The Brexit Culture War Is Finally Hitting Its Endgame

The December 12 election will determine whether Britain leaves the EU and how

Credit: Peter Summers/Getty

Four years of carnage. Brexit has been pulverizing British politics for so long that most of the people who live here can barely remember what it was like beforehand. Sometimes we reminisce about a period when politics was about other things, like health care or education policy. But it’s a distant memory which is increasingly hard to recall — like the face of someone you once knew in school.

That might finally be about to come to an end. Not the real end, of course. Brexit will never really end. It’s a permanent state of hellishness. Even if Britain leaves the EU, it’ll still face decades of trade deals and international negotiations. Even if it doesn’t, there’ll be years of political upheaval as the emotions triggered by it refuse to die down. We’re not at the end. But we might, if we’re lucky, be approaching the end of the beginning.

The prime minister, Boris Johnson, is going to hold a general election. On December 12, either he will win, or the other side will. And that decision will dictate how Britain leaves the EU, or if it even will at all.

It won’t be a normal election. It’ll be grounded in an intense sense of tribal warfare conducted on cultural lines.

This is the new form of political identity operating in Britain. Back in those olden political days of 2015, we used to think in terms of left and right, Labour and Conservative. Politics was fundamentally socioeconomic.

Then the 2016 Brexit referendum came. When the results were in, it was clear it didn’t represent the traditional left-right division. Well-off voters in the shires of southern England voted the same way as left-behind voters in the post-industrial towns of northern England. The only variables which mattered were age, education, and proclivity to authoritarian social opinions. The older you were, the more poorly educated, and the more likely to support capital punishment — the more likely that you’d voted Brexit. Politics stopped being socioeconomic and became sociocultural.

But the actual act of delivering Brexit was not about cultural values. It was a fiendish, impossible technical puzzle — renegotiating trade deals, saving manufacturing supply lines from customs checks, leveling up independent regulatory capacity. After over four decades of legal embrace, Britain and the EU were connected in a million complex ways. It’s hard to sever that arrangement without serious pain.

The basic conundrum around Brexit in practice was that the closer Britain stays to the EU after leaving, the more it preserves the economy — but the less independence it has. And the further Britain pushed the EU away, the more independence it would get — and the more economic damage it would suffer. The government tried various approaches, but the culture war tribalism of the referendum wouldn’t input into the technical exercise. It was like trying to put a VHS tape into a DVD player.

Underneath the party politics, something deeper is shifting. The tectonic plates of politics — people’s sense of identity — are changing.

Last week, for a few glistening moments, it looked like the prime minister was on the verge of getting something through. He’d struck a new deal with the EU which pleased the Brexit wing of his party — promising complete separation from the EU — while keeping most moderates on board on the basis of simple exhaustion and terror at the prospect of there being no deal at all.

But there was a blood sacrifice: The Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party. They had been firm allies of the hard Brexiters. And yet the deal split Northern Ireland off into the EU’s customs ecosystem. They were outraged, red-faced with betrayal, absolutely incandescent with anger. In some cases, they seemed to cross that it looked like they might actually physically explode. But for the Brexiteers, their former comrades were a necessary sacrifice to the greater cause.

For a moment, the deal looked like it might squeeze through the House of Commons. Johnson tried to force it through over the course of a tight two days, which would have prevented members of parliament from having any real time to read it or properly scrutinize the contents. But at the last moment, the lawmakers held firm, rejected the timetable, and demanded more time to look at the deal.

Johnson reacted impulsively. In what seemed to be a fit of pique, he pulled the legislation and demanded that there be a general election. On Tuesday night, parliament agreed to a December 12 trip to the polls — the first December election in Britain since 1923.

The dark, cold, wet few weeks to come will define everything. If Johnson wins, Brexit will happen immediately and on the hardest terms. If the opposition wins, they will renegotiate his deal to make it much softer — staying tightly ensconced in the EU trading system — and then hold a second referendum on the deal. Brexit may well not happen at all.

The dynamics are complex. Johnson enjoys a healthy double-digit lead over the opposition Labour party. “Leave” voters have only split two ways, between him and the more hardline Brexit party, whereas “Remain” voters have split five ways, between Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party (SNP), Plaid Cymru, and the Greens.

But other structural aspects don’t play quite so well for Johnson. The Remain vote enjoys an advantageous geographical spread. In most places, there is one primary Remain party fighting the Conservatives — they’re only quite rarely pitted against each other.

It’s also hard to see where Johnson plans to get his votes from. He is already set to lose moderate Tory voters to the SNP in Scotland and the Liberal Democrats in southern England. He will need to pick up Brexit-supporting Labour voters in northern England to make up for it, but they’re put off by his upper-class manner and right-wing economic policies.

Most polling analysts believe it will be hard for either main party to win the election with an outright majority. And that favors Labour, because it can form coalitions with any of the Remain parties, whereas Johnson only has the Brexit party to buddy up with.

Underneath the party politics, something deeper is shifting. The tectonic plates of politics — people’s sense of identity — are changing. People increasingly see themselves as Remainers and Leavers, rather than Labour or Conservative supporters. And that makes it incredibly hard to assess how the votes will fall. The change from a socioeconomic to a sociocultural political debate is playing absolute havoc with British political realities.

There is everything to play for. Either side could quite easily win. Britain’s future will be defined, for a generation, by what happens in the next few weeks.