The EU Referendum and its aftermath further polarised identity politics by forging two new political tribes: ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’. The 2016 referendum was the first national political choice to be structured primarily around identity divides. Traditional conflicts over class, income, economic ideology and economic competence were pushed into the background. Instead, it was the conflicts over identity and values which split graduates and school leavers, white voters and ethnic minorities and young and old which primarily drove voters’ Brexit choices and informed their Brexit identities. The intense referendum campaign and polarising political aftermath proved to be a moment of awakening, making voters aware of just how deeply divided they were from their political opponents. They now knew what kind of people fell into each Brexit tribe, and began to display all the classic symptoms of partisan bias when asked to judge their tribe and its opponents, seeing their own side through rose-tinted spectacles while dismissing their rivals as fools and knaves. These attachments have been consequential not only for political views but also for social life since the referendum, as the identities forged by a single political choice have taken on a life of their own.

In this chapter we describe the second important electoral development of the Coalition period: the ‘reshuffle on the left’. Coalition with the Conservatives unravelled the Liberal Democrats’ electoral alliance of identity liberals, protest voters and tactical anti-Tory voters. More than one voter in eight in England and Wales switched from the Liberal Democrats to other parties during the Coalition. Protest-motivated Liberal Democrat supporters switched largely to UKIP, but the biggest shift was the migration of identity liberals to Labour, tipping the balance of the Labour electoral coalition. The traditional alliance of ethnic minority voters with Labour was also reinforced in this period as Muslim voters alienated by the Iraq War returned to the Labour fold. As white school leavers alienated by New Labour and angry about immigration shifted in large numbers from Labour to UKIP, the growing strength of identity liberals within the Labour coalition was accelerated. As a result, the 2015 Labour electorate, though similar in size to that of 2010, was dramatically different in composition. The traditional party of the workers was, for the first time, drawing more support from graduates and ethnic minorities than from white school leavers. This was a new Labour Party.

In this chapter we turn to the story of the Scottish independence referendum, to showcase how social and political context play a critical role in critically shaping identity conflicts. Similar demographic and value divides were present in the Scottish Independence and EU referendums, and in both contexts a nationalist party had surged to prominence in part by mobilising these divisions and promoting constitutional change. Both Independence and Brexit won their strongest early support from identity conservative voters wishing to ‘take back control’, and in both cases the electoral success of nationalist parties advocating withdrawal from a larger union was a key factor leading to the holding of an exit referendum. Yet despite these parallels, the politics of the two referendums has been very different. Different patterns of identity attachment explain the divergent patterns of conflict and ultimately their outcomes – Scottish attachments to an overarching British identity are much stronger than English or British attachments to a European identity, while negative views of England and Westminster as out-groups are much weaker in Scotland than negative views of the EU and Brussels as out-groups in England. We also reflect on what lessons the political aftermath of divisive referendum campaigns Scotland offers.