Brexit Ten Years On (part 2)

25:51Yeah, you know, what does it look like to have closer ties with the EU? You know, many in the government have been talking about this, what that practically looks like, I think will really determine whether we're able to come out of being on the back foot. I think still partly because of a kind of broader economic stagnation and also because of the impact of Brexit, Covid, cost of living, we're not going to be able to compete with the likes of China and the US, but we might still be able to put a really strong foot forwards and continue to punch above our weight for the country the size that we are.

26:28Large-scale research projects require long-term planning. Brexit caused uncertainty around funding, collaboration and the movement of academics and students between the UK and EU countries, which undermine confidence and stalled research. The UK sought alternatives or new initiatives in place of established EU programmes. Now, in some instances, it's rejoined them. Whether Brexit can ultimately unleash UK innovation with a more agile approach and flexible regulatory regime could, once again, depend on the relationship politicians choose to pursue with the EU from here on in. Part 8 Days before the 2019 general election, the election which the Conservatives won on a promise to get Brexit done, I found myself at Grimsby Fish Market in the early hours of a cold December morning.

27:25Boris Johnson was handling the recent catch in front of the media, extolling the virtues, as he saw them, of Brexit for the fishing industry. Fishing and farming, sectors that had long been subject to EU policy, featured heavily in the referendum and subsequent negotiations. But within both industries, there are frustrations at how Brexit has played out. I spoke to Jill Rutter, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government, and Joel Relon, a Senior Researcher at UK in a Changing Europe, to examine the impact. Starting with fishing, Joel explained why it's an industry with such resonance, despite its small contribution to the economy.

28:05Firstly, there's the imagery and the symbolism of being an island nation and having control of your own waters, I think really speaks fundamentally to the notions of sovereignty, which the Leave campaign was pushing very strongly in the referendum. And also it spokes to particular communities which were very, very pro-Brexit. So whether that's areas like Grimsby, Hull, Plymouth, in Devon, Cornwall, those kind of areas, parts of the country that really had lost faith with the political system as well. So the fisheries issue was something which really spoke to the core constituencies which drove that Leave vote.

28:37And what was the key pledge of the Leave campaign to those fishing communities? Two points, really, that they focused on. So this is all about undoing the common fisheries policy, which the EU sets, which basically says there is a certain amount of fish which can be caught in UK waters and also puts quotas in place. So the Brits get this much, the Danes, the Germans, the French, etc. get their own quantities. And so the two key pledges were, one, to revise those quotas. So to reduce the amount of fish that EU boats could catch in UK waters and UK boats could catch more. And secondly, to take back control of what they call the 12 mile zone, which is the waters closest to the shoreline, which is not where the big vessels go.

29:15It's where the small ones go. So economically speaking, less valuable catching. But the majority of British fleets are actually those small vessels which could benefit from having control of that 12 mile zone for themselves. Because there was all of this talk, basically, that the fishing communities in the UK felt like they were getting a pretty raw deal. before Brexit and there was talk about throwing fish back and having to offload catches. Yeah, so those are actually two different points. The throwing fish back speaks to what leavers would see as the absurdity of EU regulation, overly prescriptive.

29:43You can only catch this much fish. If you take too much, you've literally got to send it back into the sea because the rules say, the computer says no, you cannot have this back coming to shore. So highlighting that kind of regulatory issue. And then there's also the point that yes, other vessels coming in, taking British fish and UK fishers not catching very much abroad. I think this goes very much back to the idea that Britain got a terrible deal when we joined the common market back in the 1970s and that fishing was done down then. And so this was seen very much as a chance to rectify 40 years of hurt over that really bad deal done back then.

30:17So the key question is, did it? In some senses, yes. Probably more senses, no. So on a very basic level, well, the UK took back, first we're saying, the UK took back about 25 % of the catch share from the EU. It asked for about 80, so it was much lower than what it really hoped for. And then having that greater catch share, there has now been some increase in the volume of fish, which British boats are catching, up about, I think, 13, 14, 15 % maybe between 2019 and 2023, which is the latest data that we've been able to look at. So some increase in catch, but when you dig down into it, firstly, that's not all coming from UK waters, About half of it is coming from catches made abroad.

