The United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union is already causing turmoil in financial markets and angst in world capitals, nowhere more so than in London. David Cameron, the prime minister, has said he plans to resign after leading a failed “Remain” campaign. The consequences for both the U.K. and the EU seem dire.
Last week, before the vote, I spoke by phone with David Runciman, a professor of politics and international studies at Cambridge and the author of The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis From World War I to the Present. Neither of us predicted this result, but Runciman had a number of insights into how crumbling faith in British institutions and political parties was shaping the campaign to exit the EU. Friday morning, after the results were announced, we spoke again. In a conversation that has been edited and condensed, we discussed what drove voters to make such a fateful decision, the sad legacy of David Cameron, and why Brexit may signal the end of the U.K. Labour Party.
Isaac Chotiner: I had hoped the next time we talked would be under better circumstances.
David Runciman: Yeah, it’s quite a shock.
What’s your biggest takeaway from what just happened?
It’s one of those events that, during the campaign, felt like it could happen. And then, as we got nearer to the vote, the old rules seemed to reassert themselves. There are rules about how these referendums play out: The status quo pulls it back near the end, and the polls seemed to show that. The betting markets, which a lot of people now use as a guide, were very clearly signaling that “Remain” was going to win. So were the financial markets, and those were the old ways that you judge what’s likely to happen. They were all wrong. So the big takeaway is that the old rules don’t hold.
I certainly had the feeling that events like the election of [Labour Party leader Jeremy] Corbyn or the nomination of [Donald] Trump were the kinds of things that happened when you put a question to an angry party membership, but in general elections we revert back to the more familiar patterns. Well, this one never reverted back.
The betting markets and the financial markets being wrong about an election that was about lost faith in institutions is a sad metaphor.
Yeah, exactly. No one, up until now, thought it was a matter of trust in the betting markets. They were just meant to be a guide. We’d lost trust in the polls, which were wrong again. I imagine this is also going to impact your election, in that Trump will be able to say right up until the vote in November that the polls were wrong in Britain, and the conventional answer, the status quo, was ahead on the day of the vote. Most of the polls were 6, 7 points out.
How do you evaluate the British electorate now that it’s voted to exit? What was different about it than we all thought?
What was clear, watching it through the night, were the divisions in the electorate: London voted to stay; university towns like the one I am in, Cambridge, voted overwhelmingly to stay. There is a strong connection between university towns and the vote. Scotland voted to stay. But the rest of the country voted to leave. Outside of these not just metropolitan, but cosmopolitan metropolitan areas, there was a disconnect between politicians and the electorate. The Conservative politicians weren’t connecting, and the Labour politicians weren’t connecting. No politicians were connecting except for [U.K. Independence Party]. Different politicians were struggling to reach different parts of the electorate, but just the size of that gap … Outside of certain areas, the electorate as a whole had lost trust in politicians as a group.
What do you think will be the reaction of British people as markets go nuts and people around the world lash out at them?
This is new territory for us. In the Scottish referendum and other things, the people pulled back. And now we have taken this final step. I think there is going to be a feeling of “we did it.” Every institution and expert said this was going to be a mistake, and the electorate did it anyway, so there is a kind of “screw you” feeling. I think there is going to be, for a quiet a while, a sense of quiet satisfaction for the people who wanted this outcome, a sense of “we did it, we showed democracy still works.” I think as the markets go crazy, and just looking at it this morning they are bad in London but worse in Europe, it sort of throws pressure onto other bits of the EU that look more vulnerable than they did 24 hours ago. And that will just reinforce in a lot of people’s minds the idea that we were wise to get out. If it took us taking this decision to put Europe in such a dire predicament, then thank God we are not joined with them.
Well, that’s depressing. Thank you.
But I don’t know because we haven’t been here before. It’s quite a day. The prime minister is gone. I can’t see the leader of the Labour Party surviving. The one party that came out of this successfully, UKIP, don’t have any reason to exist anymore. It’s not clear in party terms who benefits.
That was my next question. What does this mean for the Conservative Party? Is Boris Johnson likely in?
It seems fairly likelier than the alternatives, but a lot has happened in 24 hours, and it will be a few months before the Conservative Party is likely to pick its leader. I think it looks worse for Labour. I think the Labour Party has a massive problem. This result made clear that its traditional support in the north of England is just not listening to it. The only bits of England that are listening to it are these liberal metropolitan areas, and that is never going to get you anywhere close to winning a general election. They don’t seem to have politicians who can bridge that divide, and the party is viciously divided now, within itself.
