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Of all the dire warnings issued in the run-up to the referendum, perhaps the least effective was George Osborne’s threat that house prices could crash by 18% in the event of Brexit.
For young people, home ownership is now an unattainable dream for all but a few, and so in 2017 when Aussie millionaire Tim Gurner said that millennials would be better able to buy homes if they spent less on avocado toast, the BBC calculated that it would take 67 years of renouncing avocado toast on a daily basis to save enough for a property in London at today’s prices. Why, then, would young people be so grimly devoted to the EU when a house price crash would benefit them at the expense of all those selfish Brexit-voting oldies?
Countless articles have rehearsed the class insecurities of the “left behind” Brexiters. Generally these unfortunates are depicted fulminating over pasties and ale in shabby market towns and grim post-industrial cities outside the London area. The object of their antipathy is the shiny “elite”, plugged into a promise-filled, multicultural urban life and the knowledge economy, seemingly buoyant in the new, frictionless modern world.
Leaving aside its substantive, real-world pros and cons, Europhilia has become a mark of devotion to the culture and worldview associated with this “elite” and the modern world it navigates. It is a value set strongly correlated with tertiary education and that has come to be called “openness”.
https://twitter.com/GuitarMoog/status/1146326616693444608?s=20
The first election in which I was old enough to vote saw the election of Tony Blair, which makes me just middle-aged enough to remember this Britain arriving. Coffee not tea (and not instant coffee either); cities not towns; low-cost flights, not Butlins; multiculture not monoculture; Jamie Oliver, avocados, broadband, the restyled Mini Cooper; mass customisation; 50% of young people going to universities; everything done on a mountain of debt, especially that 50% graduate rate.
If Thatcherism opened the country economically, Blair’s Britain did so culturally. This double “openness” is the heart of “cultural Remain”.
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SubscribeI am surprised that I appear to be the first person to comment on this article. Having spent the previous 40 years in the Republic of Ireland, and returning unexpectedly to this country only a few months before the 2016 referendum, I had fallen out of touch with how people think here. So, to this half-outsider, one of the things that stood out during the 2016 campaign was that arguments on both sides seemed based more on emotion than on reason. This article is the first that I have seen that nails the curiously nebulous kind of idealism that seemed to drive so many of those who, being under 45 or so, were in favour of remaining.
The author is right to connect this with Corbyn’s popularity among the young. In late 2015, while travelling on a train from Manchester to Holyhead ferryport, I listened to a large group of young people (at least 12), aged around 20″“25, talking animatedly to a group of four German tourists who were asking them about British politics and the planned referendum. I was struck by the ways in which the young people answered the Germans’ questions about why they were all passionate supporters of Jeremy Corbyn or why they were so passionate about remaining within the EU. All the questions were answered by statements such as “He’s kinder”, or “It’s better together”, or “we’re all European now” or “I love being able to travel around Europe.” In short, the answers had little to do with defined political policies or principles ” they were dominated by emotional assertions, and by highly generalised ethical aspirations. I found it puzzling and somewhat discomforting, very different from what I remembered of this country some 35 years earlier.
Then I remembered the funeral of Princess Diana, watched on television from Ireland with a similarly discomforting mixture of detachment and incredulity. What, I kept wondering, had happened to the country I had left less than 20 years previously?
I especially appreciate this sentence from Mary Harrington’s article:
That’s exactly the trouble. What she describes here, and what I experienced on that train to Holyhead, epitomise what happens when emotionalism becomes normalised as a primary justification for opinion. The promise cannot possibly be fulfilled. Disappointment and frustration are inevitable.
One of the best articles I have read on this subject. Thanks
An excellent article.