Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Core Tory voters, the elderly, provincial middle class, voted en masse for Brexit. They probably always would have. But they were joined by a large cohort of lower-income, less-well-educated voters who had been drifting to the right since the 1990s. According to one polling group, 60 percent of people in the upper-middle- and middle-class socioeconomic groups—those in professional and managerial jobs—backed Britain’s EU membership, whereas among the unemployed and unskilled workers the percentage was reversed.50 Sixty percent of Labour voters turned out for Remain. But that went only to show that in much of the country, the Labour Party was largely divorced from poorer and less-well-educated voters. Apart from education, the other socioeconomic variable that weighed heavily in the balance was the pain inflicted by austerity since 2010, and that hurt worst where decline was a long-term phenomenon.51 But even more than low education and low income, Brexit voting was correlated with authoritarianism. On the kind of cultural maps drawn by marketing experts, Brexit voting sat in close proximity to values like security, support for the death penalty and a preference for the public flogging of sex offenders.