Will 2018 be the year when the United Kingdom changes its mind about leaving the European Union? Conventional wisdom says that stopping Brexit is impossible. But what did conventional wisdom say about Donald Trump? Or Emmanuel Macron? Or, for that matter, the original Brexit referendum? In revolutionary times, events can go from impossible to inevitable without ever passing through improbable. Brexit was such an event, and its reversal could be another.
Just ask Nigel Farage, the former UK Independence Party leader, who has suddenly said that the June 2016 Brexit referendum could be overturned. “The Remain side are making all the running,” Farage warned his fellow hardline Leavers this weekend. “They have a majority in parliament, and unless we get ourselves organized we could lose the historic victory that was Brexit.”
The votes for Brexit and Trump are often described today as an ineluctable result of deep socioeconomic factors like inequality or globalization. In some ways, this description is right. Political upheavals of some kind were to be expected after the 2008 economic crisis, as I have argued for years.
But there was nothing inevitable about the specific upheavals that happened. Brexit, like Trump, was a contingent outcome of small perturbations in voter behavior. If just 1.8% of Britons voted differently, Brexit would now be a forgotten joke-word. If Hillary Clinton’s popular majority of three million votes was distributed slightly differently among the states, the phrase “President Trump” would be as laughable today as it was in January 2016.
To stop Brexit in the year ahead, four similarly modest shifts in behavior need to happen. Public opinion must shift slightly further against the Brexit decision, which is already viewed as “wrong in hindsight” by a 4% point margin. Politicians who privately detest Brexit must speak out publicly. Reasoned opposition to government policies must be recognized again as a hallmark of democracy, not an act of treason. And the sense that Brexit is inevitable must be dispelled.
These requirements are interdependent. Politicians will speak out only if they sense public opinion shifting; but public opinion will shift only with credible political leadership. Politicians are cowed into silence if all opposition is branded as anti-democratic. And if Brexit appears inevitable, why should voters bother to think again?
The sense of inevitability, opinion polls and focus groups show, is the most important obstacle to a reversal. About 30% of British voters oppose the EU so passionately that they will always back leaving, regardless of the economic costs, just as Trump’s “base” will always support “their” president regardless of how he behaves.
But these diehard Euroskeptics would never have won a majority without some 20% of voters who cared little about Europe, but treated the referendum as a protest vote. Many of these low-conviction voters are now dismayed that Brexit has distracted attention from their real grievances about health, inequality, low wages, housing, and other issues. Yet, for this very reason, they want the inevitable departure from Europe to happen as quickly as possible so that the country can get back to business as usual.
Now suppose these voters began to believe that Brexit, far from being inevitable, might never happen. They would demand that politicians “should stop banging on about Europe” and start dealing with the people’s real concerns.
The sense of inevitability could be dispelled by recent shifts in the internal politics of both the Conservative government and the Labour opposition.