European, National and Regional Identities in the UK: An Investigation of the Identity ‘Type’ Prevailed in the Brexit Referendum

More than two years following the referendum that decided the country’s departure from the EU, “Brexit” continues to be a major point of contention and as late as February 2019, two months prior to the set exit-date, substantively different preferences for the future UK-EU relationship continue to be debated in the British Parliament. Surveys suggest that this ambivalence is reflected in the attitudes of the population with, e.g., the latest relevant Eurobarometer (EB89, Spring 2018) reporting that 25% of respondents perceived themselves “definitely” as EU citizens, while 31% responded either “definitely not” or “not really”. This study examines the relationship between European, national and “regional” (in the sense of constituent countries) identity among the British electorate using data from a Voting Advice Application (VAA), an online platform providing voters with measures of closeness to political parties contesting an election, after users declare their agreement or disagreement on policy-related questions. The “WhoGetsMyVoteUK” VAA, designed for the 2017 UK General Election, included three 10-point scales requesting that users report how well three adjectives describe themselves: European, British, English (Scottish etc.). We employ Cluster Analysis to attempt an examination of the degree to which these different identities can be in accord or are in conflict, analysing the four constituent countries of the UK (England, Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland) separately. Finally, we proceed to examine how different identity types (national-only, cosmopolitan, mixed etc.) are distributed among different groups in the population defined by demographic and political identity variables in link to the identity ‘models’ promoted by the political parties in the UK during the ‘Brexit’ referendum campaign.