I am British.

Never before has the phrase "I am British" elicited so much pity.
I come from an island where many of us like to believe there's been a lot of continuity over the last
thousand years. We tend to have historically imposed change on others but done much less of it
ourselves. So it came as an immense shock to me when I woke up on the morning of June, 24th to
discover that my country had voted to leave the European Union, my Prime Minister had
resigned, and Scotland was considering a referendum that could bring to an end the very existence
of the UK. So that was an immense shock for me, and it was an immense shock for many
people. But it was also something that *** following several days, created a complete political
meltdown in my country. There were calls for a second referendum, almost as if, following a sports
match, we could ask the opposition for a replay. Everybody was blaming everybody else. People
blamed the Prime Minister for calling the referendum in the first place. They blamed the leader of
the opposition for not fighting it hard enough. The young accused the old. The educated blamed the
less well-educated. That complete meltdown was made even worse by the most tragic element of
it: levels of xenophobia and *** abuse in the streets of Britain at a level that I have never seen
before in my lifetime. People are now talking about whether my country is becoming a Little
England or as one of my colleagues put it: whether we're about to become a 1950s *** theme
park floating in the Atlantic Ocean. My question is really, should we have the degree of shock that
we've experienced since? Was it something that took place overnight? Or are there deeper structural
factors that led us to where we are today? So I want to take a step back and ask 2 very basic
questions. First, what does Brexit represent, not just for my country but for all of us around the
world? And second, what can we do about it? How should we all respond? So first, what does
Brexit represent? Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Brexit teaches us many things about our
society and about societies around the world. It highlights in ways that we seem embarrassingly
unaware of how divided our societies are. The vote split along lines of age, education, class and
geography. Young people didn't turn out to vote in great numbers, but those that did wanted to
remain. Older people really wanted to leave the European Union.Geographically, it was London
and Scotland that most strongly committed to being part of the EU, while in other parts of the
country there was very strong ambivalence. Those divisions are things we really need to recognize
and take seriously. But more profoundly, the vote teaches us something about the nature of politics
today. Contemporary politics is no longer just about right and left. It's no longer just about tax and
spend. It's about globalization. The fault line of contemporary politics is between those that
embrace globalization and those that fear globalization. If we look at why those who wanted to
leave, we call them "Leavers," as opposed to "Remainers", we see two factors in the **** that
really mattered. The first was immigration, and the second ***, and these represent a desire for
people to take back control of their own lives and the feeling that they are unrepresented by
politicians. But those ideas are ones that signify fear and alienation. They represent a retreat back
towards nationalism and borders in ways that many of us would reject. What I want to suggest is
the picture is more complicated than that. That liberal internationalists, like myself, and I firmly
include myself in that picture, need to write ourselves back into the picture in order to understand
how we've got to where we are today. When we look at the voting patterns across the United

Kingdom, we can visibly see the divisions. The blue areas show Remain and the red areas
Leave. When I looked at this, what personally struck me was the very little time in my life I've
actually spent in many of the red areas. I suddenly realized that, looking at the top 50 areas in the
UK that have the strongest Leave vote, I've spent a combined total of 4 days of my life in those
areas. In some of those places, I didn't even know the names of the voting districts. It was a real
shock to me, and it suggested that people like me who think of ourselves as inclusive, open and
tolerant, perhaps don't know our own countries and societies nearly as well as we like to believe.
And the challenge that comes from that is we need to find a new way to narrate globalization to
those people, to recognize that for those people who have not necessarily been to university, who
haven't necessarily grown up with the Internet, that don't get opportunities to travel, they may be
unpersuaded by the narrative that we find persuasive in our often liberal bubbles. It means that we
need to reach out more broadly and understand. In the Leave vote, a minority have *** the politics
of fear and hatred, creating lies and mistrust around. For instance, the idea that the vote on
Europe could reduce the number of refugees and ****-seekers coming to Europe, when the vote on
leaving had nothing to do with immigration from outside the European Union. But for a significant
majority of the Leave voters the concern was disillusionment with the political establishment. This
was a PROTEST vote for many. A sense that nobody represented them, that they couldn't find a
political party that spoke for them, and so they reject that political establishment. This replicates
around Europe and much of the liberal democratic world. We see it with the rise in popularity of
Donald Trump in the United States, with the growing nationalism of ***Victor Oban in
Hungary, with the increase in popularity of Marine Lee Pen in France. The specter of Brexit is in all
of our societies. So the question I think we need to ask is my second question, which is how should
we collectively respond? For all of us who care about creating liberal, open, tolerant societies, we
urgently need a new vision, a vision of a more tolerant, inclusive globalization. One that brings
people with us rather than leaving them behind. That vision of globalization is one that has to start
by a recognition of the positive benefits of globalization. The consensus amongst economists is that
free trade, the movement of capital, the movement of people across borders benefit everyone
*****. The consensus amongst international relations scholars is that globalization brings
interdependence, which brings cooperation and peace. But globalization also has redistributive
effects. It creates winners and losers. To take the example of migration, we know that immigration
is a net positive for the economy as a whole under almost all circumstances. But we also have to be
very aware that there are redistributive consequences that importantly, low-skilled immigration can
lead to a reduction in wages for the most impoverish in our societies and also put pressure on house
prices. That doesn't detract from the fact that it's positive, but it means more people have to share in
those benefits and recognize them. In 2002, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations,
Kofi Anan, gave a speech at Yale University, and that speech was on the topic of inclusive
globalization. That was the speech in which he *** that term. And he said, and I paraphrase: "The
glass house of globalization has to be open to all if it is to remain secure. *** and ignorance are the
ugly face of exclusionary and *** globalization." That idea of inclusive globalization was revived
in 2008 in a conference on progressive governance involving many of the leaders of European
countries. But *** and the financial crisis of 2008, the concept disappeared almost without a
trace. Globalization has been taken to support a ***. It's perceived to be part of an elite

