Brexit and Trump supporters

This study that looked at Trump supporters has got quite a bit of publicity. Some have been surprised that “his supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relative high household incomes, and living in areas more exposed to trade or immigration does not increase Trump support.” They also tend to be a little older. Having looked at who voted for Brexit, I was not surprised.

The two clear explanatory variables for those who voted that the UK should leave the EU were education and age. Much has also been made of the fact that, other things equal, those from areas of the country that suffered from deindustrialisation over the last 30 years tended to vote Leave, but there was no correlation with levels or rates of change of income. Nor is there any clear correlation between Brexit support and levels of immigration, again matching this study’s findings for Trump support.

One of the most striking findings from the post-Brexit Ashcroft poll was the answer to the following question: “Overall, life in Britain today is better/worse than it was 30 years ago’. While Remain voters overwhelming chose better, a clear majority of Leave voters chose worse. If you take that question to be only about individual living standards, then there is no way half the population have had declining living standards over the last 30 years. But why should a question about ‘life in Britain today’ be interpreted in narrow economic terms?

In the case of Brexit we had a coalition between two groups who had reason to feel aggrieved at trends over the last 30 years: social conservatives within an increasingly liberal society and those living in areas that had not shared in metropolitan economic success. You could say that both groups, in different ways, had been left behind and therefore become alienated by the dominant sectors of society. (See this study by Jennings and Stoker, for example.)

The Trump study finds “more subtle measures at the commuting zone level provide evidence that social well-being, measured by longevity and intergenerational mobility, is significantly lower among in the communities of Trump supporters. The causal mechanisms linking health and intergenerational well-being to political views are not well-understood in the social science literature. It may be the case that material circumstances caused by economic shocks manifest themselves in depression, disappointment, and ill-health, and those are the true underlying causes. Or, it may be that material well-being and health are undermined by a cultural or psychological failure to adjust and adapt to a changing world.” [typos corrected]

Times of rapid economic and social change can leave large parts of society left behind, particularly if they are not equipped with the skills required to adapt. When incomes then stop growing, these groups long for things to be how they used to be (to 'make America great again'). The most obvious manifestation of change is the prospect (not actuality) of living with different people and cultures: hence 'taking back control' over immigration in the UK and building a wall in the US. What the Brexit vote showed is that when this fear of the new is combined with a protest over relative economic deprivation it can become a dangerous political force. For the US we can just hope that to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

The BBC and Statistics

If you think this is not the most exciting blog post title, then you will get part of the problem identified in a report on that very subject. The report does not pull its punches. For example:

"We were surprised that an organisation the size of the BBC, with a high (and increasing) volume of statistics in its outputs, does not itself have an explicit expert statistical capability. If guidelines were issued advising journalists to seek statistical advice, virtually noone we talked to could complete the sentence “For advice, contact ….””

There was until recently a Head of Statistics, but that job has been abolished.

However, having statistical expertise within house is only a partial answer to these kind of problems. As the report makes clear, journalists need to have some knowledge of their own, so that they can challenge politicians in real time. If an education minister says spending has gone up in real terms, a good journalist should immediately ask whether it has also increased per pupil. Lot of this is about the appropriate normalisation of statistics, which was the central message of my own submission to this inquiry.

That submission, and the report itself, is about the detail of how to improve the BBC’s use of statistics. Three more general points also occurred to me.

The first is about economics. Much that is written in this report about statistics could also be said about economics. The current view about economics reporting in much of the media is that this is a specialist (albeit generally topical) area that needs one or more specialist reporters, to be filed under the heading of ‘business reporting’. In reality a great deal, perhaps the majority, of political discussion depends crucially on economics. Mediamacro is not the product of the occasional confused economics editor, but the lack of economics understanding among political reporters.

The second is about balance. Many have rightly complained that an obsession with balance during the Brexit campaign allowed Leave lies to go unchallenged. But moving beyond balance requires the ability to access and judge expertise: to tell the lies from the truth. If that expertise is not there, balance is the cheap and only feasible option.

Which brings me to my third, and perhaps most contentious, point. This report makes many sensible suggestions. They generally involve more resources: training, in house expertise, better research. Yet journalism is under pressure like never before, largely as a result of the medium you are using to read this post. For most that will inevitably mean less time to check statistics, consult and research. The BBC is often said to be in a privileged position in this respect, but I would turn that point on its head. We may need somebody with deep pockets, rather than the competitive market place, to sustain quality journalism.