30:54So it's not all to do with Brexit, clearly. And then secondly, who's catching that fish? Mostly it is Scottish boats. There's been a significant increase in Scottish catch, but catches in Wales and in England have actually gone down. And the reason for that is the Scottish industry is by far the biggest. And so you've got the kind of biggest fleets are catching more things like mackerel, which are caught by those big boats, but actually catches of the fish, which is normally caught by smaller vessels, maybe more English vessels, has actually gone down. So you've got a two-part story here. Some people doing well, but others not doing so well at all.

31:24And certain English fisheries have actually, not fisheries, fishers have gone out of not business altogether, but they've had to lay people off because they're not able to do as much as they were before. Now, why is that? Is that because of the deal that was negotiated with the EU? Or is it kind of wider economic factors? So I think it's partly to do with the reallocation of quotas. And so really leaning into those larger vessels. So certain parts of industry have been able to do well. but also it's to do with the fact that catching the fish is only one part of the story you also have to be able to sell it and who buys our fish is europeans there's not a big market for shellfish those kind of things in the uk particularly a lot of it goes to belgium france netherlands countries like that and because of brexit it's become harder to export fish some things are banned outright the eu has banned exports of bivalve mollusks as they call them which is an oyster or a muscle to you and me because they say british waters aren't hygienic enough And also there's an issue with the paperwork at the border, which means slower export processes, which means fish just might perish.

32:26So you can't get everything abroad as quickly as before. And so there's a higher rate of catch, but exports to the EU are down, I think, by about 30 percent from 2019 to 2023. So we're catching more fish, but we can't sell it as quickly and as profitably as we could before.

32:43Let's talk about farming. Just explain, what was the Common Agricultural Policy, which was effectively the framework for farmers when we were part of the European Union? So the Common Agricultural Policy was, if you like, the really long-standing heritage policy of the EU common market. It occupied a giant proportion of the budget when we first joined. And we would say that it was designed to provide income support, production support to inefficient continental farmers. That would be the sort of, you know, characterisation you would have seen back in the 1970s. We saw sort of in the 1970s, 80s, all those big butter mountains, wine lakes, things like that, as a result of production subsidies.

33:28The scheme was massively reformed in the early 2000s, actually largely sort of British initiative to decouple payments from production. So what it changed to being is a scheme which was basically income support for farmers, which took the form of what was called the basic payment scheme, where you owned land. It might depend on whether your land was good for farming or less good for farming. But if you own land, you got a payment from the Common Agricultural Policy. That budget was protected and national governments couldn't really touch it. And that was the scheme that was operating until we left the EU.

34:04And one of the things I think that really did unite a lot of people in the Brexit debate was that surely we could do better than the common agricultural policy. Farmers didn't like it. They thought it tied them up in a whole morass of red tape, compliance conditions to get, in many cases, quite big and really important payment for a lot of their incomes. But environmentalists noted that the decades of the common agricultural policy had seen destruction of lots of landscapes, had been really bad for lots of key environmental indicators. So what then changed as a consequence of Brexit? So as a consequence of Brexit, we took back control.

34:42Each government in the UK took back control. So it's a devolved matter. The boldest reforms were when Michael Gove was Environment Secretary. He made a speech in 2017 that set a new principle which said we're actually not going to pay you just for holding land anymore. And the Michael Gove mantra was that we would pay public money for public goods. Forget about income support. What we'll support you to do is to do things that largely are good for the environment, but might also be good for heritage and things like that. And that's basically been the core guiding principle of the England scheme.

35:22In England, the basic payment scheme has been replaced with the Environmental Land Management Scheme and its core pillar, the Sustainable Farming Incentive. In Northern Ireland, there's a farm sustainability payment. In Wales, a sustainable farming scheme is being introduced, while Scotland has kept basic payments in place so far with future reforms designed to include environmental protections. Replacing one common agricultural policy with four different frameworks hasn't been plain sailing. A lot of farmers would say, actually, we haven't got the same degree of assurance we used to have through the income support and farming has been through very volatile periods since 2020.

36:02Some very good for farming, big commodity price rises in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, other areas where we're seeing now massive squeeze on farm costs because of the rise in fertiliser prices, consequence of the war in Iran. Of course, the other aspect of this, which could affect farming in particular, is the trade deals that the UK then does with other nations. So for example, the trade deals with New Zealand and Australia, what impact have they had on British farmers? The first thing is, of course, the trade deal with the EU. And just as Joel was saying about fishing, we've seen a big fall off in a lot of agri-food exports to the EU as a consequence now of those new barriers, not customs barriers, but the need to comply with paperwork, much, much harder.

