Specialist Adviser to a House of Lords Select Committee on electoral registration. She is co-author of The Political Integration of Ethnic Minorities in Britain (2013).
Robert Ford is Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester. He is an expert on immigration, public opinion, and party politics in Britain. His first book, Revolt on the Right (2013), was named Political Book of the Year in 2015. He writes regularly on British electoral politics for national and international media outlets.
They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics, and reported the following:
When we open Brexitland on page 99 we are taken back in time from Brexit, to the spring of 1968, when Conservative politician Enoch Powell made his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which he attacked the demographic changes being driven by immigration from Britain’s former imperial colonies in the Commonwealth.. Powell’s intervention was the first instance of a leading British politician taking such an openly anti-immigrant stance, and while it provoked a negative reaction from the political elites, costing Powell his post in the government of Edward Heath, it received a huge amount of public support. At this point of the book we are building up the picture of how this famous intervention mobilised voters threatened by immigration and rising ethnic diversity behind the Conservative party Powell’s speech helped give his party a decades-long electoral advantage on the issue of immigration control. It was not until David Cameron’s Prime Ministership in early 2010s that this advantage dissipated, opening the door to the radical right UK Independence Party’s surge, and ultimately to the EU referendum of 2016.Learn more about Brexitland at the Cambridge University Press website.
In many ways the Page 99 test works well for Brexitland. It is a book about how political parties, public opinion and social norms have all changed in reaction to the demographic changes Britain has experienced in the last 60 years. Page 99 has it all: we show the party political side of Powell’s infamous speech; the disconnect between mainstream political elites and the average British voter, which Powell exploited; we show the electoral power of Powell’s divisive anti-immigration stance; but also the power of anti-racism norms – violating them cost Powell his career in government. This page showcases our effort to take a very broad look at the causes of Brexit by delving deep into British political history to trace the roots of parties’ reputations and choices, and how history can repeat itself, with, for example, uncanny parallels between the debates over post-colonial immigration in Powell’s time and more recent arguments about EU accession migration from Central and Eastern Europe since 2004.
Perhaps the only element of the book which is not directly present on page 99, but frames the background to the events it discusses, and which we discuss elsewhere in the book, is demographic and value change that Britain has experienced within a lifetime. Powell’s speech is a response to one of the main demographic changes we discuss in the book, ethnic diversity. The other element, missing from page 99 but covered elsewhere in the book, is the mass expansion of higher education, which resulted in a fundamental shift in the social and political values of the younger, better educated generations. Educational expansion has driven changes in how ethnic diversity is assessed, encouraging stronger commitment among younger Brits to upholding the anti-racism social norm, and encouraging more expansive definitions of intolerant behaviour which violates this norm. This value change is something that will go on influencing British politics beyond Brexit, for decades to come.
The parallels between the social and value changes discussed in Brexitland, and wider trends elsewhere are not accidental. The power of the conflicts over ethnic diversity and immigration can be felt in other European countries and in US politics too.
--Marshal Zeringue
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