Good journalism may be what economists call a public good. The obvious body to produce public goods is the public sector. But good journalism is also about holding the public sector and the politicians that run it to account. [1] Implementing this report requires more resources, at the same time as the government is squeezing those resources because elements within it dislike the BBC. This illustrates a contradiction that goes well beyond the BBC’s use of statistics.

[1] Good journalism also often requires holding the private sector, and in particular large corporations, to account. If that journalism is financed through advertising, we have a similar problem.

Blanchard on DSGE

Olivier Blanchard, former director of the IMF’s research department, has written a short critical piece about DSGE models. Forget all the econblog reaction that essentially says he has been too kind: DSGE completely dominates academic macroeconomics, and there is no way that all these academics are going to suddenly decide this research programme is a waste of time. (I happen to think Blanchard is right that it isn’t a waste of time.) What is at issue is not the existence of DSGE models, but their hegemony.

One of Blanchard’s recommendations is that DSGE “has to become less imperialistic. Or, perhaps more fairly, the profession (and again, this is a note to the editors of the major journals) must realize that different model types are needed for different tasks.” The most important part of that sentence is the bit in brackets. He talks about a distinction between fully microfounded models and ‘policy models’. The latter used to be called Structural Econometric Models (SEMs), and they are the type of model that Lucas and Sargent famously attacked.

These SEMs have survived as the core model used in many important policy institutions (except for the Bank of England) for good reason, but DSGE trained academics have followed Lucas and Sargent as viewing these as not ‘proper macroeconomics’. Their reasoning is simply wrong, as I discuss here. As Blanchard notes, it is the editors of top journals that need to realise this, and stop insisting that all aggregate models have to be microfounded. The moment they allow space for eclecticism, then academics will be able to choose which methods they use.

Blanchard has one other ‘note for editors’ remark, and it also gets to the heart of the problem with today’s macroeconomics. He writes “Not every discussion of a new mechanism should be required to come with a complete general equilibrium closure.” The example he discusses, and which I have also used in this context, is consumption. DSGE modellers have of course often departed from the simple Euler equation, but I suspect the ways they have done this (rule of thumb consumers, habits) reflect analytical convenience rather than realism.

What sometimes seems to be missing in macro nowadays is a connection between people working on partial equilibrium analysis (like consumption) and general equilibrium modellers. Top journal editors’ preference for the latter means that the former is less highly valued. In my view this has already had important costs. I argue that the failure to take seriously the strong evidence about the importance of changes in credit availability for consumption played an important part in the inability of macroeconomics to adequately model the response to the financial crisis (for more discussion see here and here). Even if you do not accept that, the failure of most DSGE models to include any kind of precautionary saving behaviour does not seem right when DSGE has a monopoly in ‘proper modelling’. [1]

Criticism of the DSGE hegemony from those outside economics, from macroeconomists who are not part of it, or even from economic policymakers has had little impact on those all important journal editors up until now. Perhaps similar comments from one of the best macroeconomists in the world might.

[1] I discuss the reasons why this may have occurred in relation to Chris Carroll’s work here.

Entryism and Corbyn supporters

Owen Jones writes “Corbyn’s opponents .. are, by turns, bewildered, infuriated, aghast, miserable about the rise of Corbynism. But they should take ownership of it, because it is their creation.” I have argued the same in the past, but I would go further. If this crisis within Labour does prove as destructive as I fear it will be, it will be a result of the behaviour of many of Corbyn’s opponents. It is their actions and words which make compromise between the membership and the PLP so elusive.

As I argued in my post on the future of the Labour party (the gist is in the title: Mutually Assured Destruction) those who tried to undermine Corbyn’s leadership from the start in a very public way (I called them the anti-Corbynistas) became in the eyes of most Corbyn supporters their opposition. As a result, they see the vote of no confidence as just an extension of this anti-Corbynista activity, and therefore believe they must defend their original choice at all costs.

While this characterisation of all of the PLP is wide of the mark, the way the anti-Corbynistas characterise Corbyn supporters is far more bizarre. Their model is Trotsky style entryism. This was very real in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, and my one and only experience of standing for election when I was a student involved defeating them. They were always small in number. [1] Their modus operandi was taking over other organisations through a mixture of subterfuge, strategy and persistence, targeting in particular groups where more traditional support had become moribund.