36:48And we haven't made it comparably difficult for European farmers to bring their goods into Great Britain. So that's the first problem there. The second one is that the UK was very keen to land new free trade agreements and landed them quite early with Australia and New Zealand. And our livestock farmers in particular think that that has left them potentially very exposed because the EU, when we landed those deals, hadn't landed deals with those countries, partly because they couldn't reach agreement on reducing the level of protection in the European market. So the constraints facing Australian and New Zealand livestock, beef and sheep farmers.

37:32The UK has agreed to phase out quotas on exports from Australia and New Zealand over 15 years. The UK government could say, well, that will be good for consumers, cheaper beef and lamb potentially. They don't make too much of that. They actually say most of those imports will substitute for ones that come from Europe at the moment. But our farmers feel very exposed and very let down. And notably, when the EU then landed a deal with Australia, they kept far more protections for their farmers. But UK was quite keen to land those deals to show that they could land post-Brexit trade deals. And the Australians and New Zealanders, you might say, slightly saw someone rather desperate for a trade deal coming and insisted on really quite good terms for their farmers.

38:19So then for the fishers and the farmers who weren't fans of the common fisheries policy or the common agricultural policy and maybe back Brexit as a result or for another reason entirely, do we have any sense of how they feel now? All of this is much harder I think than it looks on paper when you can sort of just talk the easy things. We can design a scheme that's easier. You could say that actually, in our trade negotiations, we prioritise the consumer more than producers. We used to always rail against European protectionism. But one of the things that Brexit does is expose our politicians to that accountability.

38:54They now have to make those choices. And I think what farmers and fishers find is sometimes they don't like the choices our politicians make. And that's one of the consequences of Brexit.

39:10For both fishing and farming, there have been wide-ranging consequences. And beyond subsidy schemes, quotas and trade, changes to immigration and the impact on seasonal farm workers has been contentious too. Of course, Brexit is a process, not a single event. And for both sectors, replacing decades-old EU frameworks is still being worked through. and what side of the Brexit argument you sit on might determine whether the challenges are deemed a consequence of the act of Brexit itself or the way it's been implemented. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. 102 miles ago, the oil light came on.

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41:25Part 9 Before the Brexit referendum, I covered David Cameron's diplomatic dash around European capitals as he tried to persuade EU leaders to sign up to a package of reforms that he hoped would strengthen the case for continued EU membership. Then, EU leaders were reluctant to offer anything that would undermine the bloc's core principles. But compromise was sought because most European leaders wanted the UK, with its economic and diplomatic heft, to stay in the EU, not least because of fears that Brexit might trigger a domino effect among some other member states. Of course, in the end, despite David Cameron's renegotiated terms, the UK opted to leave.

42:10So what's the view from Europe now? I spoke to Mujtuba Rahman, Managing Director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, and Janneke Washoviak, a research assistant at UK Interchanging Europe, who began by describing the EU's relationship with the UK before Brexit. So I think the UK always had a bit of a special relationship with the EU in the sense that it used to have all these opt-outs when it was still a member of the European Union. So, So, for example, it, of course, never agreed to join the euro. It wasn't part of the Schengen zone. So I think a lot of EU member states saw the UK as a really important member state, but at the same time, maybe as a bit of a reluctant member state as well.

42:56So I think it's always been a bit of a complicated relationship, even before the Brexit days. So then we had Brexit and the UK took the decision to leave the EU. But, Chaba, how did the EU have to adapt to that? In the immediate aftermath of the referendum result, there was a real collective desire among the member states to very quickly figure out a way in which they could ensure continuity on the trade side. You had very important industrial and export interests all over Europe that were lobbying their respective governments to make sure that no matter what happens, unfettered access to the UK market remains.

43:39And so that was actually the important early political discussions that took place among the member states. In opposition to that was the European Commission, which actually said we all need to slow down a bit here. And before we think about what we're going to do on trade, there's a set of defensive interests that we need to organise ourselves around, namely the financial settlement, the rights of European nationals living in the UK and, of course, the Irish border. And so it wasn't until a little later that the Europeans ultimately aligned around the sequenced approach where unless those questions were addressed, only at a later stage would they begin to talk about trade.

