A Crisis of European Proportions: Brexit, the decline of neoliberalism and resurrection of class

The UK's 2016 EU referendum result, wherein a majority of the UK population voted to leave the European Union, has an important and direct relationship to the 2008 financial crisis and the much-touted decline of neoliberalism. My project will ask whether the Brexit vote represents a continuing decline of the neoliberal project in the UK or presents a neoconservative return to issues of nationhood and belonging, developing a narrative of this decline that views Brexit as a crisis-response. In order to achieve this, I will take class as the demographic prism through which to understand the decline of neoliberalism and market-oriented culture and politics in the UK. I will draw analogy between the 2008 financial crisis and Brexit as symptoms of neoliberal disease, asking whether this crisis signals a moment of recovery or failure. In exploring the academic and ideological aspects of neoliberalism as a totalizing social and economic framework and the populist assertion of power demonstrated by the EU referendum result, I will aim to construct a new understanding of class in 21st century Britain. I will consider neoliberalism and the EU's relationship with culture and ethnicity, but foreground the shifting ways in which voters understand and embody class, particularly in response to crisis. My work will capitalize on Brexit as a unique political and cultural event through which to explore the idiomatic reality of neoliberalism as it pertains to popular demographic understanding in the UK.
Disciplines such as Sociology must reembrace the complexities of categorization presented by understandings of class in 21st century Britain. I will chart its relationship with neoliberalism and develop a rationale of class that is directly tied to its relationship with Brexit. Expanding on the work of theorists such as Tyler (2013) and Hall (2011) I will address the shifting understanding of class and what this term means both academically and in popular understanding through a combination of theoretical work grounded in the development of neoliberalism, through the Third Way and into Euroscepticism, and ethnographic fieldwork. I address these aspects of my project further below. My understanding of class will be developed against the institutional backdrop of the European Union. Populist reengagement with European politics is directly related to the inaccessible façade depicted of the EU as a monolith of institutional language and incomprehensible policy. Again, I will draw analogy here between the remoteness of Brussels and the cloistered privilege of the financial and banking industries and how class can be defined as developing in opposition to these great neoliberal institutions, using theorists such as Gamble (2009) and Mirowski (2013) to understand the parallels between these crises. I want to reestablish class as a valid motivating factor through which to understand voter behaviour and refute the conception of populist voting as a form of optimal ignorance. Brexit is the summation of several crises unfolding in UK cultural and political life, signaling the death of giants in the popular imagination and the growth of new demographic and idiomatic understandings, one that embodies a new form of 21st century neoconservative tribalism. [..]