What has actually happened over the last few year to the Labour party in the UK is very different. Labour’s increased membership is similar to the support for Sanders in the US and the rise of the ‘new left’ in other European countries. Of course those who were previously in far left fringe groups will be getting involved, but in this case they are a tiny minority in an organisation that has become rejuvenated as a result of Corbyn (as his opponent in the forthcoming elections, Owen Smith, has acknowledged). If you really want to know who these new Labour party members are, read this post from the Very Public Sociologist, or this article by Ellie Mae O'Hagan or this from Helen Lewis. These accounts chime with my own experience. Militant entryists they are not. Of course this wave of new support contains a fringe of entryists as well as a fringe of intolerant twitter trolls, but to characterise the whole by this fringe is to wilfully misunderstand it.

As Ellie Mae O'Hagan describes, Corbyn supporters are also a group with few representatives in the media (and I’m talking Guardian not Mail), which allows too many in the Westminster-centric media to dismiss them as Socialist Worker fodder. Of course for those journalists in the right wing press who are not sympathetic to Labour, entryism is an attractive story to tell. For those on the right of the party who know this membership will never support their side, the myth of entryism provides a convenient excuse to pursue measures to exclude them. But if you are neither of those and want to influence this new membership, the last thing you do is go on about entryism. Which is the trap Tom Watson fell into earlier this week. [2]

Just as the anti-Corbynistas are happy to falsely characterise Labour party members who support Corbyn as either entryists or being under their sway, so they also claim that Corbyn and McDonnell never intended to try and work with the PLP. Instead it was always an entryist plot. I am called naive when I have suggested otherwise in the past. What I have actually said is that cooperation with the PLP was the only path that offered the new leadership any chance of success, which is what my MAD post is all about. But of course the anti-Corbynista claim about the leaderships real motives is unprovable: the leadership trying to work with the PLP (as it did) can be put down to pretence, and when the leadership failed it could be put down to deliberate intention rather than lack of ability.

The group whose motives are really suspect are the anti-Corbynistas. With Corbyn’s election in 2015 they saw their ability to influence the party slipping away, and have subsequently done everything they can to ensure it disappeared out of sight. They have publicly undermined the leadership, giving Corbyn supporters a clear excuse to ignore the polls. They have attempted to exclude Corbyn from this new election, allowing Corbyn’s supporters to say that by voting for Corbyn they are standing up for democracy. They have called Corbyn supporters entryists when most are clearly not. If they really wanted to win hearts and minds they have been utterly useless, and as a byproduct have probably destroyed hopes of any kind of compromise. (I have lost count of the number of times I have been told by Corbyn supporters that Owen Smith is bound to come under the sway of the anti-Corbynistas.) It is not clear to me yet whether this behaviour is just incompetence, or whether it is they who really have an undeclared objective, which is to split the left.

[1] Colin Talbot argues that because these organisations had high churn, there are a lot of ‘ex-Trots’ out there. “It is this mass of vaguely ‘socialist’ middle-aged ex-Trots – and there are an awful lot more of them than they or anyone else probably realized until recently – that might explain a lot of the ‘Corbyn’ phenomena. Disillusioned with Blair (mainly over one single issue – Iraq), despondent of Labour ever winning again anyway, they have turned to Corbyn as the political equivalent of going out and buying a Harley.”

But maybe these ‘ex-Trots’ are ‘ex’ because they went off the concept of entryism - like the author himself. Being disillusioned by Iraq and despondent at Labour losing in 2015 are virtues. The implication that by supporting Corbyn they somehow have not grown out of their youthful behaviour is nothing more than an opinion.

[2] He said “There are Trots that have come back to the party, and they certainly don’t have the best interests of the Labour party at heart. They see the Labour party as a vehicle for revolutionary socialism, and they’re not remotely interested in winning elections, and that’s a problem. But I don’t think the vast majority of people that have joined the Labour party and have been mobilised by the people that are in Momentum are all Trots and Bolsheviks.” My italics, suggesting his analysis is similar to mine. But then he went on about “old hands twisting young arms”, which is really not a good way to persuade those with young arms!

