Brexit and Belonging: An interview with Katharine Tyler (Associate Professor in Anthropology, University of Exeter) and Cathrine Degnen (Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Newcastle University) about their anthropological research into Brexit, by Andrew Whitehouse (Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Aberdeen).
I recently interviewed Katharine Tyler (Principal Investigator) and Cathrine Degnen (Co-Investigator) about their new interdisciplinary project on Brexit, identity and belonging in England. The first part of their answers to my questions are below. Part two will follow soon.
The title of our project is Identity, belonging and the role of the media in Brexit Britain. We are a team of researchers based at the University of Exeter and Newcastle University. More details about the research and the team can be found at: https://www.brexitandbelonging.org/
Part One of the interview can be found here.
You point out that you want to move beyond the broad categories of large-scale political analysis and that you want to understand views from very different places. It’s noticeable that analyses in the media seem to focus on certain kinds of voter and certain places but not on others. Working-class Leave voters in post-industrial communities are given great scrutiny, but much less attention is paid to the many middle-class Leave voters or working-class Remainers. Remain voters in general don’t seem to be the focus of as much analysis as leave voting. Why do you think certain groups of voters are given lots of attention by academics, the media and politicians when others aren’t and how is your research attempting to overcome this problem?
We completely agree with what you are proposing. Within current public and media discourse seeking to explain Leave and Remain voter positions, there are places and groups of people that are focused on significantly more than others. In particular, in terms of explaining who voted to leave the EU, attention is repeatedly drawn to so-called ‘left behind’ and ‘left out’ places that were once industrial heartlands, and to the English white working classes.
Some social and political commentators argue that this focus of attention on the white working classes is inextricably linked to processes of de-industrialisation across Europe and the USA. In the UK, commentators often point to the convergence of the global economic crash of 2008, the implementation of the austerity agenda, and an increase in migration of people to the UK from Eastern Europe to explain a growing sense of disenfranchisement of the white working classes in post-industrial Britain. In turn, the white working classes have become increasingly depicted in public discourse as anti-immigration, nationalistic, xenophobic and racist.
This othering and vilification of the white working classes draws on a deep history of the ways in which the working classes (but not always racialised as white) have been imagined and constructed over many hundreds of years in the UK. This process does certain boundary work that enables the expression and reproduction of social distinction, hierarchy and inequality.
This all means that before the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, there was already an imagined category of people – the so-called ‘indigenous white working class’ - that was thought to exist and whose circumstances could easily be mobilised in media discourse to account for and explain the referendum result to those who were surprised, horrified and shocked by it. Furthermore, this dynamic pushes us to reflect on how in making white working class Leave voters in post-industrial communities the object of scrutiny, the subjects to be interrogated, it in turn normalises Remain voters who in general are not the focus of much sociological analysis or wider public attention as are Leave voters. This also means that the white middle classes, ethnic minorities and migrants across class identities tend to become automatically associated with the Remain vote, and are thus not positioned as ‘Leavers’. Consequently, as you suggest, questions concerning the role of the middle classes across ethnic and racial identities in supporting the Leave vote, and questions regarding who voted Remain across class identifications, and what that means, is rendered invisible in academic debate and media discussion about Brexit.
Our method sets out to work across identity differences, in different places and parts of England. We include those who support Leave and Remain, across class, gender, generation, political identities, racial and ethnic identities, migration status and nationalities. We have no preconceived ideas about how these identities are played out and who voted to Remain (or identifies as a ‘Remainer’) or who voted to Leave (or identifies as a ‘Leaver’), and perhaps most significantly what that means. Indeed, the very idea of being a ‘Leaver’ or a ‘Remainer’ are identities which as we have learned are not always self-evident and are not readily expressed or appropriated by everyone. In short, we are interested in how ideas and identities of Leave and Remain are themselves constructed, lived and made meaningful or not for people in their own terms and within their own understandings.
Something you mention here is that voting Leave is often explained as a response to things that are not directly to do with the EU, such as de-industrialisation and austerity. To what extent do your research participants’ views on Brexit relate directly to the European Union itself?
Yes, the motivation for voting Leave is often explained by the media and other social commentators as a response to de-industrialisation and austerity. Indeed, at times, our research participants also talk about such macro-level changes in the political landscape of contemporary Britain. However, firstly, it feels crucially important to note here that:
1) Not all the regions we are working in have experienced industrialisation or de-industrialisation in the same way. For example, Devon, Boston in Lincolnshire and Northumberland are largely agricultural and have had a very different relationship to the impacts of de-industrialisation compared to other parts of northeast England and Leicester. Moreover, those regions we are working in that are emblematically associated with industrialisation and de-industrialisation (parts of northeast England, for instance) have not experienced that in a homogenous way – that is to say, there are a wide range of socio-economic positions inhabited by people living in northeast England, and deeply uneven ways in which the most negative impacts of the lurch out of industrialisation have been experienced here. This includes both within cities such as Newcastle and Sunderland where those effects are differently felt, and between areas, such as the different fortunes of Newcastle in comparison with Sunderland, or the experiences of people living in some of the former coal mining areas in semi-rural County Durham or coastal areas like Ashington, compared to those of rural agricultural Northumberland, or the fisheries, versus those living in urban conglomerates.
