The political, economic, cultural and social implications of Brexit continue to reverberate throughout the UK and the EU.

Brexit has been linked to the UK’s ongoing poor economic growth, constitutional and political instability, the normalisation of xenophobic, racist and nativist attitudes, and the emergence of new political identities. In the EU, it has generated ongoing discussions on the future direction of European integration, differentiation and disintegration processes. Brexit brought questions related to the EU's cohesion and identity to the foreground, while Euroscepticism and anti-EU sentiments have gained momentum.

Thus, we are still living through the ‘Brexit moment’: a period of unfinished history that is still unravelling and which necessitates ongoing investigation. Moreover, Brexit offers a valuable tool for understanding a broader range of contemporary problems across the UK and EU, such as: nationalism and Euroscepticism; affective polarisation and fragmentation of political cultures; transnational operations of NGOs and businesses; and intergovernmental cooperation in key policy areas such as the environment.

Given the complex and multifaceted nature of Brexit and its consequences, and its utility for the academic investigation of broader matters of salience across Europe, it is necessary for scholars to continue to engage with the subject. Moreover, it is important for these investigations to be conducted from within and across a range of disciplines, facilitating a more holistic and nuanced understanding.

Our Research Group, Perspectives on Brexit, hosted by the University of Portsmouth, does exactly this. It fosters cross-collaborative research amongst emerging scholars working on Brexit from a variety of disciplines, universities and countries across Europe and the world.

Our panel reflects some of this diversity and tackles a range of distinct but interrelated matters that pertain to Brexit, Europe and the EU. Nicholas Scott examines English identity and nationalism, along with its consequences at both the state and European levels. Constance Woollen delves into the influence of social class, race, gender and citizenship in shaping voting behaviour and attitudes. Sebastian Lowe and Judith Koch use computational methods to analyse the evolution of Eurosceptic discourse as part of an interdisciplinary digital humanities project. Mark Kaye explores the societal impacts of contentious political events and their ability to divide society and political cultures. Dimitra Kiousi examines how UK and Scandinavian environmental societal actors navigate the complexities and tensions in their inter-organizational ties within the context of poly-crises, of which Brexit is just one among many crises facing the European Union.

By reducing a complex policy matter into a simple binary question of ‘in or out,’ the UK’s referendum on its membership of the EU triggered an ‘affective polarisation’ that divided UK society into two groups: Leavers and Remainers. Recent and ongoing research indicates that these distinct and dividing political identities remain particularly potent. A survey conducted by Hobolt and Tilly in 2022, for instance, found that 62 percent of people asked still thought of themselves in Brexit terms.

Utilising qualitative interviews with 30 individuals and prioritising a ‘bottom-up’, data-driven approach, this paper makes an original contribution to the fields of Brexit and European studies by exploring the extent to which persons living in the city of Portsmouth perceive and experience this Brexit-induced affective polarisation in their everyday lives. It further does so by utilising particularisation, a conceptual framing which recognises subjects as multiple, fluid and traversing a variety of social relations while inhabiting a plurality of cultural fields; thereby allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the variegated and evolving societal impacts of Brexit.

While there has been a growing interest in the implications of Brexit-induced affective polarisation for democratic praxis, a literature review conducted for this paper has revealed that there has been relatively scant attention paid to the phenomenon’s implications for the everyday lives of persons living in the UK. Many questions remain regarding the extent to which people’s quotidian experiences have been impacted by Brexit related social divisions, people’s perceptions of these divisions and how affective polarisation may have influenced people’s sense of belonging within various and overlapping ‘imagined communities’. This paper addresses this lacuna. In so doing, the paper contributes to and enhances the academic understanding of Brexit-induced affective polarisation, as well as the broader cultural and social consequences of the UK’s exit from the European Union.

Over the past two decades, the European Union's political landscape has witnessed a succession of interconnected crises: from financial and economic crises, the rise of democratic backsliding, intensified migration movements, the 'Brexit' referendum, to, more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia's war in Ukraine, and the energy crisis. These concurrent crises have given rise to the term 'poly-crises,' characterising crises that span both global and European spheres. Against the backdrop of treating crises in isolation, this paper delves into how environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) headquartered in the UK, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark engage in cooperative efforts through bilateral and regional avenues amidst the context of poly-crises. In doing so, the study draws on data from a series of elite interviews with UK and Scandinavian policy and conservation experts actively engaged in climate change and biodiversity-related matters to identify contextual factors, reasons, and issues that influence the development of cooperative ties with like-minded NGOs in the present times. Preliminary findings underscore the significance of knowledge sharing, policy enhancement, and the diffusion of innovative practices in fostering inter-organisational ties amongst these environmental partner organisations. By exploring how these NGOs navigate intricate environmental concerns within the framework of poly-crises, this paper offers valuable insights into the proactive role civil society actors can play in understanding crises from 'below.' It also emphasises the need for a more nuanced understanding and conceptualisation of crises that takes into account their overlapping attributes, rather than viewing them in isolation. This becomes especially pertinent within the context of addressing the interrelated and holistic solutions required to tackle biodiversity loss and climate change. As these environmental issues transcend borders, crises should no longer be perceived as isolated events but rather as interconnected complexities with transboundary implications.