Brexit harm denial and the exchange rate

There seems at the moment some confusion in the Brexit camp: is all the bad news just wishful imagination by Remainers, or is it real but caused by Remainers. Some specific thoughts on the extraordinary Telegraph editorial are here, but one event that was not in anyone’s imagination was the depreciation in sterling as the result became known. Brexiters tend to think markets know what they are doing, so they have resorted to all kinds of arguments why this depreciation was not really bad news.

First, the reason why it is bad news. A depreciation in sterling makes everyone in the UK poorer, because the goods we buy that are made overseas or sold in world markets (oil) will cost more. That this depreciation happened as a result of the vote is beyond dispute. So what do Leave apologists have to say in response? So far I have heard the following.

The depreciation has a good side, because it gives a boost to our exporters.

Economists say never reason from a price change, but instead ask why prices have changed. There are two possible reasons why sterling may have depreciated immediately the vote was announced. The first is that markets think UK exporters need to become more competitive in the longer term to offset the impact of Brexit, because Brexit will make it harder to export to the EU. In short, we are poorer because of Brexit.

Now it is true that markets are anticipating a future event (Brexit has not happened yet), so in theory there will be a short term boost to exports as firms benefit from the depreciation now, but the costs of Brexit come later. But that brings us to the second reason for a depreciation: markets believe Brexit will cause an economic downturn in the UK, implying lower levels of UK interest rates. (In this they have been proved correct). The fact that they were expecting lower interest rates even though exporters get a short term boost tells you that this boost is at best just going to make things a bit less bad than they might otherwise be.

Either way, any short term benefits from the depreciation do not offset the fact that we are all poorer as a result.

Sterling was overvalued anyway

This is an argument put forward by Daniel Hannan. The idea is that a depreciation was going to happen anyway. It is an argument that makes no sense. Suppose you think the price of coffee is too low because markets have underestimated future demand from the US. An unexpected blight then wipes out half the coffee trees in Latin America, and the price shoots up. It is ludicrous to then say no problem, the price was too low anyway. The markets are still underestimating future demand from the US, and when they realise this the price will rise further still.

Sterling is only back to where it was ….

Imagine your earnings vary from month to month because of bonuses. Your boss cuts your basic pay, and tells you not to worry because when you add in the average bonus it is still going to be higher than when bonuses were really low. If you think that actually means your pay has not been cut, then you will be convinced by this argument.

It is just a temporary problem before things become clearer

This argument might just work, but only if you admit things that Leavers tend not to admit. First, it seems reasonable to assume that the short term economic downturn is because firms do not yet know what kind of Brexit we will get, and are putting things on hold until they do. Putting things on hold causes the Brexit Bust, which means the Bank cuts rates, which depreciates sterling. Now move forward to the date where things become clearer, and suppose the outcome is much better for trade than it might have been. (Basically we stay in the single market and accept free movement of labour.) The economy then recovers, interest rates rise, and sterling appreciates. If that happens (and it is a big if), all we need to do is ask who was responsible for all this uncertainty and the temporary damage it caused.   

Brexit: a battle lost but who will fight the war?

The Brexit vote was, in economic terms, an act of self harm. You do not need to just ‘trust the experts’ on this: it is pretty close to common sense. As Rebecca Driver clearly explains, leaving the single market will make it much more difficult for (particularly small) firms to trade in Europe. As Europe is on our doorstep and geography matters, that cannot and will not be compensated for by trading more elsewhere. [1] Finally greater trade is associated, for clear reasons, with higher growth. Lower growth will impact unfavourably on every area in the UK, whether they voted Leave or Remain.

The harm done is not just economic. As Ben Chu writes, “The crude majoritarian politics of this referendum has seen half of the population (a generally poorer, less well-educated and elderly half) effectively strip major freedoms and even a cherished identity from the other half (a more prosperous and predominantly younger half)”. Before the referendum, I had conversations with people arguing that a Brexit vote would be more harmful than a Trump presidency, and this deep sense of anger, loss and despondency will not go away. We therefore need to understand why it happened.

In my last post I argued that Brexit was a protest vote against both the impact of globalisation and social liberalism. The two come together over immigration, and of course the one certainty of the Brexit debate was that free movement prevented controls on EU migration. Globalisation has benefited the majority in the UK, so those who had not benefited could not alone have won a Brexit vote. Equally social conservatives have lost battle after battle in the UK on specific social issues. Brexit was the perfect storm where these two groups came together, and combined they just managed to win.