44:20So it took a bit of time to figure out what the right European approach to Brexit should be. And that only emerged much later in the summer. Yes, because, Yannicka, it was always this thing that you effectively deal with the divorce first and then the future arrangements afterwards, because this had an impact on the EU. of course, as well as the UK, this decision for the UK to leave? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think the result of the Brexit referendum came as a huge shock for member states. And it also led to fears, quite existential fears, because there was this kind of theory of the domino effect that other member states might want to follow in the UK's footsteps.

45:01And of course, Brexit had an effect on the EU as well. I mean, they lost a hugely important member state, a member state which not only has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, but also member state that has got a nuclear deterrent, that has a lot of kind of soft and hard power cloud. So that was a loss for the EU. It also had an impact on the EU economically. I mean, the economic impact wasn't as keenly felt in the EU as it was felt in the UK. But nevertheless, certain member states that trade a lot with the UK were affected. Just picking up on that thought, Majtiba, what do you see as the main costs to the EU of the UK's decision to leave?

45:44But I guess also, were there benefits? So there were very serious costs. I mean, Brexit removed the EU's second largest economy at the time, one of its strongest militaries, its largest financial centre. You know, the UK is obviously a major global player, a P5 member state. And so I think the Europeans absolutely felt as though they're losing an important economic and military and defence power. And there was a real sense of loss about that fact. I think in particular in the chancellery, Angela Merkel and the team around her were mortified by the result and were absolutely of the view this will lead to a weaker EU.

46:26I think the calculations in France, notwithstanding that loss, were slightly different because France did gain a lot of strategic influence as a result of the UK's departure. In terms of what they gained, I do think they did find it easier to pass joint measures related to integration in certain areas, in particular joint borrowing and industrial policy. policy. Now we see the Europeans making progress on something known as the Industrial Accelerator Act to, again, counter what they perceive to be unfair Chinese and American competition. And I think it would have, again, been very hard to even have this conversation, frankly, within the EU if the UK had been a member state.

47:14Because of the UK's natural reluctance to further integrate in these ways, you mean? Absolutely. And because the UK, alongside many other economies, remain champion of the free market. And so moving in what some believe in Europe is a more protectionist direction, I think would have rubbed a lot of people in the white horse system up the wrong way. And so maybe Europe would ultimately have moved in this direction, but it would be a less ambitious proposal. Janneke, how do you think the EU's relationship with the UK is now compared to what it was immediately before and perhaps even immediately after Brexit?

47:50How's it changed and developed? I think it's been a bit of a roller coaster over the last 10 years or so. I mean, I think the years of the Brexit negotiations were very divisive and had a hugely negative impact on the relationship and particularly on trust between the two sides. I mean, I think we had some real low points there, particularly during Boris Johnson's premiership. And then kind of over time, we had improvements. I think, particularly Rishi Sunak's premiership did a lot of good in the sense that he was able to negotiate the Windsor framework and resolve the Northern Ireland question, which had been hanging over the relationship.

48:34And then, of course, Labour coming in promising a reset had yet another positive impact in the sense that the relationship is much friendlier now, much warmer than it used to be. But I think it's also fair to say that there is still some lingering distrust. And while people in Brussels might have forgiven the divisiveness of the Brexit years, I don't think they've forgotten about it. Do you think that the EU should take any responsibility for that? Because you'll know that there's a school of thought in the UK that the EU wanted to almost punish the UK for leaving. it wanted to prevent other countries following suit.

49:11So it took quite a hard-nosed approach to the negotiations, perhaps even punitive. Do you think the EU could have taken a different approach to negotiations, which may have eased the post-Brexit relationships? I think from an EU perspective, it maybe wasn't so much about punishing the UK, but it was about kind of protecting what they had. Because of course, if at the time they hadn't taken such a hard line, then this domino effect that we mentioned earlier probably would have happened. So I think for them, it was quite an existential moment in the history of European integration, because it was the first time that a member state actually decided to leave and they didn't know what that meant and what it meant for the future of the EU.

49:56So I think we sometimes underestimate how kind of important and existential this moment was for the European Union. Mujtaba, Yannicka touched upon it. We've now got a government which is very explicit about wanting closer ties with the European Union in various different aspects. I wonder what areas from an EU perspective does the EU still need or even want the UK to contribute to? I think there is a desire to do more on security and defence, to do more on migration and to do more on climate. These are all strategic areas for the EU and they are areas where I think they genuinely believe a closer, more integrated, more aligned UK would benefit and support European goals in those areas.

