The politics of Brexit – or UKexit as it should be called, for it will take the UK, not Britain, out of the EU – has been addressed in many different ways. But two dimensions have generally remained missing from most analysis: the politics of anti-London, and of the old.
The Brexit vote came from non-metropolitan areas of England, mainly from Conservative voters, as Anthony Barnett emphasises. These were votes of the old. Indeed, Brexit was framed to appeal to the old, as a desire to return to a national past, and a critique of the nature of an ever more powerful capital. Brexiteers, the politicians and financiers of the Leave campaigns, also turned the latent politics of anti-London into the politics of anti-Brussels, a formidable and significant achievement.
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