AS a leading expert on European politics and foreign affairs, Professor Anand Menon has a long and distinguished career - though, until recently, it was largely conducted below the radar of popular debate.
Lately, however, his public profile has risen sharply. He is a familiar figure on current affairs TV shows, and his views and findings are now frequently the subject of newspaper headlines. There is a simple one-word explanation: Brexit.
Professor Menon has become a go-to academic whose insights into Europe have become newsworthy and whose status as an unbiased authority within the Brexit debate is recognised across the political spectrum.
This is partly due to his position as director of The UK In A Changing Europe, a publicly funded think tank based at King’s College, London. The stated mission is to promote “rigorous, high-quality and independent research into the complex and ever-changing relationship between the UK and the European Union”.
Frequently asked for his personal view of whether Britain should leave or stay, he prefaces responses by pointing out that he is “not allowed to express preferences”, though he can indicate likely outcomes of different courses of action based on the think tank’s ‘independent’ findings.
Consequently, he firmly believes the sort of Brexit the government seems to want at the time of going to press will mean our economy will be smaller than if we had stayed in, while the political consequences of ‘not leaving’ will also be negative.
“There is a trade-off between the political and economic impact of whatever happens with regard to Brexit,” he tells the GG2 Power List. “Leaving the EU under the terms of the deal (negotiated by former prime minister Theresa May) will have a negative impact in the short to medium term on the national economy.
“A hard, no-deal Brexit would be even more damaging economically. On the other hand, given the British people voted to leave the European Union, remaining inside might cause deep political dissatisfaction on the part of leavers who might feel their instruction to the government has been ignored.”
The son of immigrants from Kerala, Menon came to the UK in 1966 when he was one and grew up in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, a place he retains great affection for and is still very much attached to. That said, he describes it as being a “very racist” place in the 1970s and 1980s. The only Indian boy in his secondary school, he’d never venture out alone on a Saturday night for fear of being “beaten up” and recalls a bus driver shouting “Kunte Kinte” (from the pathbreaking US TV series, Roots, in which the original slave was known as) at him when he forgot to show his ticket.
Becoming an undergraduate at Oxford University in 1984 was an eye opener, because for the first time in his life, he “didn’t get racially abused!” On the other hand, he was the object of class snobbery from well-to-do students who professed not to understand his (then) Yorkshire accent. He believes the same social snobbery still serves to divide the UK.
In a recent radio programme about the social and economic polarisation underlying Brexit, he contrasted “forgotten parts of the country” like his home town, which voted two-to-one in favour of Leave, with his pro Remain university town - “two different worlds with very little in common” - and concluded that Brexit has shone a light on the divide.
“I’m sure it was there before, and it has given it labels, which makes things easier. No one is going to go around saying ‘I’m social authoritarian, I’m social liberal’, which is probably the distinction, but ‘I’m Leave, I’m Remain’ probably captures it.
“It’s almost nothing to do with the EU, it just captures a social hinterland, albeit that people voted leave for wildly different reasons, I don’t think Boris Johnson has much in common with the people in Wakefield who voted Leave.”
Menon suggests both sides in the Brexit debate have been guilty of over-simplification and exaggeration. “If we leave the EU, we will suffer an economic hit. It’s not going to be Armageddon; we’re not going to turn into Somalia overnight, we will still be one of the big economies of the world, we’ll still be relatively prosperous, but we will be slightly less prosperous to the tune of two or three per cent, maybe three, four per cent, than if we had stayed in, because trade will fall.
“But if you turn that on its head and say, ‘we will solve all our problems by staying in’, no you can’t. Seventeen million people voted to leave, a significant proportion of those 17 million voted in part because they are hacked off with the political and economic establishment.”
Given there are strong arguments on either side, can he suggest a way out of the dilemma? The answer probably lies in a body of new research carried out jointly by The UK in a Changing Europe, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The research, set to be published later this year, has set itself the task of discovering the source of the discontent behind the Leave vote in so-called left-behind areas, and how people thought Brexit could improve their lives.
Menon believes British political leaders will only find a way to heal the UK’s Brexit divisions if they know what lies behind them – what sort of discontent is being refracted or even distorted through the Brexit lens - and this means taking a new look at the laissez faire economic model Britain has adopted since the time of the Thatcher government in the 1980s.
Could he provide the GG2 Power List a heads up on the findings? “The findings indicate that residents of these areas feel dissatisfied with the state of the country. They talk about an economy that is ‘rigged’, a lack of opportunities particularly for training, and of deep dissatisfaction with politics.
“Brexit has reinforced a division in UK society different to the traditional left-right division between the big two parties. Leave and Remain have become new political identities and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this polarisation runs deep. In addition, there are other divisions, between the nations of the EU, between young and old.”
