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The Brexit Culture War Is Finally Hitting Its Endgame
The December 12 election will determine whether Britain leaves the EU and how
Four years of carnage. Brexit has been pulverizing British politics for so long that most of the people who live here can barely remember what it was like beforehand. Sometimes we reminisce about a period when politics was about other things, like health care or education policy. But it’s a distant memory which is increasingly hard to recall — like the face of someone you once knew in school.
That might finally be about to come to an end. Not the real end, of course. Brexit will never really end. It’s a permanent state of hellishness. Even if Britain leaves the EU, it’ll still face decades of trade deals and international negotiations. Even if it doesn’t, there’ll be years of political upheaval as the emotions triggered by it refuse to die down. We’re not at the end. But we might, if we’re lucky, be approaching the end of the beginning.
The prime minister, Boris Johnson, is going to hold a general election. On December 12, either he will win, or the other side will. And that decision will dictate how Britain leaves the EU, or if it even will at all.
It won’t be a normal election. It’ll be grounded in an intense sense of tribal warfare conducted on cultural lines.
This is the new form of political identity operating in Britain. Back in those olden political days of 2015, we used to think in terms of left and right, Labour and Conservative. Politics was fundamentally socioeconomic.
Then the 2016 Brexit referendum came. When the results were in, it was clear it didn’t represent the traditional left-right division. Well-off voters in the shires of southern England voted the same way as left-behind voters in the post-industrial towns of northern England. The only variables which mattered were age, education, and proclivity to authoritarian social opinions. The older you were, the more poorly educated, and the more likely to support capital punishment — the more likely that you’d voted Brexit. Politics stopped being socioeconomic and became sociocultural.
But the actual act of delivering Brexit was not about cultural values. It was a fiendish, impossible…
