The Brexit vote didn’t create Remainers or Leavers, but it did give them names. On 12 September 2006, a little under ten years before the UK voted to leave the EU, the departing prime minister, Tony Blair, told the Trades Union Congress that politics in the 21st century would be dominated not by issues of left against right but of “open vs closed”: a question in part formed by how globalisation had changed people’s economic and social circumstances, but also by cultural and social issues.
That framing was flawed. Andrew Cooper – David Cameron’s pollster, who, like Blair, was firmly on the side of “open” – thought that it was unnecessarily pejorative, while one Blairite Labour MP complained that it was about as helpful as describing the new divides as between “respectable and loose”.
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