Joseph Rowntree Foundation research also showed general mistrust of politicians as voters are increasingly driven by emotion

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The vote for Brexit was fuelled by poorer voters feeling they had very little control over immigration, coupled with a more general mistrust of politicians and officials, according to new research into attitudes before the referendum.

The study, carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, presents a wider narrative of voters being increasingly motivated by emotion, rather than economic choices, something the researchers said could point to a future in which populist parties thrive.



Personal feeling over immigration was a particularly dominant motivation in the run-up to the Brexit vote, said Nancy Kelley, the director of the policy research centre at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), which conducted the study.

“In a sense if you’re concerned about immigration, then experts arguing that it’s good for the economy is so missing the point,” she said at an event in parliament to launch the research.

“That’s not the debate you’re wanting to have. What you’re wanting to say is ‘I find this psychologically troubling in some way’ – how it’s making people feel.”



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Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at Kent University and an expert on populist parties, said this new narrative left the Labour party at risk of “getting hammered” if it continued to advocate free movement of people post-Brexit.

Politicians on the centre-left were still discussing immigration in “a very transactional, rational language”, Goodwin said.

“Everything we know from 20 years of research on social science suggests that issues of culture and identity are just as important, if not more important, than questions of economic scarcity and perceived economic threat.

“Unless mainstream politicians, society, elites – whatever you want to call them – start to look beyond questions of economic distribution, the populist right will always be able to outflank those parties,” he told the event.



“That’s because it is in engaging in a discussion – you might not like how it is talking about it – about culture and identity. That is critically important.”



The study, which ran in parallel with research published last week showing how voters’ decision on Brexit cut across party and social lines, used data gathered by NatCen before the referendum campaign had begun.

When people were asked how in control they felt over political issues such as crime, housing and health, the proportion who said “I can make no difference” ranged from 10% to 28%.

Immigration to UK hit record levels prior to Brexit vote, data shows Read more

However, with immigration this shot up to 72% saying they had no control, with an even higher 76% of those on lower incomes saying this. Only 6% of people felt they had any real control over immigration.

This feeling came to the fore during the EU referendum, Kelley argued: “You’re presented with a binary choice that is framed as a choice between less and more immigration – at that point that feeling of total inability to control becomes relevant.”

Coupled to this, she said, was a particular feeling among lower-income voters that government officials “don’t care what I think”.

“People who are in poverty are much more likely to agree with the statement,” Kelley said. “They feel they are completely irrelevant to politicians. The way people answer this question is very directly correlated with a leave vote.”

Other factors tied closely to voting leave included people’s belief they had lost out economically compared with others – 76% of those who believed this supported Brexit – and thinking Britain had changed significantly for the worse, 73% of whom opted for leave.

This was part of an apparent shift towards emotion-based political decision-making, she said. “Subjective characteristics, what people think and feel, was just as important in deciding how people vote as any of those objective characteristics – your age, your income, where you live, all of that.”



The new research also included in-depth, qualitative studies of the views of low-income voters in one outer London borough.

Here, the study said, people “talked about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers interchangeably”, and felt that immigration created pressure on public services, in which they and their family were likely to lose out.

Such questions had been asked for some time, Kelley noted, but were suddenly the focus of new attention following the referendum.

“We have been measuring quite a lot of these things,” she said. “We’ve just not been listening to what those measures have told us, for a really long time.”