Greater economic and cultural openness in the West has not worked for all citizens. Among those who’ve benefitted least, a populist politics of culture and identity has risen to challenge the traditional politics of left and right, creating a new division: between the mobile ‘achieved’ identity of the people from Anywhere, and the more marginalised, roots-based identity of the people from Somewhere. This value divide helps to account for the Brexit vote in Britain, the election of Donald Trump, the decline of the centre-left, and the rise of populism across Europe. David Goodhart’s framework for understanding contemporary politics shows how the Somewhere backlash is a democratic response to the dominance of Anywhere interests in everything from mass higher education to mass immigration and the EU. Goodhart explores the political and moral intuitions that are sharply dividing Brexit Britain, and offers a proposal for a new political settlement.

David Goodhart (@David_Goodhart) is the founding editor of Prospect magazine and one of the most distinctive voices on British politics today. He is currently head of the Demography, Immigration and Integration Unit at the think tank Policy Exchange, and was previously director of the centre-left think tank Demos. His last book The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration (2013) was runner-up for the Orwell Prize in 2014 and was a finalist for ‘Political Book of the Year’ in the Paddy Power Political Book Awards.

Tony Travers is Director of LSE London, a research centre at the London School of Economics. He is also a Visiting Professor in the LSE’s Government Department. 

The LSE European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe. In the most recent national Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector.

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