Austerity => Brexit ?

A whole bunch of people (me included) have already pointed out a likely link between Brexit and austerity. It seems reasonable enough that if you take people's public services away then they're going to want someone to blame, and they're not necessarily going to be too fussy about who that is. Herein are studies confirming those suspicions, at least on a correlative (if not yet causative) level :

He found that UKIP's share of a district's vote jumped anywhere from 3.5 to 11.9 percentage points in correlation with austerity's local impact. "Given the tight link between UKIP vote shares and an area's support for Leave, simple back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that Leave support in 2016 could have been easily at least 6 percentage points lower," Fetzer continued. As tight as the Brexit referendum was, that alone could have been enough to swing it.

"Individuals tend to react to the general economic situation of their region, regardless of their specific condition," Colantone and Stanig wrote. But Fetzer was able to break out some individual data in his analysis of austerity, and he found a correlation with Brexit votes there as well. Individual Britons who were more exposed to welfare state cuts — in particular a reduction in supports for housing costs — were again more likely to vote for UKIP. 

People really are weird. To varying degrees, they're also unfortunate and awful creatures. In a way, it's nice that they react to the general situation and not just their own circumstances (although some of them definitely don't care a jot about the general situation). But this crazy idea that people thought the E.U. was somehow having a detrimental effect on their own lives, without ever (or at least vanishingly rarely) being able to spell out exactly how this happened... there's the downside.

Austerity has a certain appeal. Virtually all of us has experienced the situation where we can't afford everything we want so we have to save up for things. At a basic level, it makes good sense that if the country is in recession we should try and save money. And the economy under Cameron did improve. But there were little or no signs of austerity ever weakening, and for all George Osborne is against Brexit, he was very strongly fiscally Conservative with a capital C.

Inequality in Britain had been worsening for decades, as the upper class in the City of London pulled further and further ahead of the largely rural working class, setting the stage for Brexit. And then austerity fell hardest on the shoulders of the latter group, compounding the effect.

It isn't that the economic dislocation of the 2008 crisis and the ensuing austerity crunch made Britons more racist. By all accounts, half or more of the country has consistently looked askance on immigration going back decades. (Indeed, international polling suggests a certain baseline dislike for immigration is a near-universal human condition.) What changed in the last few years was the willingness of certain parts of British society to act politically on those attitudes. And that, arguably, is where the economics come in.

In the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, much of the campaigning in favour of "Leave" was unabashedly racist. Hard-right political groups like the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) painted a picture of native Britons overrun by hordes of foreign immigrants that were straining the country's health care, housing, public services, jobs and wages to the breaking point. The thing is, the racism was a particular poisonous way of framing a very real underlying economic fear: all those necessities really had become harder to come by.

I'll offer a rough-and-ready version of a narrative explanation of the final stages of Brexit. I cannot speak for the preceding decades economically, but I can confirm that there had been a strong hard right, anti-foreigner rhetoric in the popular press which successive governments disgustingly failed to get a grip on. There was a strong feeling of not hostility but disgruntlement towards the E.U. for many years. It was regarded largely as a fringe issue, but it was very much in everyone's minds.

Then came the global financial crisis. Although we all knew it was coming, the Brown-led Labour government catastrophically failed to persuade enough people that it wasn't Labour's fault. I would say that Labour spending helped the country survive the crisis, that without robust social institutions and services we would have been much worse hit. But the Tories successfully spun a pro-austerity message that Labour had actually overspent (which is probably nonsense, but appealing nonsense) and this, if it didn't exactly result in them sweeping to power, then put them very clearly in charge.

Austerity was something could grin and bear - but only for a while. It got worse. It didn't help that Labour's new leader was a nice chap but totally undetectable, and in trying to distinguish himself from his predecessor, had made the mistake of capitulating to the Tories on immigration. Milliband's message was nowhere near critical enough of the Tory policies in that it did not have a simple enough theme to it. It did not have any clear narrative, it just had policies. And admitting that Labour was wrong on immigration only handed more ammunition to the Tories, giving them the right to claim they were right all along and therefore better able to deal with it.

As austerity deepened, when the referendum came, people were no longer tolerant but angry. They were not all that dissatisfied with the Tory government, who were after all doing pretty much what they said they would do as relatively honest villains (especially now they were unfettered by the Lib Dems, who had rendered themselves pointless). But they were still looking for someone to blame. To their credit, Labour by this point had realised their mistake and elected a charismatic (though unconventional) leader whose politics were much more aligned with many of the voters. And he did have a clear, thematic, anti-austerity message. Unfortunately he turned out to be if not a hard Brexiteer then at least a closet Leaver.

So the final combination was one of angry voters, austerity policies that had genuinely made things worse, a government who were doing what they said they would and improving the economy (though not for ordinary people), a chronic anti-E.U., anti-immigrant atmosphere, and an opposition leader who just didn't care. Even this toxic concoction produced only the slimmest of victories for the Brexiteers, but a victory it was nonetheless.

The unfolding disaster that is Brexit could have been avoided in a plethora of ways, but austerity has a strong claim to be the root cause. Giving the prevailing political conditions, it was likely always necessary but only provisionally sufficient. It's not likely that it would have happened at all without austerity (saving radically different political circumstances), but even so it could have been stopped at any number of occasions. Indeed, it still can. Of course, the article doesn't say as to whether the austerity-Brexit correlation is the strongest one, or if the correlation could be a symptom of a more fundamental relationship, but the link is at least credible.

Supposing that this narrative is correct, then there are a couple of key features :

1. Brexit is a perfect storm of horrible details. That the key driver was austerity does not mean that the whole omnishambles was inevitable - it could have been stopped by any number of different actions. It is not the result of the inevitable tide of history washing away liberalism or whatever Putin thinks.
2. People are stupid and easily fooled. Ignorance is not, contrary to a popular saying, a choice. Rather it results from people (as Plato said) not thinking they need more information because they already have the answers. I do not think the above narrative requires outlandish leaps of logic or extraordinary political insight*, yet it seems to have escaped a large fraction of people that they should blame the people inflicting economic hardship on them and they instead blame someone else entirely.

* At some point I plan to review the posts labelled "predictions", but for now I'll just say I've made plenty of mistakes.

In conclusion, it's depressing stuff. And while instigating austerity enabled Brexit, fighting austerity does not seem to engender a renewed hope in the E.U. Political decisions have highly non-linear and non-reversible consequences. I don't like it.

The overwhelming correlation between austerity and Brexit

Across the pond, the Brexit disaster continues to unfold in newly disastrous ways. Theresa May has resigned as prime minister, and the Trump-esque Boris Johnson looks like a lock to replace her. Parliament members - up to and including Johnson's own fellow Conservatives - are panicking that the new prime minister may try hardline tactics to force Brexit through, plan or no plan.