50:39Yannicka, on that, I mean, we've seen in response to Ukraine, the coalition of the willing. We've also seen the formation of the European political community, which was a President Macron notion to bring together common minded European countries. Is that what the EU is looking for? And what specifically does it want from the UK or need from the UK now? I mean, I think the way that you phrase the question, what does the EU need from the UK, is probably not necessarily how people in Brussels would see it. Because their view is, well, you know, you left and now you have to tell us what you want. And they very much see the ball as being in the UK's court.

51:19So it's kind of the expectation is for London to figure out what they want from this relationship and to then approach Brussels and tell them. and then they will consider those proposals. And I think one reason for that is that the UK and Brexit just is no longer a priority for the EU and for its member states. They have lots of other pressing issues from Ukraine to the war in Iran to the relationship with President Trump to the next long-term EU budget that they're currently negotiating. So I think the relationship with the UK is not really on leaders' minds. That said, they are interested in a closer relationship with the UK in those strategic areas, like security and defence, like energy security, how to build a more resilient Europe, also people-to-people relations and opportunities for young people, that at the same time, it's not really what is kind of keeping leaders awake at night.

52:11And I think if the UK wants to go further, it is kind of the emphasis on the UK to come up with kind of ideas and proposals. That's how Brussels sees it, at least. And final thought, Majdhah, there's been a lot of talk, particularly with President Trump in the White House, about a sort of geopolitical realignment and Europe having a really crucial role to play in that. To Yannicka's point, do you think the EU sees the UK as a crucial component? Absolutely. And I think there is a real opportunity here in light of the turbulence and the transatlantic relationship for the UK and the EU to do more together and to be more strategic.

52:47There are big frictions the Europeans are confronting both with Beijing and with Washington. and there's a real opportunity again for the two sides to do more. But as Yannicka said, and I agree, the government in the UK, Keir Starmer, has to make the argument. And if he makes the argument, a positive argument, for the customs union, for the single market, for something fundamental that is not cakeism, I think the Europeans would absolutely be willing to have that conversation. But if the UK government's proposition is, we want free movement for industrial goods, but not for Labour, not for services, not for capital.

53:23That's not going to fly in Europe.

53:32So, as the government seeks a closer relationship with the EU, it seems it comes back to this crucial point about trade-offs, what it's willing to give or give up in order to achieve that. Those who welcome closer EU ties point to the potential economic benefits and the reduction of barriers with our nearest neighbours. Those who oppose the idea say it will mean a loss of sovereignty over trade, regulation and migration. It seems the European view hasn't changed much from the height of the Brexit debate a decade ago. Whatever path the UK wants to pursue, it can't have its cake and eat it. Part 10 There is no doubting just how divisive Brexit was.

54:19Whatever side of the debate you sat on, the strength of feeling ran high. Its split opinion ruptured political parties and toppled prime ministers. In the years after the referendum, the country watched while Westminster was dominated by intense wrangling and much of Whitehall's bandwidth was focused on Brexit. New political identities emerged, leavers and remainers, and in 2019, an entire general election was dominated by Brexit. So has it had a lasting impact on the way people feel and vote now? I spoke to Paula Surridge, Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol, and Rob Ford, Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester, who started by describing how he thinks Brexit has shaped our politics.

55:09What we saw with Brexit is voters line up along a set of new dividing lines that were quite distinct to the dividing lines that have long separated Labour from Tory, but were already becoming evident in the way people were behaving in terms of the minor parties that were growing before Brexit. People forget that the strongest performance for a Farage party before 2024 was 2015 with UKIP. The strongest performance for the Greens before 2024 was also 2015. So those things were starting to come into view. Brexit catalyzed that. So the strongest predictors of voting for Brexit were not class or income.

55:46They were education, age, social values. And then those became linked to these new tribal identities, leave and remain. You know, we didn't have any political resonance, no political attachments to the terms leave and remain before the spring of 2016. Now they're markers of a particular kind of politics. And that's what's really reshaped things since, because now you have these two tremendously powerful tribal identities out there. And that's shaping and also structuring, bounding how people are behaving in terms of their votes. There's a Leave tribe still, which is Tory and Reform. First Tories do best, now Reform are doing best.