It’s looking very uncertain, but I would rather today be a Conservative politician than a Labour politician. I think the Conservative Party—despite the very real wounds opened up by this campaign—is still in power. And power is pretty effective at healing these kinds of wounds. The other big question in Britain is about the legislation we now have that says we ought to wait until 2020 for the next general election. It’s very hard to see how we could get to 2020 without an election, but we don’t know how to call an election anymore because the rules have been changed.
You can switch prime ministers without an election though.
Yeah, we are going to. Cameron will go. But say Johnson comes in. The Conservative Party has a very small majority in the House of Commons, and it is likely to decline. Four more years is a long time to govern. Johnson can come in and be prime minister, but he almost certainly needs a general election to give himself a fresh start. He can’t just battle on for the next four years.
The thing you said about Labour relying on metropolitan votes reminds me of the situation here, where the Democrats are less and less a rural and white-working class party and more an urban and nonwhite party. It’s amounted to a majority in the last two elections, but it’s the same predicament.
Yeah, the nonwhite part of the population is less clear-cut here, and I think that the Labour Party has not been as broad as the Democrats. It really did feel like it could rely on parts of the country. Scotland was one, and Scotland is gone. The north of England is one, and the north of England—if you looked at Thursday’s result—is gone. Most of the south of England is gone. I don’t think the Democratic Party has been reduced to the pockets of support that the Labour Party is looking at now. To get from where it is now to winning a general election: It’s really hard to see how that happens. This election could be—and one hesitates to say this—terminal for the British Labour Party.
I saw a very mean tweet today saying that Cameron was one of the rare people who knows what the first line in his obit will be. Do you have any thoughts on Cameron? Do you think he had to hold this referendum, or was this a catastrophic error?
Well, it certainly looks catastrophic now. It was close, and if it had been 52–48 the other way, Cameron would be thought of as one of the luckiest leaders we have ever had, because it would have been the fourth or fifth time he had pulled something out of the fire. But if you gamble like this, you are going to lose one. This was the wrong one to lose for him. This was the big one. This feels massive. I imagine it will still feel massive in a year’s time. In my lifetime of studying politics and being interested in politics, this feels like the biggest event domestically for us. This feels like the game-changer. It will be on Cameron’s political gravestone. He did this.
He was very front-and-center in the campaign. You can say, to his credit, he didn’t shrink from it, and I think he knew that if he lost then that was it, which would explain some of the frenetic aspects of the campaign near the end. He saw his fate colliding with him. Democratic politics is an amazing business. Twenty-four hours ago, if you believed the betting and financial markets, he was safe and had three more years to craft his destiny. Now he is being painted as the greatest failure in 50 years of British politics. I do feel for him.
Since Anthony Eden, right?
And the thing about Eden was that was personally catastrophic for him and had geopolitical consequences, but it didn’t have the all-encompassing effects that this does. This affects the future of the United Kingdom and the continent of Europe, and it has profound economic consequences. It has profound consequences for the future of British democracy and how people think about it. Suez was a disaster, but five years later the country looked the same. It is very hard to think Britain will look the same five years from now.
Do you think we will look back on this as the end of the United Kingdom?
It depends on what you mean by the end. I think the Scottish question is very difficult. Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, has already come out and said that there has to be another referendum on independence in Scotland. I still think it’s hard to be confident that the referendum will be won, because the problem with the Scottish referendum that hasn’t gone away is what currency Scotland will have. Scots don’t want the euro, and now the British pound is a free-floating thing anchored in Westminster. Why would the Scots want that? But it might happen. The tensions between Scotland and England are just colossal now. They are two separate countries yoked together by a currency, so the strains are going to be enormous over the next five years, much bigger than what we have seen.
The United Kingdom, as it has been governed pretty much for the past 100 years, is over, and we are going to have to find something new. Whether that means separate nation-states or some kind of radical federalism, who knows? It’s not the end of the United Kingdom, but it is the end of the thing we have thought of as the United Kingdom for however many years.
Thank you David. I hope I am not calling you back on Nov. 9 to talk to you about the future of democracy here.
Maybe I will be calling you.
