The politics of feeling in Brexit Britain: stories from the Mass Observation Project, by Jonathan Moss, Emily Robinson and Jake Watts, paperback, 254 pages, ISBN 978-1-5261-5251-0, Manchester University Press, 2024.
Jonathan Moss is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sussex University, Emily Robinson is Reader in British Studies at the same university, and Jake Watts is an independent scholar.
The authors start by writing, "The Leave Vote was widely interpreted (by both its supporters and detractors) as the triumph of passion over rationality." They provide no evidence for this surprising assertion. They use reports from the Mass Observation Project, but no figures.
The authors claim that "In public discourse on the EU referendum, Leave was invariably cast as the emotional choice and Remain the rational one." Invariably? In all public discourse? Is the Daily Telegraph not part of our public discourse? To be cancelled as if it doesn't exist?
Indeed, detractors of Brexit often reduce Leave voters' motives to emotions, and to pretty ugly emotions at that: anger, hate, fear, and resentment. Just as Tories have always reduced socialism to envy.
The authors note "the prominence of negative feelings – such as anger, fear, and anxiety – in conventional understandings of far-right populism in Europe, Trump in the United States, and of course Brexit in the UK." "Of course Brexit", as if far-right populism in Europe, support for Trump in the United States, and voting to leave the EU were all part of one single phenomenon. One EU supporter said that the Leave vote showed that the country contained 17 million Nazis. Similar false accusations are now routinely launched at Reform voters.
Some tried to diagnose Brexit as part of a collective pathology. Psychotherapist Philippa Perry suggested in the Guardian that "If we had slowed everything down, listened to fears, found a way of framing them, and taken action to include people who feel like an older child being pushed aside, would Europe even have been the issue?"
This is all too revealing – EU supporters should have 'slowed everything down'. What? Talk slowly, as if to foreigners? Listened to their fears, because what else could have motivated them? Treated them like children?
Her husband, the artist Grayson Perry, explained to the Political Science Association's 2016 annual conference that "the liberal academic elite has … let us down because they are not emotionally literate enough to understand what 52% of the electorate was thinking – or feeling, should I say …" This was to deny that the majority did any thinking at all.
Two professors of politics, Jonathan Hopkin and Ben Rosamond, opined that "voters' political views are likely to be suffused with bullshit." Are they not voters themselves? Is their accusation then true of themselves? Do they see themselves members of some superior caste, above the common herd?
The authors accuse Leave voters who objected to mass immigration of "not rejecting neoliberal discourse; they were reinforcing it." Don't the authors realise that the free movement of labour is a key tenet of neoliberalism, and one of the founding four freedoms of the EU's treaties?
The authors acknowledge that "political studies has contributed to the misleading public narratives that positioned Leave supporters as motivated by passion and Remain supporters as motivated by reason. … such studies work to exclude supporters of movements and political parties labelled as populist from the bounds of democratic politics, on the grounds that they are irrational, misled, or manipulated." Unfortunately, this study does too.
There is no mention of there being any rational democratic arguments for independence, no reference to the EU's undemocratic institutions, no mention of the EU's austerity policies and their damaging effects.