56:25And there's a Remain tribe, Labour, Lib Dems, Greens, also Scots and Welsh nationalists. Labour have hitherto been dominant in that tribe, despite not always being the most vocal for Remain. But right now we're seeing perhaps challenge emerging within that camp as well. Paula, immediately after the referendum, there was this period where Brexit just dominated politics. There were intense negotiations, lots of arguments in Westminster. What did that do to our politics? Well, I think there was a further erosion of trust in politics. Remain voters no longer trusted the system to deliver the outcomes they wanted, their preferred outcomes, while Leave voters saw Parliament making all these moves to try and force another referendum, or even just the length of time the process took.

57:09And I think that eroded both sides' trust in politics even further. Rob, do you want to pick up anything on that? It did intensify, as Paula says, that sense of distrust in politics, particularly, I think, on the Leave. Well, actually, it's a strong identifier on both sides didn't like it, because the Remain side felt they weren't getting a fair shake at sort of revisiting and renegotiating these kinds of issues, it all got filtered into our very polarised binary parliament. Norway voted 52 to 48 to stay out of the EU once upon a time, and then they had a big cross-party negotiation to decide what that meant, bridging both sides, whereas we filled it straight into our binary parliament system, and it just became full-fat leave and no input from Remainers at all.

57:51But I think it probably had a bigger impact long run on the leave side. Leave voters were already more prone to distrust politics as usual, to distrust the political establishment, to believe that their will would in some way be frustrated or watered down or ignored. So when they started seeing evidence that that might be happening, they got quite annoyed about it quite quickly. And so in some respects, it may well have laid the groundwork for this reappearance of Nigel Farage and the radical right and Reform UK in an even stronger form, because these voters have not forgotten that their will was being frustrated in that period.

58:27Paula, leave and remain did become very defining terms in the political discourse at the height of the Brexit referendum, but also in the negotiations that followed. I wonder, do you think that people still broadly define themselves as either leave or remain? I don't think they're as strong as identities as they were in the immediate aftermath, but they gave people labels for a whole package of things that Rob's already described there. So I think one of the key things that Brexit did in that sense was to give this slightly disparate bunch of attitudes, values and groups a label that they could kind of unite behind.

59:04But that happened at the same time that the old divides were still there, which is to some extent why we start to see much more significant fragmentation, because these new divides come along, but the old divides are still there to some extent. So you do still see some people on the left of the old divides who supported Leave and people on the right of the old divides who supported Remain. And that's feeding into the fragmentation that we're seeing now. Rob, at the 2019 general election, Boris Johnson campaigned on the slogan, get Brexit done. And we saw areas at that election that had traditionally been Labour turned Conservative.

59:42So how instrumental do you think that Brexit was in breaking those old political allegiances? Well, it was important, but I think that importance does need to be set in a bit of context, because there were a number of moving parts there. If you take these red wall seats, which we've all discussed for so long, ever since, Labour's vote was actually declining in a lot of those places for a long time. Indeed, if you can go all the way back to 2001, you'll see really big slumps in turnout in those places in the second new Labour election, 20 years before Boris Johnson mobilised people in those places.

1:00:14Partisan attachments to Labour were fading for a long time in those places. But what there still was, which is where the term Red Bull came from, incidentally, was a term coined by a conservative strategist, James Kanagasorian, to describe places that looked demographically and attitudinally like they ought to be voting Conservative. So if you took the same kind of voter, the same kind of job, and the same kind of background, the same kind of attitudes, and plonked him in Basildon in Essex, he'd definitely be Tory. You put him up in Bolton, he's not Tory. So that was the paradox. And what the Johnson effect was, was to break down that last barrier.

1:00:48So it was a breakthrough, but it was a breakthrough that the walls had been weakening for a long time before they finally came down. Paula, once the walls did finally come down, for all the reasons that Rob has expressed there, do you think that is what has led in part to where we are now with this increasingly fragmented politics, where people perhaps were able to look to other parties that they might not have considered before? Yeah, absolutely. And I just wanted to add to what Rob was saying there. We actually saw quite a lot of weakening in those red wall seats, increases in the Conservative vote and a weakening of the Labour vote in the 2017 election.

