Saturday 24 December 2022

Matthew Goodwin on 'Bregrets'

Matthew Goodwin is a professor of politics at the University of Kent. You might have seen him on political programmes from time to time. He does a lot of polling and his research, according to Wikipedia, focuses on British politics, radical-right politics, and Euroscepticism. This doesn’t surprise me, I’ve always assumed he is a Brexiteer and on the right, quite an unusual place for an academic in Britain. He has also written a book: National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.

Goodwin was at one time a fellow at the right-wing Legatum Institute where Shanker ‘snake oil’ Singham was a prominent pro-Brexit adviser to ministers on trade issues. I mentioned Goodwin a few days ago in a post where he says it's too early to tell if Brexit has really contributed to our economic challenges.

He has an article in The Spectator: Brexit regrets? Britain has a few. This is a summary of the current position of Brexit on the political landscape of Britain. He admits there has been a ten-point swing toward rejoining the EU in the past year alone and says, "This is leading to a shift in how the major parties are positioning themselves on the question of Europe."

In other words, Brexit is far from over.

This is the key bit:

"There is no doubt that this very bleak economic context is having a negative impact on support for Brexit. As recent studies point out, voters have not, in the main, become more positive about what they see as the key benefits of Brexit, such as Britain’s success in developing its own Covid-19-vaccine program, and its ability to control its own affairs and respond decisively to the Ukraine crisis. But they have become much gloomier about what they see as its drawbacks. Brits are more convinced that Brexit is damaging their wages, the country’s economy, and the National Health Service. People who perceive that the country’s economy is getting weaker, rather than stronger, are more likely than they were before the cost-of-living crisis, to think that Brexit is also not going very well."

Now I want you to compare this with another article from November 2018 in The Telegraph (he’s a man much in demand by right-wing newspapers): To the disappointment of Remainers, Britain has no 'Bregrets'

So, no Bregrets three years ago but at least he now concedes there are some. This is progress.  Goodwin now admits what is plain for us all to see:

"A large swathe of the country is now utterly and increasingly convinced that the referendum outcome was the wrong call. Meanwhile, another big chunk of the country clings on to a vision of Brexit Britain which is fundamentally different from the one that is being implemented by their rulers in Westminster. Bregrets? Britain, it seems, has a few."

The problem of course is that the "vision of Brexit" that its supporters cling to is not and will never be available, as they are increasingly coming to realise.

In January 2020 he was 'debunking' what he said were the 'myths' about leave voters that they were nostalgic, gullible, and they're scared of diversity.  This is what he said then:

"There are moments in the life of a nation that become central to its sense of self. Brexit is surely one of these. Of course, it is politically significant, but it also matters on a deeper level: it is highly symbolic, imbued with a far greater significance than debates about institutions or trade suggest.

"Perhaps the most popular claim is that Leavers did not know what they were doing. Yet a rapidly growing pile of research suggests the exact opposite. Leavers knew exactly what they were doing. They were asking for two entirely reasonable and legitimate things: for decisions that affect their country to be taken in their country, and for their government to have greater control over who comes in and out of the country."

"These requests, in turn, were rooted in things that have long lain at the core of what it means to be British: respect for judicial independence and the common law; a strong emphasis on the need for political accountability; a rich, proud and uninterrupted tradition of parliamentary democracy; an instinctive suspicion of the centralisation of power; a vibrant civic culture; a strong attachment to both little and national platoons."

"They wanted to regain their national independence and reassert their national sovereignty against supranational institutions that looked neither transparent nor particularly responsive. They wanted to be able to control the pace and scale of demographic change. And they felt that, on balance, the EU threatened not just the stability of Britain’s economy but, more fundamentally, its national identity, culture and security."

"Brexit turned winners into losers and losers into winners. And by doing so it threw light on a settlement that had simply stopped working for a large swathe of the British population."

Whatever Goodwin thought about Brexit in 2016 (and I see no evidence that he ever criticised it) he seems to believe it was in the best interests of ordinary working-class voters to quit the EU. 

He genuinely seemed to think leavers knew what they were voting for - and perhaps some of them thought they knew. Unfortunately, Brexit was never going to provide it. 

“They wanted to regain their national independence and reassert their national sovereignty against supranational institutions that looked neither transparent nor particularly responsive. They wanted to be able to control the pace and scale of demographic change. And they felt that, on balance, the EU threatened not just the stability of Britain’s economy but, more fundamentally, its national identity, culture and security.”

Goodwin was in fact perpetuating his own 'myths'. The EU never threatened the economy, if anything it was propping us up. Neither was our national identity at risk and leaving hasn’t allowed us to ‘reassert’ sovereignty - we are still negotiating with the EU over the NI protocol and we can’t now return Albanians who take small dinghies across the Channel, to France. We might have regained some notional idea of sovereignty but it’s proving to be worthless.

And I think Brexit is showing that far from the right speaking for and understanding the working class, that is another myth which is being debunked. 

So, as we end the second year of Brexit, leave voters are at last starting to wise up.

I leave you with two tweets from Mr. Goodwin that you might think are relevant:


China

Further to my post about the new wave of covid in China - Bloomberg is reporting that 37 million Chinese caught covid in a single day last week and 248 million caught the virus in the first 20 days of December:

Stay safe.

I’m not going to post on this blog over Xmas and I’ll start again next week.

Posted by at