Explanations do not imply inevitability, but instead tell us why the result could easily have been different. We need a sensible discussion about immigration, rather than assume it is always and everywhere a problem. However to follow the social conservative route and say concern over immigration is just xenophobia is not helpful. [2] We need to challenge the view the right wing press has patiently built up that immigration is responsible for declining public services and making it difficult to get housing. Too many people continue to discount the power and influence of the media: that is a mistake, as this research on Fox news shows. It is not difficult to get across the benefits of immigration, given how much the NHS and our construction sector depend on immigrants, but it is not something many of our leading politicians have done for some time.

More generally it is becoming increasingly clear how destructive the doctrine of neoliberalisation has been. Neoliberalism combines the encouragement of globalisation with demands for a much reduced role for the state. In the advanced economies the deindustrialisation implied by globalisation and the growth of China and elsewhere has been beneficial overall, but there are sections of society that have lost out, which invites a backlash. As Kevin O’Rourke shows, globalisation has often led to fierce resistance in the past. Dani Rodrik has demonstrated how state spending can protect, and has often in the past protected, the losers from trade. [3] (As an economist mights say, globalisation is a Kaldor/Hicks improvement, but in recent times the compensation part has been missing.) Brexit, like the financial crisis and perhaps also Donald Trump, are in this sense problems created not by globalisation alone but by neoliberalism.

For the UK it is worse than that. It is not just that austerity is the real cause of declining public services, and a failure to build houses is the cause of rising prices and rents. (See Chris Dillow or Mariana Mazzucato) It is that this government in particular has connived with the right wing press to transfer blame for an NHS in crisis and unaffordable housing from their own policies on to immigration. The Remain campaign was Cameron and Osborne, and neither were prepared to change their tune and start talking about how limiting immigration would mean there was even less money for public services. As I noted in the previous post, the NHS was an important concern for Leave voters, and they thought Brexit would make things better. Can you imagine a worse background for the EU referendum vote than a government that continually stressed the importance of limiting immigration, but failed to achieve those limits so spectacularly. [4]

This was not the only problem with the Remain campaign. In terms of getting the message across, Leave seemed to understand their target audience much better. (It is not my field, but this from Mark Hind makes sense.) To get the message across the Remain campaign relied on the institutions of the establishment: the Treasury, Bank of England, IMF etc. Fine for those for whom the establishment is respected, less so for those who regard it as remote and detached from their lives. Remain made very little use of academics, despite the fact that this group is trusted by the public. [5] Leave did seem to understand this, which is why they went to ridiculous extremes to discredit these experts. The broadcast media hardly ever noted the consensus among economists that Brexit would reduce everyone's standard of living, and instead did their ‘he says, she says’ thing. This media also failed to point out the lies Leave told, preferring ‘balance’ over truth.

All this implies that while the potential for a Brexit vote was always there, reflecting the perfect storm of anger against globalisation and social liberalism, it might not have been realised if the Remain campaign had been better, the Leave campaign had been honest and the broadcast media had not departed from its mission to educate and explain. The lies of the Leave camp are already apparent. The depreciation in sterling that immediately followed the vote is a cut in living standards for everyone in the UK with no lasting compensation. It is permanent unless the markets have got things spectacularly wrong. The economic downturn that is underway is as predicted. In both cases voters were told this was fear mongering by the Remain side: now those that promoted Leave are in the ludicrous situation of arguing that markets and firms have somehow been deceived by Project Fear.

In normal circumstances this would all be a cause for optimism. We do not need many voters to realise that they were conned by the Leave campaign before Leavers become a minority, or at least for the majority to favour a deal that can keep the UK in the single market with essentially free movement of labour. (There may have even been such a majority on the day of the vote.) To call this the denial stage in some ‘grieving process’ by Remain voters misunderstands the nature of the decision. Leaving is compatible with a whole range of alternative arrangements: some quite close to EU membership, some not. In that sense the vote only gave the green light to an ongoing struggle over what these arrangements will be. (For a discussion of the politics involved, see here but also here.) Thus those who say we should accept the verdict of the people are wrong, because a great deal is still to play for.

Yet circumstances are far from normal, and there seems little ground for optimism. Our new Prime Minister - who was as complicit in the sham targets for immigration as Cameron and Osborne - has appointed those who supported Leave to handle negotiations. She knows that the only way she can unite her party is to end free movement and therefore leave the single market.

