but the headline figure – it used to be 25 per cent of our economy and is now 10 per cent – conceals the fact that we are still a significant manufacturing economy. Our proportion of manufacturing is more or less the same as in the US and France; we are the eighth biggest manufacturing economy in the world. Some of the decline is relative, since the services part of the economy has grown faster. [..] UK manufacturing is now a high-skill, high-value industry; we don’t make cars and fridges and washing machines and phones and things that everybody notices, but we do make high-technology components and industrial devices of a sort that nobody ever thinks about. The UK, for instance, has the second biggest aerospace industry in the world. The most complicated bit of a plane is the wing; the world’s biggest passenger aircraft wing belongs to the Airbus 380, which is made in Wales. [..] This industrial work is high-skill, high-value, and doesn’t provide mass employment; it’s a lot like the kind of service work which thrives in London and the South-East. These jobs are dependent on the UK being a liberal, open, internationalised economy with high skill levels in particular areas. That has been the direction of travel in UK politics and economics since 1979, and both parties have pursued policies with that goal in mind. The Labour government offered more social protection but did so largely by stealth and without explaining and arguing for its actions. There was no strategy to replace the lost industry; that was left to the free market. With these policies, parts of the country have simply been left behind. [..] No political party has anything to offer it except varying levels of benefits. The people in the rich parts of the country pay the taxes which support the poor parts. If I had to pick a single fact which has played no role in political discourse but which sums up the current position of the UK, it would be that most people in the UK receive more from the state, in direct cash transfers and in benefits such as health and education, than they contribute to it. The numbers are eerily similar to the referendum outcome: 48 per cent net contributors, 52 per cent net recipients. It’s a system bitterly resented both by the beneficiaries and by the suppliers of the largesse. [..] Making economic arguments to voters who feel oppressed by economics is risky: they’re quite likely to tell you to go fuck yourself. [..] If I had to pick one sentence I’ve heard more than any other in the last six years of conversation about economics, it would be ‘Why aren’t people more angry?’ The Brexit vote showed that plenty of them are. [..] ‘Take back control’ is a cynical but extremely astute pitch to an electorate in that state of mind. Immigration, the issue on which Leave campaigned most effectively and most cynically, is the subject on which this bewilderment is most apparent. There are obviously strong elements of racism and xenophobia in anti-immigrant sentiment. [..] If Britain is broken, which is what many Leave voters think, why is it so attractive? How can so many people succeed where they are failing? [..] The evidence on immigration is clear: EU immigrants are net contributors to the UK’s finances, and are less likely to claim benefits than the native British. The average immigrant is younger, better educated and healthier than the average British citizen. In other words, for every immigrant we let in, the country is richer, more able to pay for its health, education and welfare needs, and less dependent on benefits. They are exactly the demographic the UK needs. As for the much touted Australian ‘points system’, we have nothing to learn from it: immigrants to the UK are better educated and more skilled than immigrants to Australia. In addition, most of the people who appear as immigrants in the migration statistics are students, because the Home Office chooses to count students who come for the duration of degree courses as migrants. Of the 330,000 net arrivals in the latest numbers, 169,000 are students. [..] These facts, freely available to anyone who takes an interest in the subject, had no traction in the referendum debate. That’s partly to do with Remain’s incompetence, but perhaps it also reflects the fact that the reality of young, healthy, aspirational, hard-working, thriving immigrants wouldn’t have helped the Remain case: it touches on too many sore points about being left behind. One of the most important ideas to emerge from micro-economics – or at least, the one with the most consequences for democratic politics – is ‘loss aversion’. People hate to have things taken away from them. But whole swathes of the UK have spent the last decades feeling that things are being taken away from them: their jobs, their sense that they are heard, their understanding of how the world works and their place in it. [..] [..] The fact that the leadership of both main parties has disintegrated would under normal circumstances be a big story, but in the current chaos it is no more than a side effect. The deeper problem is that the referendum has exposed splits in society which aren’t mapped by the political parties as they are currently constituted. People talk about Britain being ‘divided’ as if that’s a new issue, but societies are often divided, and the interests of all groups and individuals do not align. [..] Political parties are the mechanism through which divisions in society are argued over and competing interests asserted. The trouble with where we are now is that the configuration of the parties doesn’t match the issues which need to be resolved. [..] Leave’s arguments were based on lies. The first of these was that Britain ‘sends’ £350 million a week to the EU. This is a straightforward, knowing falsehood, and the fact that so many prominent Brexiters started rowing backwards on it the day after the vote is a sign that they knew it all along. The campaign’s second big lie was that the UK would be able to have access to the single market without accepting the free movement of people from the EU. No country has this arrangement, and there is no reason to think it is possible. If Britain were to secure a deal whereby it had access to the single market and control over EU immigration, it would be the end of the EU – because other countries would leave the EU and demand the same. Leave campaigners don’t seem to understand that Continental elites feel just as strongly about the continued existence of the EU as the Leavers feel about Brexit. For the EU to survive, it will be important for the UK to be seen to pay a high price for leaving. We don’t know what that price is going to be, and I don’t look forward to finding out. It’s been widely remarked that the geographical and class-based nature of the UK’s divisions means that many people live in communities where they don’t know anyone who voted for the other side in the referendum. [..] I do know some Leavers, though, mainly people who work in finance. [..] What all these Brexiters have in common is a belief that not much will change after the vote. The UK will have the same arrangement as Norway: we will make cash payments to the EU and accept free movement of people in return for access to the single market. That sounds fine to me; it sounds like the least bad outcome given where we are. The problem, however, is that it isn’t what most Leavers voted for. They were promised that they/we would ‘Take back control’, in a campaign whose principal focus was immigration. A stitch-up over immigration and access to the single market would be by far the best option for the UK, but it would also be a betrayal of these Leave voters. [..] The second toxic legacy of the campaign concerns the shamelessly xenophobic nature of the Leave message. There were good reasons why British public life had strong taboos around the subject of immigration. [..] The economic arguments in favour of immigration, in rich Western countries with low birthrates, are pretty straightforward: since the next generation of taxpayers aren’t being born, we’re going to have to import them, if we want to keep our healthcare systems, pensions and welfare states. The Office for Budget Responsibility puts the necessary level of long-term immigration at 140,000 a year. But while the benefits of immigration are generally shared, the local impacts can sometimes seem overwhelming, especially when an area with no previous experience of immigration suddenly finds itself with thousands or tens of thousands of new arrivals, and no corresponding increase in resources to help with the pressure on housing, schools, healthcare and the rest. Governments have been far too slow to respond to this tension between long-term collective good and short-term local costs. [..] Nobody outside the City loves the City, but the tax revenues raised by London’s global role in financial services are very important to the UK. At the moment, the City is the beneficiary of ‘passporting’, which allows it to deal freely in services across the EU. That passporting is likely, highly likely, to be the subject of an attack [..] There are likely to be all sorts of unintended consequences to exploit, and the City is full of people whose entire working lives revolve around exploiting unintended consequences. [..] The City is creative, opportunistic, experienced and amoral; if any entity has the right ‘skill-set’ to benefit from the post-Brexit world, it is the City of London. [..] None of this is what working-class voters had in mind when they opted for Leave. If it’s combined with the policy every business interest in the UK wants – the Norwegian option, in which we contribute to the EU and accept free movement of labour, i.e. immigration, as part of the price – it will be a profound betrayal of much of the Leave vote. If we do anything else, we will be inflicting severe economic damage on ourselves, and following a policy which most of the electorate (48 per cent Remain, plus economically liberal Leavers) think is wrong."
