skip to main content
Goldsmiths - University of London
  • Staff & students
  • Search
  • Main menu
 
Main menu

Primary

  • Home
  • Course finder
  • Study with us
  • Departments
  • Research
  • Services for Business
  • For the local community
  • Alumni and friends
  • News
  • Events
  • About us
Staff & students

Staff + students

  • Students
  • Library
  • Timetable
  • Learn.gold - VLE
  • Email - Outlook
  • IT support
  • Staff directory
  • Goldmine - staff intranet
  • Graduate School - PGR students
  • Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre
  • Events admin
In this section

Breadcrumb navigation

  • About us
    • Contact
    • Find us
    • Working at Goldsmiths
    • About Goldsmiths
    • Our misson, values and strategy
    • Governance
    • Our history
    • Student and graduate profiles
    • Senior Management Team
    • Community
    • Equality and Diversity
    • Academic Partnerships
    • Open Book
    • Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art
    • Goldsmiths Global
    • Goldsmiths Press
    • Term dates
  • News
  • Brexit
Open social sharing
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Whatsapp

Where do we go from here? Here's our politics experts' take on Brexit

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Politics and International Relations

Article

Written bySarah Cox
Published on 30 Jun 2016

As Britain and Europe face up to the post-referendum realities of Brexit and the fall-out within our political parties, researchers from across Goldsmiths' departments have published their thoughts online. Read on or watch the video below for expert comment on "the meltdown".

Dr Simon Griffiths, Department of Politics and International Relations, is a historian with a research focus on British party political history. He explains:

“The current meltdown in British politics is perhaps unprecedented. Huge splits have opened in the Tory Party between the anti-European traditionalist, 'Little England', group and the pro-European free marketeers. These were cracks that David Cameron spent his decade as Conservative leader desperately trying to cover over.

"What was more unexpected was the existential crisis of the Labour Party, which seems to be entering a civil war that could even see it collapse as the main party of opposition. There is no clear consensus of where to go next, between its moderate parliamentary party and its often more radical membership, and no side currently wants to give way in order to resolve the dispute.”
 
“All this was caused by economic crisis and the collapse in faith of Britain's long-term economic strategy. For the last 50 years, since the loss of its Empire, Britain's leaders have seen trade with Europe as the answer to the UK's relative economic decline. This strategy was scuppered by last week's referendum. 
 
"Finally, this is a crisis that could see the end of the UK. The different support for staying in the EU around the country now makes Scottish independence a likely conclusion, with Northern Ireland also pushing for independent relations with the EU.” 

What sort of crisis is this?

Dr Will Davies (Department of Politics and International Relations) and Professor Aeron Davis (Department of Media and Communications) have published a number of Brexit blog posts on the Political Economy Research Centre website, exploring post-referendum economic and political chaos, the sociology of Brexit, and what we can expect to happen next.
 
Visit www.perc.org.uk to read more and follow @Goldperc on Twitter for updates.
Why did people vote to exit the EU? From protest votes against migration, to an attempt at moving Britain away from European red-tape, Simon Griffiths explains why some people ticked the Leave box.
Description of image

"The press didn't divide us, we were already divided"

Professors Des Freedman and Natalie Fenton from the Department of Media and Communications have both published articles this week on Open Democracy about the role of the media during the referendum. In his piece, Professor Freedman explains that Britain's divisions were not invented by the media.

"Britain was divided long before the referendum campaign got going," he says. "The economic issues that were clearly at the heart of the ‘leave’ vote are, according to Larry Elliott writing on the morning after the vote, ‘deep-seated and of long standing.’ [Elliott] concludes that the UK is a ‘country divided by wealth, geography and class'.

"The tragedy is that the bulk of media attention during the referendum totally failed to do justice to these underlying questions of inequality, alienation and frustration with ‘official’ politics and focused instead on painting the vote in terms of a civil war inside the Conservative party."

Writing on Brexit, inequality, and the democratic defecit, Professor Fenton says: "When publics are abandoned, when their voices no longer matter and their identities are demolished through economic inequality, precarity and non-recognition, they lose faith in the political institutions that are supposed to represent them."

"The tag line for the Leave campaign – ‘Let's Take Back Control’ – speaks to a very real disaffection that this democracy doesn't work for the vast majority of its members."

"This is not a citizenry satisfied that they understand all of the issues they are voting on nor that when they do vote their views are taken heed of by their elected representatives."

Hear more from Professor Natalie Fenton on Al Jazera's Listening Post

"There will be an EU legislative legacy for some time"

In a new research paper set for publication, Professor Daniel Neyland and Dr Sveta Milyaeva from the Department of Sociology explore the basis for ill-feeling toward EU legislation: arguments over its lack of flexibility, its costs of legislative production but also its costs for business, and the length of time it takes to produce and implement policies.

These concerns seem most pronounced in the development of Regulations – a form of EU legislation that establishes single and binding acts for all member states. Taking the recent General Data Protection Regulation as their example, Professor Neyland and Dr Milyaeva suggest that building a Regulation involves bringing concerns to light that then need to be reconciled through the Regulation. However, given that the Data Protection Regulation alone inspired 3,999 often incompatible concerns, this reconciliation is never fully satisfactory to all concerned.

So what happens next? “At least initially the UK will not have its own alternative regulatory frameworks written and so there will be an EU legislative legacy for some time,” explain the researchers.

“The UK may have to strike a trade deal with the EU which will require taking on board forms of EU legislation,” predicts Professor Neyland. “Even in the long-run, it seems unlikely that firms, particularly those in the data protection field, will want to adopt one approach to business for 27 member states of the EU and a different practice for the UK, so the UK may end up with EU policy by default."

 

Our world renowned experts

Professor Will Davies

Will Davies is a political economist with interests in neoliberalism, history of economics and economic sociology.

Professor Natalie Fenton

Natalie's research interrogates the relationship between media, democracy and social change. She works across political communications, political sociology, media studies and cultural studies.

Dr Simon Griffiths

Simon teaches, writes about, and comments on, contemporary British politics, the history of political thought in the UK, and public policy.

  • About us
  • Accessibility statement
  • Contact us
  • Cookie use
  • Find us
  • Copyright and disclaimer
  • Jobs
  • Modern slavery statement
Admin login
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
© Goldsmiths, University of London Back to top