Worse still, the government will do whatever it wants to do when it comes to the type of Brexit we have. Our official opposition will, if the polls are right, be the same opposition that was both ineffective and conflicted in the Brexit campaign, preoccupied as it will almost certainly be with cleansing the PLP rather than the details of trade arrangements. There is no alternative opposition with any strength. The SNP cannot speak for the rest of the UK, and anyway will be focused on trying (and probably failing) to drum up enough support for independence. As a result the 48% or more who did not want an end to the single market will not be able to do much about it. I fear that if you want a vision of what Britain after Brexit will become, you just need to look in the pages of the newspapers that were a vital part in bringing Brexit about.

[1] My impression was that discussion on broadcast news programmes, which is the main source many people have to unbiased news coverage, or even the debates never got to this point. We had someone from Remain saying trade with Europe would suffer, and someone from Leave saying we would be ‘free’ to trade with other countries. You do not need the Treasury’s gravity equations to make this simple point about geography and trade, but you need to go a little beyond soundbites.

[2] A similar point can be made about nationalism, which is hard to combat and may be a symptom rather than a cause.

[3] Rodrik, D. (1998), "Why do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments?" Journal of Political Economy 106(5): 997-1032

[4] None of this was hard to see before the last general election. Those who in 2015 voted Conservative but also wanted to Remain need to ask why they took no notice of the warnings that some of us made. Those ‘business leaders’ who seemed to unanimously endorse Cameron need to ask, or be asked, why they were gambling with their company’s future in doing so.

[5] Part of the problem is that Leave voters tended not to trust anyone. This, by Jean Pisani-Ferry, is good on experts and trust.

A divided nation

After the Brexit vote, economists and others who voted Remain are quite right to say I told you so as the economic hit they expected comes to pass. The Brexit Bust needs to be labelled clearly, given the power the Leave side has over the means of communication. (Those behind that campaign are already talking utter nonsense in order to pretend it had nothing to do with them.) But those who voted Remain also need to understand why they lost.

The studies I’m going to focus on here use regressions and the breakdown of the Brexit vote district by district. [1] It is important to do regression analysis, which can look at more than one factor at a time, because influences are correlated with each other. We might note, for example, that districts are less likely to vote Leave if they contain relatively high earners, or relatively well educated people. So is it lack of education or lack of money that caused people to vote Leave? That is what any kind of multiple regression can try and sort out.

Before looking at individual studies, let me mention some things that appear to be uncontroversial. Education and age are key determinates: if you are less educated or older you tend to vote Leave. Both matter independently: although young people with few qualifications tend to vote Leave, they are less likely to do so than less qualified older people.Once you take these into account, income is not a significant factor. Geography matters in key ways. One of those is that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland were much less likely to want to leave (controlling for other factors). The other I will come to.

A key issue is whether the local level of migration has had an influence. Stephen Clarke and Matthew Whittaker at the Resolution Foundation find that the level of immigration is not important, but its recent rate of change is, in making people vote Leave. Zsolt Darvas at Bruegel also finds the level unimportant. However Monica Langella and Alan Manning from the LSE find that areas with high immigration are more likely to vote Leave, and confirm the finding that the rate of change matters too. So while two studies agree that areas with a recent large increase in immigration are more likely to vote leave, more work needs to be done on whether its actual level matters. However, even if it matters, it does not matter that much, as the large majority for Remain in London tells us.

One other area where the studies differ is employment or unemployment. Clarke and Whittaker suggest areas with a low employment rate are more likely to vote Leave, but Langella and Manning seem to find the opposite, and Darvas says any impact from levels of unemployment (which is not the same as the inverse of the employment rate) is explained by other factors which I will now come to.

There are some variables that have not been considered by all three of these studies. Darvas has one particularly interesting result: the Leave vote increases in areas where there is a lot of poverty and local inequality. Langella and Manning find that areas with long term declines in agricultural, manufacturing or public employment are more likely to vote Leave. This is also the conclusion of a team led by Bristol geographer Ron Johnston, which is worth quoting in full.