2) The complexity of this pattern also plays out in the impact of austerity on the places we are working in in terms of local council budget cuts, and the diverse ways in which austerity has impacted the lives of individuals. Consequently, attending to how, if and when wider socio-economic changes are discussed in relationship to people’s views on Brexit, identity, belonging and place is part of our on-going research.
3) Lastly, de-industrialisation is only one of the macro-level changes that are deeply significant to our field-sites. Some of the areas that we are working in have experienced other, extensive amounts of social and economic transformation, and sometimes in very compressed periods of time (for instance, the experience of the fisheries in Devon and northeast England, with their virtual collapse in some areas).
As for our participants’ views on the European Union itself, we ask all of them what the key issues were for them during the referendum, and if they were eligible to vote why they voted the way they did. Those who voted to both leave and remain in the EU report a range of reasons. But these always include at least some that relate directly to the EU, and how they imagine it either as (broadly) a force for good or (relatively speaking) an entity that is malign, self-serving and that does not have the UK’s best interests at heart – or maybe is none of these things, but is perhaps instead too distant and removed to be able to represent and respond to the needs of people “here”. What is central for us is how our participants’ understandings of the EU fits into individuals’ narratives of what constitutes social justice, equality and their vision of how they think and feel Britain should be positioned in the world. We are concerned with who is included and who becomes excluded from these narratives of European and national belonging and identity.
You discuss the common explanation that people voted Leave in areas that have been ‘left behind’ economically and politically. The idea of being ‘left behind’ implies that people who live in such places are ‘stuck’ too and lack the capacity or inclination for mobility that is often deemed to be required to be successful in modern economic life. Following from this, I’m interested to know what your research reveals about people’s relations to the places they live and about whether they see themselves as mobile or rooted. How does your research relate these attitudes to place and mobility to questions about how people see others, such as immigrants for example, and to wider political views?
Firstly it is worth saying that we do not simply discuss the common explanation that people who voted ‘leave’ are ‘left behind’ and ‘stuck’. Instead, we have actively set out to critique, challenge and complicate that assertion in our work. It is also worth highlighting that we have heard the term ‘left behind’ applied to European citizens living in the UK who are advised not to be ‘left behind’ by not claiming pre-settled or settled status before the Home Office deadline of December 2020. As you can see, this idiom of ‘left behind’ is deeply problematic in terms of the work it does to objectify and Other both the supposedly ‘stuck’ and ‘immobile’ leave voters often associated unthinkingly in public discourse with the English ‘white working classes’, and more recently with the supposedly ‘mobile’ EU citizens who are not British citizens and who want to ‘stick’ with living in the UK.
In terms of people’s place identifications, we are speaking to people who feel a diverse array of attachments to their place of residence, the nation and Europe. In this regard, we are speaking to people across ethnicity, nationality, migration status, generation and class within diverse places in terms of socio-economic constitution, histories of migration, multiculturalism and social diversity. For example, Leicester is a city that is set to have no clear ethnic majority in the 2021 Census, whereas Newcastle, Northumberland, Exeter, Devon and Boston are predominantly white places in terms of ethnic composition although also with variable degrees of transformation in these patterns. And Boston is a place known for its settlement of EU citizens from Eastern Europe who work in the agricultural sector.
Across all the field-sites, we are interested in how people living in these diverse milieus claim a sense of belonging or not to the local. For example, some people might claim a sense of familial connection to their village, town or county (region) that spans generations. Others might have lived in their town or village for some two or twenty years, or they might be passing through this place for study or work and see it as a transitory moment. Some have returned to this place after living elsewhere in the world and plan to settle here. Some people come from one of our field-sites and now live in another. Suffice to say, identity relationships with place and the local are by no means straightforward. In amongst this complexity, we are engaging with how people’s sense of belonging or not to this local place, and their relationships across ethnic, national, generational and class differences within each place, becomes entwined with their senses of identification or not to Englishness, Britishness and European-ness in the face of Brexit.
Here, we are also interested in how some people perceive and experience an increased sense of nationalism, xenophobia and racism in the face of Brexit, and how that becomes articulated within the wider politics of everyday multiculturalism and diversity in each place. Whereas for indeed others, Brexit is about asserting claims of national sovereignty: what becomes significant for us is what does this mean, and how does that manifest itself in ideas about who is included and excluded in the local and the national? Our understanding is that all of these perspectives, reflections and experiences are embedded within people’s ethnic, national, class, gender and generational identities that are entwined with their wider social and political worldviews. It is precisely this, then, that we are in the midst of tracing the contours and complexities of.
The Identity, Belonging and Role of the Media in Brexit Britain project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
