Is 'anger at the status quo' a useful concept?

Much of the British commentary on the politics of Brexit assumes, either implicitly or explicitly that the referendum result was the result of a sense of disenfranchisement, or disempowerment, present in a wide section of the electorate. This notion of disenfranchisement is not typically defined, but is typically taken to exist as a general sentiment over and above specific political motivations or goals, acting both as an emotional  intensifier and a general sense of anger at politicians and political processes. This notion is used both as a form of apologism for otherwise unsavory political developments (describing, for example, anti-immigrant sentiment as focusing on a lack of control over migration policy) and as part of an argument in favour of other radical political programs. It is particularly significant that many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn argue that a sense of disenfranchisement among the population could be channeled towards a left wing movement if it adopts the proper rhetorical strategy to compliment its policy platform (this notion has deep roots in the left).

But while there may be some use of this notion of disenfranchisement in general, in makes no sense in the particular context we find ourselves. First and foremost, in making sense of the leave vote, it makes sense to remind ourselves of certain basic facts. The first is that having voted for the governing party prior to the referendum is a pretty good predictor of your vote in the referendum, but in the opposite  direction to what would be consistent with the narrative of disenfranchisement. 66% of those who voted Conservative in 2015 voted Leave in 2016, 68% of Labour voters voted remain. While only a plurality of leave voters (43%) voted Conservative, this is largely a product of the British electoral system (to illustrate this, consider by the same logic that around 80% of remain voters did not vote for the government). For the leave vote to be motivated by a sense of political disenfranchisement, it would require precisely those who have had the most success in determining recent election outcomes to be most likely to also have voted leave. This, while not an absolute logical impossibility, is certainly quite hard to reconcile with the undifferentiated notion of disenfranchisement typically discussed. What’s more, the election result of 2017 seems to only strengthen rather than weaken this trend. 

A second reason to distrust the idea of general disenfranchisement as a motivator in the referendum is to look at policy in recent years and whether those who voted leave were more or less likely to have been represented in this sense. Here too, the idea of disenfranchisement seems equally backwards; the referendum result in many crucial senses tells the opposite story. As Simon Wren Lewis notes on a blog post micro-economic impacts of austerity, those groups with the loudest voices and who represented the greatest electoral asset to the Conservatives were least hit by cuts since 2010. The state pension, for example, has seen real term increases at the same time that other state provisions have seen cuts. The correlation between age and the vote in the referendum is well known, at a time where government gerontocracy, in content if not in form. It is worth noting here that widely quoted figures on higher income voters tending to vote remain miss precisely this dimension: as leave voters are far more likely to be pensioners, their incomes tend to be lower, but in terms of assets leave voters tend to be wealthier, for much the same reason. An attitude to economic policy bares this out quite clearly. Leave voters tend to respond less favorably to redistributive economic policies, and more favorably to deregulation, to ‘capitalism’ as a system .

In what sense, then, can Leave voters, as a group, claim to be, or have been disenfranchised? There is one obvious sense, which is once again most consistent with the basic facts of the referendum result. Leave voters tend, overwhelmingly, to feel antagonistic towards the liberal social values which increasingly formed the political consensus. Numerous surveys have shown a leave vote to be closely associated with support for the reintroduction of the death penalty, corporal punishment in schools, and of course, negative views on multiculturalism and immigration. It is quite plausible to describe this as a form of political alienation. The sense that these views were increasingly marginalized, and those who held them strongly and unapologetically ostracized in recent decades is not a false one. But we must ask ourselves if this is a kind of disenfranchisement we want to be reversed, particularly when it is not associated with any general dislocation from political processes. We need only replace talk of addressing a sense of disenfranchisement with talk of empowerment for this to appear both intuitive and morally defensible. It is not that Leave voters feel less disenfranchised in a generic sense from political processes now the result has been achieved, it is that they feel more empowered to hold and vocalize what were previously unacceptable views on specific areas by  a result which appeared to legitimate and embolden those who held them in doing so.

This matters because it means in absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, we should not take seriously the idea that Labour, or any kind of progressive movement can or should seek to make use of the dissatisfaction of the Leave vote for progressive ends. To the extent it is about anger at existing political norms, it is precisely because these are insufficiently authoritarian and excessively socially liberal. There is no reason to suppose these forces exist as something, which could be redirected to achieving precisely the opposite aims.