This an assessment of the main themes and arguments of the book. Looking back at Brexit, what is most striking is the subsequent economic decline of the UK – a consequence of Leave demagogues diverting voters’ attention from economic risks. Brexit’s populism was a manifestation of the Europe-wide rise of identitarian politics, the normalisation of national populism and the drift toward authoritarianism. These trends went with viewing the world as a collection separate sovereign nation states. A national population was imagined as a homogeneous mass, potentially embodied in a single sovereign leader. Seeing nations as separated entities brings a focus on foreign others, exemplified in the Brexiters’ fixation on immigration into the UK. Demagoguery, bound up with ‘post-truth’ culture, is used as an explanatory concept throughout this book, but requires redefinition in the age of mass media, data collection and psychological profiling. The most important conclusion is that Brexitspeak, Brexit policies and Brexit attitudes in government constitute threats to representative democracy, foreshadowed in the referendum process and actions by post-Brexit governments.

The Conclusion draws together the key themes explored in this book. Highlighting the crux norms of comity, collaboration, and conflict management framed by the conditions of reciprocity, reputation, and repeat play, the Conclusion defends a relational and collaborative conception of the separation of powers. Looking to new horizons, the Conclusion gestures at future lines of research opened up by the collaborative idea, including the possibility of imagining international, supra-national, and transnational law in collaborative terms. It concludes by presenting the fundamental norms of the collaborative constitution as vital in the current moment, but also as a form of ’constitutional capital’. On analogy with the influential idea of ’social capital’, it argues that the unwritten norms of the collaborative constitutional system are a precious constitutional resource we should preserve, protect, and enhance in order to create stable and sustainable constitutionalism for the twenty-first century.

In June 2016 the UK shocked the world by voting to leave the European Union. In our previous book (Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union) we told the story of what happened in the referendum and why it produced a leave vote. This book is a sequel to the earlier one and examines what happened after the decision was made looking at events up to the point that the UK formally left the EU in January 2020. This was a period of unprecedented political and electoral turmoil in British politics which for a period looked like it could shatter the party system. It encompassed three elections and three different Prime Ministers and unprecedented volatility in both Parliamentary and electoral politics. The book maps out the twists and turns of the Brexit process, both at the level of the political elites and among the mass public. It then goes on to examine the long-run antecedents of this momentous decision, using data that goes back more than fifty years. Finally, it speculates about the economic and poltical consequences of Brexit for the future, while taking into account the Covid Pandemic which itself added to the turmoil in British politics.

Boris Johnsons victory over Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 general election

The electoral consequences for Theresa Mays government in the 2017 general election examining the role of Brexit and other factors in explaining the results

The political twists and turns of the Brexit process

The fragmentation of the UK party system in the European Elections of 2019. Why the Brexit party won, Labour came third and the Conservatives came fifth.

In a Confectionary Performance as that term is used in this chapter, the maker and the spectator will both appreciate that the performance is a deliberate one of making something by combining other things. ‘Synthesis’ and ‘articulation’ would serve as satisfactory synonyms for ‘confection’, but the advantage of ‘confection’ as a description of making processes that persuade spectators is the word’s association with pleasing sweetness. The very word persuasion originates in the idea that a person is moved ‘through sweetness’ (per-suade). Paying attention to the use of culinary and other sensory affective Confectionary Performances, this chapter highlights the significance in our post-truth age of political performances that bypass our logical thought processes in order to influence us through our feelings.

Donald Trump called ‘Make America Great Again’ his ‘whole theme’. He blazoned the slogan in signal white on his red baseball cap and even trademarked it. The use of building metaphors is the standard puff of presidential election campaigns. The reference to building bridges is especially potent, metaphorically, as a way of combining the virtues of building with the political ideal of connecting people. Hence Bill Clinton’s slogan for his successful 1996 presidential election campaign was ‘Building a Bridge to the 21st Century’. This chapter considers how politicians exploit the building metaphor and how the idea of building is integral to the laws by which states achieves a necessary balance between stability and change.

The year 2020 provides evidence of the Crimea’s continued relevance in troubled times. In Britain, 2020 marks the moment that Brexit was finally done. Several critics found resonance in the Charge of the Light Brigade and the cult around it, which valorized heroic failure. Like the officers of the Light Brigade, the Tory leadership blundered as it led the nation into the abyss. In Britain and beyond, 2020 will be remembered as the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic. Like the battle against the cholera in the Crimea, the British struggle against the virus was marred by mismanagement. In response, the names of Nightingale and Seacole found their ways onto makeshift hospitals and rehabilitation centers. And, as in the Crimea, military men – here, centenarians whose youths overlapped with the longest-lived of the Victorian generation – captured the hearts of the public. Most notable was Captain Tom Moore, whose compassion and particular variety of courage spurred him, at the age of 100, to raise money for the NHS before dying a celebrity in 2021. Even now, the Crimean War’s long afterlife provides touchstones for success, failure, and hope.

Chapter 10 concludes our story by looking at the evolving electoral aftermath of Brexit in England and Wales, as seen in the 2017 and 2019 general elections, and the possible paths forward. The steady growth of the identity liberal electorate of graduates and ethnic minorities has provided Labour with a powerful source of new votes. But this influx of new identity liberal supporters has also created new electoral risks, risks underlined by the party’s weak performance in the 2019 election. The growing electoral heft of identity liberals within the Labour coalition has increased the political power of identity politics to unsettle the attachments of economically left-wing but socially conservative ‘old left’ voters, who are increasingly at odds with the identity liberal groups now rising to dominance in Labour’s electoral coalition. The re-alignment of these voters, driven by Brexit, fuelled the Conservatives’ 2019 triumph, but that success in turn brings new challenges. The Conservatives have made major short-term gains with white school leavers, but must now meet the expectations of these disaffected and distrustful voters, and also face growing risks of counter-mobilisation from graduates and ethnic minorities opposed to the identity conservative politics they are now seen as representing.

This chapter examines the interlinked barriers to women’s participation identified by the ethnographic descriptions and analyses of parliamentary interaction in the first half of the book. First it considers the nature of stereotypes about gender and communicative styles and their effects on women politicians, in particular the ‘different voice’ ideology and the problems posed by beliefs in the masculine voice of authority in public contexts. These interactional styles are shown to be ideologically salient to the ways in which politicians evaluate political speeches, including their own. Secondly, it considers sexism and its effects by using examples from the House of Commons. This leads to a discussion of fraternal networks and homosocial bonding and the ways in which this can marginalise and exclude some groups. Finally, the underrepresentation and sexist framing of women politicians by the media is considered by reviewing existing international research literature and examples from the UK House of Commons, using a critical discourse analytic approach.