Thursday’s vote in the United Kingdom suggested Brexit was a referendum on the global elite; a rebuke of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and the postwar order. London, an island of strong “Remain” support, was marooned in a sea of “Leave.” Dispatches from the British hinterland confirmed the impression of Capital against Country. “In shorthand,” Peter Mandler wrote in Dissent, “Britain’s EU problem is a London problem.”
In the immediate aftermath of the vote, it certainly seemed that wealthy London—a city of students, immigrants, and tourists, corporate headquarters, and creative industries doing business abroad, all thriving under the status quo—had been castigated by Britain. There was talk of banks relocating from the city to Dublin, Frankfurt, and Paris; anti-immigrant graffiti and attacks; and Londoners renouncing their country. As the U.K. voted to exit the established international system, London’s position as the world’s pre-eminent global city was diminished. The question was not whether London would suffer the consequences of Brexit, but how much it would suffer.
Easy to forget, amidst all this: Brexit’s most famous advocate, Boris Johnson, is the bicycle-commuting, subway-riding former mayor of London, who claimed that a well-managed Brexit was the best possible solution for the city itself. “If you want our great capital to be genuinely open to the world—rather than locked in and diminished by a failing EU system,” he wrote in the Evening Standard before the vote, “then go global, vote Leave, and take back control next week.” Brexit as vote may have been an expression of anti-London sentiment, but Brexit as policy hasn’t always been conceived that way.
Johnson and co. have long argued that London, the global metropolis, had more to lose from the bureaucratic tyranny of the European Union than from a well-managed departure. In a 2014 Greater London Authority report titled “A Win-Win Situation,” Gerard Lyons, Johnson’s chief economic adviser and a full-fledged Brexiteer, concluded that an outward-looking Brexit was a far superior option for London than “business as usual” in the EU and would enhance the city’s competitive advantage.
“London is considerably more oriented towards both innovation and the world economy than is the rest of the U.K.,” the report says. An exit accompanied by pro-growth policies, according to this theory, would actually cause London’s growth rate to leap even further ahead of the U.K. at large.
In this scenario, Brexit would not, as Manhattan Institute fellow Aaron Renn writes, refute “the urban triumphalist vision” in which “cities, not provinces or nation-states, are the real actors in the global economy.” On the contrary, London’s Brexit lobby imagined the city’s influence growing. Regulatory freedom, high-skilled immigration, a union of British cities pushing for greater local power: Those were the ingredients for a post-Brexit London, a freewheeling global city-state. (Even London Mayor Sadiq Khan, a Remainer, reacted to the Brexit vote with that hope. “On behalf of all Londoners,” he told business leaders on Tuesday, “I am demanding more autonomy for the capital—right now.”)
Greg Clark, a senior fellow at Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program, takes a similarly sunny view of Brexit. If London adapts quickly, he predicts, “corporations will reorganize rather than leave,” especially with a national immigration policy better-suited for London’s needs than the EU’s worker freedom requirements. “London will present a diversification opportunity for investors,” he continues, and could gain more independence relative to the U.K. state. (The Economist derisively calls this rosy view the “Singapore on steroids” idea. Rather than imitate the success of the tiny polity that has become a global financial center in just 50 years, the magazine suggests that a solitary Britain would end up “poorer, less open and less innovative … less influential and more parochial.”)
What happens to universities after Brexit offers a good example of what cosmopolitan London prospering from EU remove might look like. Broadly speaking, as I wrote on Friday, higher education has been considered one of the EU’s greatest success stories. The Erasmus program has allowed millions of young Europeans to study abroad and created a whole generation of (highly educated) Europeans with friends and memories across national borders. London, meanwhile, is one of the world capitals of international education. At London colleges and universities, 1 in 4 students are from outside the U.K. Under EU rules, students from the European Union are eligible for discounted tuition fees and a related student loan scheme that makes a British education much more affordable for them than for other international students, who might pay more than twice as much. At University College London, the 4,500 EU students make up the fastest-growing group in the student body. (About 1 in 5 UCL staff members are also EU nationals.) Brexit could jeopardize those connections.
But it’s China that is the fastest-growing source of students at London universities more generally, and it’s there (and to India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa) that Britain could look. Students and professors, wrote Jamie Martin, a former U.K. Department of Education official, “should vote for a more open, innovative and internationalist future—and that means voting to Leave.” More students from India, mainland China, the USA, Hong Kong, and Nigeria (paying more than their EU counterparts) would also constitute a “windfall” for the schools.
That vision represents, in microcosm, the post-Brexit London utopia, a city oriented less toward Europe and more toward the world at large.
It is also, as many, many observers have noted, a mirage. The dream of a London-friendly Brexit depends foremost on getting a sweetheart deal with the European Union on issues like “passporting,” the rules that allow EU financial institutions to be based in London, and most critics don’t think the U.K. has the leverage to obtain a superior agreement. (Or as an EU diplomat put it on Monday, “You cannot have your cake and eat it.”)
There’s also the question of internal politics. As Anne Applebaum writes in the Washington Post, “That elite version of Brexit—England as an offshore haven, a deregulated zone, an arcadian haven, a cosmopolitan business center, the Dubai of the North Atlantic—was not what the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph sold in the campaign, and it isn’t what the leave campaign put on their billboards.”
The Leave campaign became increasingly tainted by xenophobia, while immigration remains the essential ingredient of London’s success. The city is now 38 percent foreign-born, up from 15 percent in 1971. Last year, London surpassed its all-time population mark, set in 1939. But the native-born population is actually lower than it was in 1971—by a full million people.
No one knows who will be negotiating Brexit (apparently one thing the Brexit-for-London planners forgot was to have a plan). But if the Brexit vote is a product of economic frustration with the capital, it seems naïve to think the resulting series of deals will be crafted to London’s liking.