agenda rather than something that benefits all. And it needs to be reclaimed on a far more inclusive
basis than it is today. So the question is, how can we achieve that goal? How can we balance on the
one hand, addressing fear and alienation while on the other hand, refusing *** to give in to
xenophobia and nationalism? That is the question for all of us. And I think, as a social scientist, that
social science offers some places to start. Our transformation has to be about both ideas and about
material change, and I want to give you four ideas as a starting point.
The first relates to the idea of civic education. What stands out from Brexit is the gap between
public perception and *** reality. It's been suggested that we've moved to *** society, where
evidence and truth no longer matter, and lies have equal status to the clarity of evidence. So how
can we rebuild respect for truth and evidence into our liberal democracies? It has to begin with
education, but it has to start with the recognition that there are huge gaps. In 2014, the ***
MORI published a survey on attitudes to immigration, and it showed that as numbers of immigrants
increase, so public concern with immigration also increases, although it obviously didn't unpack
causality, because this could equally be to do not so much with numbers but the political and media
narrative around it. But the same survey also revealed huge public misinformation and
misunderstanding about the nature of immigration. For example, in these attitudes in the UK, the
public believed that levels of *** were a greater proportion of immigration than they were, but they
also believed the levels of educational migration were far lower as a proportion of overall migration
than they actually are. So we have to address this misinformation, the gap between perception and
reality on key aspects of globalization. And that can't just be something that's left to our
schools, although that's important to begin at an early age. It has to be about lifelong civic
participation and public engagement that we all encourage as societies.
The second thing that I think is an opportunity is the idea to encourage more interaction across
diverse communities. One of the things that stands out for me very strikingly looking at
immigration attitudes in the United Kingdom is that ironically, the regions of my country that are
the most tolerant of immigrants have the highest numbers of immigrants. So for instance, London
and the Southeast have the highest numbers of immigrants, and they are also by far the most
tolerant areas. It's those areas of the country that have the lowest levels of immigration that actually
are the most exclusionary and intolerant towards migrants. So we need to encourage exchange
programs. We need to ensure that older generations who maybe can't travel get access to the
Internet. We need to encourage, even on a local and national level, more movement, more
participation, more interaction with people who we don't know and whose views we might not
necessarily agree with.
The third thing that I think is crucial and this is really fundamental, is we have to ensure that
everybody shares in the benefits of globalization. This illustration from the Financial Times post:
Brexit is really striking. It shows tragically that those people who voted to leave the European
Union were those who actually benefit the most materially from trade with the European
Union. But the problem is that those people in those areas didn't perceive themselves to be
benefi**. They didn't believe that they were actually getting access to material benefits of increased
trade and increased mobility around the world. I work on questions *** to do with refugees, and
one of the ideas I spent a lot of my time preaching, mainly to developing countries around the
world, is that in order to encourage the *** of refugees, we can't just benefit the refugee

populations, we also have to address the concerns of the host communities in local areas. But in
looking at that, one of the policy prescriptions is that we have to provide disproportionately better
education facilities, health facilities, access to social services in those regions of high
immigration to address the concerns of those local populations. But while we encourage that around
the developing world, we don't take those lessons home and incorporate them in our own societies.
Furthermore, if we're going to really take seriously the need to ensure people share in the economic
benefits, our businesses and corporations need a model of globalization that recognizes that they
too, have to take people with them.
The 4th and final idea I want to put forward is an idea that we need more responsible
politics. There's very little social science evidence that compares attitudes on globalization. But
from the surveys that do exist, what we can see is there's huge variation across different
countries and time periods in those countries for attitudes and tolerance of questions like migration
and mobility on the one hand and free trade on the other. But one hypothesis that I think emerges
from a ** look at that data is the idea that *** societies are far less tolerant of globalization. It's the
societies like Sweden in the past, like Canada today, where there is a *** politics, where right and
left work together, that we encourage supportive attitudes towards globalization. And what we see
around the world today is a tragic **, a failure to have dialogue between the *-* in politics, and a
gap in terms of that liberal center ground that can encourage communication and a shared
understanding. We might not achieve that today, but at the very least we have to call upon our
politicians and our media to drop a language of fear and be far more tolerant of one another. These
ideas are very tentative, and that's in part because this needs to be an inclusive and shared project.
I am still British. I am still European. I am still a global citizen. For those of us who believe that our
identities are not mutually exclusive, we have to all work together to ensure that globalization takes
everyone with us and doesn't leave people behind. Only then will we truly *** democracy and
globalization.