This article is concerned with how Brexit has affected British identity, including the role English national identity played in the 2016 United Kingdom (UK) referendum on European Union (EU) membership. This article aligns itself with the postfunctionalist theory of European integration, arguing that English identity-based concerns and regional-national nationalism greatly affected the outcome of the 2016 referendum, leading to a more disjointed UK. Now that Brexit has happened, this article offers an attempt to understand how Brexit has affected the cohesion and resonance of British identity within the UK. In the era of the constraining dissensus, postfunctionalism argues for greater attention to the role identity plays in European politics at both the state and European level; identity-based concerns were a major factor in the UK’s vote to leave the EU. For the EU, Brexit may have served to strengthen its unity by removing an ‘awkward partner’ from the union. For Britain, Brexit has generated internal questions about the future of the UK in the face of the increasingly politicised identities of each of the home nations, given the heavily regionalised nature of the Brexit vote. This article will expound the core attributes of British identity, including the conflation between Englishness and Britishness and the power it exerts over British identity. This will be followed by a discussion of how the UK’s complicated history with and within institutional Europe, culminating in Brexit, has affected British unity. It will outline the specific role of English identity and nationalism in the Brexit referendum, demonstrating how English identity concerns and English nationalism contributed to Brexit. Finally, it will argue that a resurgent English nationalism was not only one of the major catalysts for the Brexit referendum, but that this reinvigorated English nationalism is weakening British unity and therefore, British identity.

Since the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum, which saw a slim majority of Britons vote to leave the EU, mostly quantitative political science research has investigated voting behaviour and attitudes. Whilst this burgeoning literature helped to identify patterns in voting behaviour, it has been closely associated with the racialised and exclusionary trope of the ‘left-behind’, leaving us with a limited picture of voting behaviour, in particular, in London. What’s more, the white, ‘male-stream’ nature of social science research more generally has left certain voices, including women, ethnic minorities and migrants (from the EU especially), largely excluded. Through informal conversational interviews and participatory research methods (identity mapping) with 24 individuals, this study digs deeper into Londoners’ Brexit attitudes, seeking to understand the intersecting roles of social class, race, gender and citizenship in determining Brexit attitudes. Three issues, on which attitudes are based, became clear during inductive analysis: pro-/anti- immigration, disillusionment with politicians, and anxiety and uncertainty. This paper, focusing on the second, contributes empirically by situating new issues (like the 1970s ‘Smoking Beagles’ campaign) in existing literature on political disillusionment and Brexit. It also makes a conceptual contribution by applying Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘cultural capital’ and ‘fields’ to a new setting. The work of anti-racist and feminist scholars is used to broaden Bourdieu’s theories to understand how social class, race, gender and citizenship interacted, to create and sustain the political disillusionment behind (some) voters’ attitudes at the Brexit referendum.

This study delves into the evolving dynamics of British euroscepticism, utilising Large Language Models (LLMs) to dissect political discourse. As LLMs, notably OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, exhibit remarkable advancements, they open new frontiers in digital humanities and social science research. Crucially, these models obviate the need for extensive programming and training of neural networks, simplifying the analysis of large-scale datasets.Our research applies these LLMs to a comprehensive corpus of British parliamentary speeches from 1997 to 2019, exploring both few-shot and zero-shot techniques for topic modelling and sentiment analysis. This approach aims to evaluate the efficacy of LLMs in interpreting complex political narratives. The focus on euroscepticism provides a substantial challenge due to its multifaceted and dynamic nature, with its discourse often intertwining with non-EU-centric parliamentary debates. By algorithmically mapping the core themes and ideologies within Eurosceptic rhetoric, we address a pivotal question in contemporary political analysis: the influence of neoliberal ideology on British euroscepticism. Our analysis determines the prevalence of neoliberal tenets, such as advocacy for post-Brexit market liberalisation and non-European trade agreements. This method uncovers diachronic and synchronic shifts within Eurosceptic rhetoric in relation to neoliberal narratives, examining the local and transnational factors contributing to these fluctuations. This study enhances the understanding of euroscepticism’s heterogenous character within British political discourse and demonstrates the potential of LLMs as powerful computational tools for social science research, enabling a deeper comprehension of complex political ideologies.