Richard Bentall / Sep 2024
Photo: Shutterstock
How do nations change their minds? If historical precedent is anything to go by, slowly. Following a decades-long campaign, the United States introduced Prohibition in 1919, a change designed to be so permanent that they amended their constitution to ensure it. It took a decade for a campaign to reverse it to gain traction, after which, in 1933, the 18th became the first and only amendment ever to be reversed, and American citizens could once again enjoy the legal consumption of alcohol.
Numerous parallels have been pointed to between the American experience during the Prohibition era and Brexit. For example, American citizens organized themselves into two identity groups, ‘wets’ (anti-Prohibitionists) and ‘dries’, very similar to the novel UK Brexit identities of ‘remainers’ and ‘leavers’. However, polling was primitive in the early years of the twentieth century, so we have very little quantitative data about what was happening in the minds of ordinary Americans.
Psychologists, however, are all too aware that people are reluctant to change their minds and that, when it happens at all, it occurs gradually. Famously, those who invest heavily in ideological projects such as end-of-the-world cults (or Prohibition, or Brexit) are likely to double down when their prophecies fail (numerous cults have seen the hour of the apocalypse arrive and pass without incident, and then simply recalibrated their calendars).
Brexit ideologues, who are likely a tiny fraction of the UK population, are following a similar path. Like everyone else in the UK, they can see that Brexit has created economic frictions and damaged social cohesion, but they argue that Brexit could still work, or was not delivered properly, or was undermined by the civil service and a secret, remainer elite (it is always someone else’s fault).
Much more important for the future of Brexit are the attitudes of ordinary people, especially the majority of leave voters who did not wholeheartedly commit themselves to the ideological project. Psychologists working in clinics with people suffering from addictions, poor health linked to lifestyles, and mood disorders find that change often proceeds in a series of stages. In the precontemplation stage, the distress caused by their problems is tangible but its causes are too frightening to acknowledge. This is followed by the contemplation stage (the patient finally begins to admit to herself what the problem is), which leads eventually to planning (working out how to change things) and finally action. Sometimes these stages are traversed without the help of a therapist, but the skilled psychologist can accelerate the process using specific therapeutic techniques.
With respect to Brexit, ordinary Britons are now hovering on the boundary between precontemplation and contemplation. There is solid evidence that, for many people, both leavers and remainers, Brexit remains an ongoing source of distress. For a considerable period now, polling has shown a persistent and growing recognition that Brexit was a mistake. A clear majority say they would now vote to rejoin if given the opportunity and enthusiasm for re-engaging in the European project is particularly strong in the young, with more than 80% of under 25s wanting Britain to become, once again, a EU member state. Research (including my own) shows that there would be overwhelming support (even amongst leave voters) for the half-way step of Britain rejoining the EU customs union and single market.
When pollsters have tried to probe beneath the surface of opinion, they have found that leave identities have weakened (a declining number of leave voters say that being a ‘leaver’ is important to their identities) but ‘remainer’ identities have stayed strong. But these changes have yet to be translated into a will to do something about it. It seems just too difficult to start a national conversation that acknowledges that a mistake has been made, and the changes that are necessary to remedy the problem seem too difficult to think about in detail (online, people talk about a decades-long project to rejoin, or speculate about harsh conditions that might be imposed by the EU). Had pollsters conducted similar research in the US during the Prohibition Era, my guess is that they would have found a similar result (‘wets’ remaining strongly committed while the ‘dries’ gradually and almost invisibly faded away, leaving behind a reluctance to talk about reversing Prohibition that took the best part of a decade to weaken).
Importantly, Britain’s politicians are even more pre-contemplative than the population at large. The Conservatives bet the farm on Brexit, ejected pro-European members, and allowed a coterie of dishonest and incompetent politicians to take charge of their ship. The inevitable result was the shipwreck they experienced in July of this year. And yet none of the candidates for the Tory leadership are willing to talk honestly about the damage to the nation caused by Brexit, not least because they are so complicit in it. Locked into this doom-loop, it is possible that, ultimately, Brexit will permanently destroy them as an electoral force.
Meanwhile, Labour is equally reluctant to reopen the Brexit debate for fear of the consequences, imagining that it would cause the so called ‘red wall’ (socially conservative working class) voters to desert them or precipitate a national psychological breakdown. Starmer has therefore committed himself to the (arguably) lunatic position of saying that specific Brexit policies must be undone while, at the same time, nothing about Brexit can be undone and that he will be able to accomplish what the Conservatives obviously failed to do, which is to make Brexit work. This incoherent posture is in defiance of the fact that by far the majority of Labour members and MPs are pro-Europeans and potential rejoiners. Overarching both the Conservative and Labour positions is the irrational and, I believe, unjustified fear of the power of Brexit ideologues, especially Nigel Farage, who enjoys a mythical status as someone who could, at a whim, bring about the collapse of any party that does not deviate from our current Brexit path.
At some point, Britain will have to move fully into the contemplation stage about Brexit. The first step must be the open acknowledgement that Brexit has not worked. Importantly, there is no requirement for an immediate solution; simply admitting that the nation is not happy with Brexit will create the conditions for a solution to be debated, and a new course for the country to be set. It is a safe prediction that, as time goes by, this will eventually happen as commitment to the Brexit project totally evaporates amongst all but the ideologues. What is less clear is what will enable politicians to start an honest conversation about Britain’s future in relation to Europe, and when they will be able to do it. It will obviously begin tentatively and, eventually, will have to involve directly challenging Farage and his followers in much the same way that US Democrats and some Republicans have finally found the courage to challenge Farage’s populist friend Trump.
My guess is, that when politicians finally gather the courage to do this, they will be pleasantly surprised to discover that the majority of people are behind them.