1:01:23So a lot of credit is given to Boris Johnson and get Brexit done in 2019. But many of those trends really started in 2017 as well. But this weakening of identity is what allows people to move around. And it's what contributes to the kind of volatility we can see, you know, big shifts in vote shares between elections, between the 2024 general election and local elections, for example. And that can only happen because voters are unanchored from parties. They may have turned away from Labour in 2017, 2019, but they didn't become Conservative Party identifiers. They became more loosely connected to politics.

1:02:01And that leads to the kind of fragmentation and movement that we see in elections now. And it makes it very hard to predict what will come next. Rob, there were a multitude of complex reasons that people would have chosen to vote the way they did in the Brexit referendum. But one thing that's often said is that people that supported Brexit were doing so as an anti-establishment notion, a pushback against the status quo that had been for some time. Do you think that that was a Brexit-specific sentiment or did it run deeper and does it continue now after Brexit? It wasn't just a Brexit-specific sentiment.

1:02:38It was one of the smart moves, one of the effective moves of the Brexit Leave campaign that they managed to harness and mobilise that sentiment. but that sentiment had been there for a long time. I mean, one of the great paradoxes of Brexit, really, is that this effort to leave the European Union has ended up creating a politics that is more European, more fragmented, more multi-party, different bases of support, and with one of the great dividing lines being pro - and anti-establishment. If you look across the other member states of the EU that we left, in practically every single case, you will find a large, nationalistic, anti-immigration, anti-establishment party.

1:03:14It's often been there for several decades because proportional representation of electoral systems have not really functioned as much as a barrier to keep those kind of parties out. We have seen the early sort of tremors of that with UKIP in the 2010s. Brexit really accelerated that, gave it a more powerful tribal identity and voice as well. Paula, we've just had a pretty big set of elections across Great Britain. In England, we saw just really a cementing of this notion that politics has become so fragmented now. One of the interpretations of that is that Brexit still played a part in the way that people were voting, so that people were more likely, for example, to vote for Reform UK in parts of England that had supported Leave than they were in parts that had supported Remain, for example.

1:03:58Do you think Brexit is still having a direct impact on the way that people are choosing to vote now? I think it is still having an impact in terms of the identities that have shaped how people think about the different political parties. There's going to be only a tiny number, if any, remain voters who are going to even consider voting for a party led by what looks like the Leave side of Brexit. So they're not going to vote for reform. Even if they started somehow to agree with them on some policy issues, that identity and that we're against them will persist. So I think that Brexit is still structuring support, even if it isn't the thing that's in people's mind when they cast their vote.

1:04:39Rob? I completely agree with Paula on that and there is there is a real asymmetry here we see it quite strongly in the local election results that we've seen in England and it's actually made England a little bit more like Scotland in a funny sort of way in that there is a kind of total coalescence of the sort of strongest leave areas around reform now you're seeing in areas that voted more than 60 % leave reform averaging close to 40 % of the vote but as paula says they completely fall flat outside of the strong leave electorate just as in scotland the smp have completely unified the strongly pro-independence vote so that makes them the biggest in a fragmented field but the unionist vote splits multiple ways similarly the remain vote and the sort of softy brexit vote seems to split multiple ways conservatives is Labour, Greens, Lib Dems all getting a share of it.

1:05:30So you have, on the one hand, one big tribe, one big message, one big goal, leave or independence. And on the other hand, four smaller tribes who aren't primarily focused on that argument, who aren't primarily focused on those identities and therefore divide in multiple ways. And in Scotland, that kind of gets offset a bit by a more proportional electoral system. But in England, where you've got first past the post, being the somewhat larger party in place after place after place delivers a huge bonus to you in terms of the kinds of seats that you get and hence you get the kind of dramatic results that we've seen last month.

1:06:09Brexit was a profound political moment and perhaps one of the lasting consequences is how it accelerated the weakening of political allegiances resulting in a more fragmented political system. Parties have to persuade voters rather than bank on their support. At the same time, distrust in politicians has grown. Both Leavers and Remainers have reason to claim Brexit didn't deliver what they'd wanted. In recent years, the UK's relationship with the EU has dropped down the political agenda. But with the government's talk of an EU reset, it is back on the table, albeit so far in a less fractious fashion.

1:06:50The promises and choices politicians make now could be crucial to their own fate, as well as the country's.

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