Prejudice and the Brexit vote: a tangled web

Abstract

The decision of the UK public in July 2016 to vote to leave the European Union was greeted with surprise within the UK and across the world. However, should we really have been surprised? Surveys of attitudes towards freedom of movement to the UK over the last 10 years have suggested an increasing negativity regarding immigration, and many debates before and after the vote have raised the issue of whether prejudice played a role in the outcome of the referendum. It is only within the last 12 months that a number of research study findings have started to provide a more coherent, data-informed evidence-base suggesting that voting behaviour in the referendum may have correlates to prejudice personality styles, nationalism, Islamophobia, and implicit/explicit prejudice. We argue that recent evidence suggests that levels of prejudice towards ‘others’ was a factor in the Brexit vote and that the attitudes underlying this vote must be explored in greater detail through cross-disciplinary scientific research, with legitimate concerns recognised and fallacies challenged.