“There are substantial parts of the country where large numbers of people have lost out from the deindustrialisation and globalisation of the last few decades of neo-liberal economic policies, and where the educational system has not helped large proportions of the young to equip themselves for the new labour market. Increasing numbers in these disadvantaged groups were won over during the last few decades by the campaigns in parts of the print media, taken up by UKIP since the 1990s, linking their situations to the impact of immigration – uncontrollable because of the EU freedom of movement of labour principle. The wider Leave campaign built on that foundation in 2016, producing the geography displayed here.”

That conclusion of course goes beyond the finding that areas hard hit by globalisation tended to vote Leave, and adds an explanation that sees the press and politicians actively trying to link the experience of disadvantage to the issue of immigration. It is an argument I have also made. Unfortunately it is an argument that is very difficult to prove using regression analysis, because - as newspapers often argue - they may print just what sells newspapers, so any correlation does not imply causation.

It is also important to remember that the link between voting Leave and areas of deindustrialisation is in additional to the strong links with education and age. Education may fit in with a story where the anti-EU stance (to say bias does not do it justice) of most of the tabloid press is important, for obvious reasons. The same is true with age, as younger people are likely to get their information by other means than the tabloid press.   

There is another, very different, line of argument that tries to explain the Leave vote not in terms of class but psychology/culture. Eric Kaufmann finds simple correlations between voting Leave and authoritarianism. A story you can tell is that, for some at least, Brexit was a vote against not neoliberalism but social liberalism. The link between social liberalism and the EU is once again migration, which represents one more unwelcome change for social conservatives. Social conservatism and authoritarianism may also map more easily into nationalism and wanting to 'take control', and it was part of the tabloid 'grooming' to do exactly that. Social conservatism may also explain the importance of age and perhaps also education.

There is no reason why we need to choose between the economic and the social types of explanation. Kaufmann and Johnston et al can both be right. As Max Wind-Cowie says (quoted by Rick here):

“Bringing together the dissatisfied of Tunbridge Wells and the downtrodden of Merseyside is a remarkable feat, and it stems from UKIP’s empathy for those who have been left behind by the relentless march of globalisation and glib liberalism.”

Both these explanations see antagonism to the idea (rather than the actuality) of migration as the way an underlying grievance got translated into a dislike of the EU. But was immigration really so crucial? A widely quoted poll by Lord Ashcroft says a wish for sovereignty was more important. The problem here, of course, is that sovereignty - and a phrase like taking back control - is an all embracing term which might well be seen as more encompassing than just a concern about immigration. It really needs a follow-up asking what aspects of sovereignty are important. If we look at what Leavers thought was important, the “ability to control our own laws” seemed to have little to do with the final vote compared to more standard concerns, including immigration.

However there are other aspects of the Ashcroft poll that I think are revealing. First, economic arguments were important for Remain voters. The economic message did get through to many voters. Second, the NHS was important to Leave voters, so the point economists also made that ending free movement would harm the NHS was either not believed or did not get through to this group. Indeed “more than two thirds (69%) of leavers, by contrast, thought the decision “might make us a bit better or worse off as a country, but there probably isn’t much in it either way””. Whether they did not know about the overwhelming consensus among economists who thought otherwise, or chose to ignore it, we cannot tell.

Third, Leave voters are far more pessimistic about the future, and also tend to believe that life today is much worse than life 30 years ago. Finally, those who thought the following were a source of ill rather than good - multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism, globalisation, the internet, the green movement and immigration - tended by large majorities to vote Leave. Only in the case of capitalism did as many Remain and Leave voters cite it as a source of ill. These results suggest that Leave voters were those left behind in modern society in either an economic or social way (or perhaps both).

Taking all this evidence into account it seems that the Brexit vote was a protest vote against both the impact of globalisation and social liberalism. The two are connected by immigration, and of course the one certainty of the Brexit debate was that free movement prevented controls on EU migration. But that does not mean defeat was inevitable, as Chris makes clear. Kevin O’Rourke points out that the state can play an active role in compensating the losers from globalisation, and of course in recent years there has been an attempt to roll back the state. Furthermore, as Johnston et al suggest, the connection between economic decline and immigration is more manufactured than real. Tomorrow I’ll discuss both the campaign and what implications this all might have.

[1] Please let me know if I missed any studies. One I found out about as this post was about to be published was this by Richard Mann.

Rolling Postscript: Studies I've seen since. This by Jo Michell (particularly on migration impact). Geoff Tily argues that London may be special.