ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship(s) between anti-political sentiment and Brexit. It makes three core arguments. The first is that anti-political sentiment was a critical underlying factor in explaining the decision to leave the EU. The vote for Brexit was delivered largely by the ‘left-behind’, a term describing a range of social groups who share a sense of marginalization, insecurity and frustration and who feel that mainstream politics has to a large extent abandoned them. In this regard, the European Union arguably provided a lightning rod that absorbed not only long-standing national insecurities about the pooling of sovereignty but also a more recent set of democratic anxieties fuelled by rapid social change. And yet none of these social changes or the growth in anti-political sentiment are unique to the UK (see Fawcett et al. 2017). The second argument is therefore that (counter-intuitively) Brexit should not be interpreted as a distinctively ‘British’ issue but as a critical case in the analysis of a set of social trends that raise fundamental questions about the relationship between populism and democracy. That is not to say that there are not distinctively British dimensions to the Brexit phenomenon; the UK has always been an ‘awkward partner’ in the EU (see George 1998) and remains the only member state to vote to leave (so far). But it is in teasing apart the relationships between Brexit and anti-political sentiment – or what is termed ‘the (anti-) politics of Brexit’ – that this chapter contributes to a set of broader questions concerning the ‘life and death of democracy’ (Keane 2009). The final argument is that in many ways it is the unfolding of the post-referendum politics of Brexit that reveals most about anti-political sentiment and the recalibration of representative politics.
