4 - Brexit and the Conservative Party’s social policies

Summary

Introduction

The UK's decision, in a referendum on 23 June 2016, to end its 43-year membership of ‘the European project’ was based on a difference of just over one million voters, which enabled the ‘Leave’ campaign to win the referendum by 51.9 per cent of the vote to 48.1 per cent. Prior to the referendum, the Conservative Party had been facing an onslaught from the radical Right. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) received the largest vote share in the 2014 European Parliament elections in the UK and got almost four million votes in the 2015 UK general election on an anti-European Union (EU) and anti-immigration ticket. While UKIP made gains in the Labour heartlands by appealing to the nationalism of ‘old’ Labour voters who rejected ‘modernised’ Blairite social democracy, it also acted as a weight in pulling the largely neoliberal Conservative Party to the nationalist Right (Ford and Goodwin, 2014).

The post-vote Brexit process is analysed here as an attempt to manage the internal contradictions of the Conservative Party under a succession of different prime ministers (Teresa May, Boris Johnson, Elizabeth Truss and Rishi Sunak). These developments indicate the continuance of neoliberalism in the social policy field as a form of social control, prioritisation of markets and corporate interests, and emphasis on welfare chauvinism – a focus, in both rhetoric and policy, on restricting welfare entitlements to ‘our own’ people, based on ethnonational demarcations, which promises (but rarely delivers) ontological security (Donoghue and Kuisma, 2022). Often in conflict with the neoliberals, an ascendant radical Right libertarian authoritarian wing of the Conservative Party is drawing on support from Eurosceptic Members of Parliament (MPs), radical Right financial actors and think tanks, such as Global Britain, the Adam Smith Institute and the TaxPayers’ Alliance. It ignores societal and environmental crises, and prioritises a turbo-capitalism of tax-free zones (such as free ports) and financial accumulation located in private equity, hedge funds and other ‘alt-finance’ organisations (Benquet and Bourgeron, 2022).