7 years on: why did people vote brexit?

Brexit happened seven years ago - and there have been different ways to look at it:

Brexit referendum seven years on: Where are we now? | Politics | News | Express.co.uk

Brexit’s 7 biggest headaches, 7 years on from EU referendum | The Independent

Although a lot of people aren't interested:

Seven years on, only one in three Britons can recall the EU referendum result | YouGov

Looking back what were the reasons for the vote?

Jay Doubleyou: brexit, britain and turkey

Jay Doubleyou: brexit: experts, elites and hedgefund managers

Jay Doubleyou: middle england: the heart of brexit britain

Jay Doubleyou: brexit: "the majority of leave voters were middle class. most lived in the south of england."

Jay Doubleyou: brexit and the culture wars

Jay Doubleyou: brexit from very different perspectives

The BBC asked people just after the vote:

BBC Radio 4 - The Briefing Room, Why Did People Vote Leave?

Maybe it had a lot to do with the decades before:

Tabloid Tales: How the British Tabloid Press Shaped the Brexit Vote - Simpson - 2023 - JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies - Wiley Online Library

The three classic British sitcoms that forecast Brexit

Britain and Europe Before Brexit: A Complicated Relationship | Time

Here are some extracts from a recent piece in the New European by David Kynaston:

Birth of a catastrophe: How the seeds of Brexit were sown in the 1960s

One of Britain’s leading historians explains how the roots of the decision taken seven years ago were laid decades before that

Were the 1960s, that most mythologised of all decades, when it all began to go wrong? I believe one can make a plausible case that that was when the long, slow-burning fuse was lit for half a century later.

We must start with de-industrialisation. Although the great step-change would come in the traumatic early 1980s, as Britain lost one-quarter of its manufacturing capacity in just two years, even in the 60s the direction of travel was unmistakable. At the start of the decade, employment was roughly equal between manufacturing and services, but by the end it had tipped decisively towards the latter, a change neatly symbolised by the moment the number of hairdressers passed the 100,000 mark.

Textiles, coalmining, shipbuilding, steel: all of Britain’s staple industries were in significant decline, as were the railways. This decline inevitably triggered the erosion of a working-class way of life, deeply in tune with industrial rhythms that had been established in the late 19th century and had come to seem permanent...

No one has written more powerfully about the social and psychic impact of de-industrialisation than Jeremy Seabrook, who on the very day that Britain voted to leave published in the New Statesman a characteristically impassioned piece about the death of the industrial way of life. “The ravages of drugs and alcohol and self-harm in silent former pit villages and derelict factory towns,” he observed, “show convergence with other ruined cultures elsewhere in the world.”

Almost all of this still lay ahead at the end of the 60s, but the left-behind signs were starting to become clear. And given that in some distinct ways Brexit has been a very male – even alpha-male – phenomenon, it is relevant that the 60s themselves saw, more markedly than in either the 1950s or 1970s, a growing proportion of women in the British labour force, once such a masculine preserve. And soon, unimaginable not long before, they would even be entitled to equal pay.

As with de-industrialisation, so too with that pet hate of the Brexiteers, “globalisation”. Although it did not become a recognised phenomenon as such until the 1990s, and although exchange controls were still firmly in place, there were indications during the 60s of the way things were going. Not only was foreign ownership of British companies increasingly prevalent, epitomised by Nestlé taking over Crosse & Blackwell as early as 1960, but these years saw the rapid flourishing of international finance centred on the City of London. This led to the rise of what became known as the Euromarkets, which involved a dominant role for American banks and in effect represented stage 1 of the internationalisation of the City, to be followed two decades later by the much more publicised stage 2, the Thatcher-era deregulation known as “Big Bang”. The Square Mile was becoming ever more adrift from the UK economy...

In short, taking these examples as a whole, we are talking about culture wars; and this was the decade when the battle-lines were drawn, often a long way from swinging London.

To end with the story a friend once told me… It was 1969, a Sunday evening in Goole (a town about 30 miles inland from Hull), and he had taken his girlfriend to the pub – where the barman refused to serve them. Their crime? She was wearing trousers. Carnaby Street and the King’s Road may have been at their fashionable height, the Rolling Stones may have been playing at Hyde Park, but Goole was still Goole.

Over the ensuing half-century, the forces of social conservatism would enjoy two defining moments in the sun. The first came in 1979, as Margaret Thatcher was swept to power not, in my opinion, because of her free-market views, but instead because many believed (on the whole mistakenly, as it turned out) that she was the person to turn the clock back to a Britain, above all an England, as it had been before the 60s; and of course the second came in June 2016, when incidentally the Leave vote was higher in Goole than almost anywhere else. “Nostalgia for the past” was the instinct to which the EU’s Michel Barnier would attribute the Leave vote. To a large extent he was right.

Birth of a catastrophe: How the seeds of Brexit were sown in the 1960s - The New European

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