WWII bombing may have helped shape the geography of Brexit, new study suggests

WWII bombing may have helped shape the geography of Brexit, new study suggests

Areas hit harder during the Blitz were more likely to back Brexit in 2016 - not simply because of economics or demography, but because wartime experience appears to have endured in local memory and political culture.

A new study suggests that the legacy of the Second World War may have played an unexpected role in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Far from being driven solely by recent economic or political factors, support for leaving the European Union appears to have been stronger in parts of Britain that experienced heavier Luftwaffe bombing during the Blitz.

By combining records of more than 32,000 German bombing incidents during the Second World War with local referendum results from 2016, economist Eric Melander found that areas which experienced more wartime bombing were significantly more likely to vote Leave seven decades later.

Using the Luftwaffe’s wartime radio-navigation technology as a source of random variation, the research shows that the relationship between bombings and Brexit is not just coincidental. German bombers relied on radio transmitters located in occupied Europe to guide aircraft to British targets during night-time raids. Proximity to these transmitters strongly affected where bombing occurred but was largely unrelated to the social and economic characteristics of potential targets in Britain.

The research suggests that the effect was strongest in areas where the Second World War remains especially visible through war graves, memorials, and commemorative culture - along with the political activation of collective memory. It did not appear in the same way for memorials to other wars, suggesting that this is not just a generic taste for commemoration or patriotism.

The study also examines whether Brexit-era rhetoric helped “activate” those memories by using survey data collected in the weeks before the referendum and analysing reactions to Boris Johnson’s May 2016 comparison of the EU to a Hitler-style “superstate”. Findings show that support for Leave rose after the remark among respondents who liked Johnson and lived in heavily bombed areas.

Eric Melander, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Birmingham and CAGE Research Associate said:

“Although this study does not claim that wartime bombing "caused" Brexit or that it was the single most decisive factor in the referendum's outcome, it still finds that heavier bombing robustly predicts stronger support for Leave.

“The relationship holds even after controlling for many of the standard explanations for Brexit, including austerity, economic insecurity, demography and exposure to globalisation. If we were to conduct a simple thought experiment, the data show that moving from very high to very low bombing intensity would be enough to shift a district from the average Leave vote share to a Remain majority.

“Importantly, bombing mattered politically only where the memory of the Second World War remained especially visible. This indicates that political behaviour may be shaped not only by present-day conditions but by the way societies remember the past – implying that these memories were not politically inert but can leave an imprint on political culture that lasts for generations and that can be used (and abused) by politicians."

• Read the full research paper: Brexit and the Blitz: Conflict, Collective Memory and Populism