Why did Corbyn do so well? A little bit of political economy

Let's assume the exit poll is about true, and that Jeremy Corbyn has done even better than the polls thought – and he was already pulling far ahead of what people, including me, expected.

There are lots of things to say about this: failures in polling (again); Theresa May's incompetent campaign and feeble personality; Jeremy Corbyn's quality as a campaigner; the role of the internet.

I think one dog that very importantly did not bark is the Labour manifesto. Remember, Jeremy Corbyn is a passionately ideological Leftwinger. But the manifesto was in many ways rather moderate. It did not, for example, aim to spend much more than the Conservatives. It did not set out to reverse many Conservative welfare cuts.

A classic model in political science explains why parties move to the centre. Suppose the two parties are concerned only to win the elections. They will each promise a platform right in the middle of the electorate, at the famous "median voter" - the person in the middle, who has half the electorate to the left of her and half the electorate to the right. Why? Because if one candidate moves to the left of this person, then (at least!) everyone on the right votes for the other candidate, who wins a 50% majority. And if one candidate moves to the right, then everyone on the left votes for the other candidate who again wins.

Here's an ASCII art picture. It shows a line representing political preferences from Left to Right. The voters are at x. The median voter is marked with a *, with two voters on her left and two on her right. Voters vote for the party that is closest to them. Both parties will propose a platform at *. Any party that moved left or right would get three voters preferring the other candidate.

____________x_______x_______*___x_________________x_________

A natural response to this is "oh, but politicians are idealists! Or at least, Jeremy is. Jeremy cares about policy, not just getting elected." Well, stop swooning over Jeremy for a second, and suppose that is true. Suppose you are Jeremy Corbyn and deeply want policy to be as left wing as possible. You will still move to the centre. For, if you do not, and lose, then you will get the policies implemented by your right wing opponent.

This seems to be what has happened. Corbyn moderated his manifesto. That made Labour palatable to voters who would never have tolerated Corbyn's own ideal policies.

In a sense, you could say that despite appearances, the ghost of Blair still haunts the Labour party. Even with Corbyn as leader, they are forced to go along with a lot of the consensus of the past forty years.

(Thank God! ... But this is a post about the "horse race", not the outcome.)

References
The original model of the median voter is the "Downsian" model, made famous by Anthony Downs' An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957); but actually first suggested by Hotelling (1929) "Stability in competition". The point about "idealistic" politicians was first made, I think, by Donald Wittman (1929) "Candidates with policy preferences: A dynamic model" – sorry no ungated version.

Thoughts on the "ban Trump" debate in Parliament

1. When the phrase "line up to denounce" appears in a story about Parliament, someone's time is being wasted: yours, Parliament's, ours.

2. A Eurocrat once described the European Parliament as "one big fucking NGO." This is like one big fucking Students' Union.

3. Thanks to direct democracy, 100,000 Twitter users can now jam our legislature with whatever bee is in their bonnet this afternoon.
4. The crawling populism that lines MPs up to make anti-Trump soundbites is the same pathology that produced Trump himself. But at least Trump is entertaining.

Update: I rest my case.

Is populism dumb? A follow up

My article on populism has just been republished on the UEA economics blog. This follow-up is inspired by Sascha Becker and Thiemo Fetzer’s interesting paper on UKIP support.

Their strategy is to look at places in the UK that received migration from Eastern Europe after 2003. They examine how vote share for UKIP grew in these places between 1999 and 2014, over 4 elections, compared to places which received less migration. (So, for stats nerds, this is a difference-in-difference analysis.)

The results show that indeed, UKIP support grew more in places which received many migrants from EU accession countries. That’s not too surprising. In particular the measure they use is the proportion of migrants 2001-2011, divided by the number of EU migrants in 2001 – so it is a relative measure which weights migration more if it starts from a low base. This might reconcile the conflicting perspectives on Brexit – i.e. was it areas with few migrants or many that voted Leave? – perhaps the answer is, areas with a sudden increase from a low base.

What shocked me, though, were the economic effects on these areas that they estimate. Now, be aware that the statistics here are not gold standard in terms of causality: they can’t prove for sure that the following changes happened because of EU migration. Nevertheless, these things did happen where there was more EU migration:

•  Lower wages, especially for the low paid, though the effect is not large
• More job seeker allowance and incapacity benefits claimants (NB: this won’t be solely driven by migrants claiming, but also by native claims – in other words, displacement of natives out of the job market)
•  Higher house prices and more people renting privately

I don’t want to lean too much on a single unpublished study. Nevertheless, this is not what I expected. The consensus position one hears from economists is that migration does little to harm the wages of natives. This paper doesn't fit that picture. If it is right, UKIP support and maybe Brexit voting may be driven less by nationalism, more by economic self-interest.

By the way there is a cautionary tale – yet another – here about over-reliance on “expertise”. The UK government at the time vastly underestimated the level of migration:

A central reason for opening the borders where [sic.] the thriving UK economy and a set of estimates from a Home Office commissioned study, predicting that “only around 5,000-13,000 Eastern Europeans [were] to arrive to the United Kingdom per year” …

The reliance on historical data, which naturally constrains the analysis to periods with relatively high migration cost... and resulting low migration elasticities, in addition to the possible impact of general equilibrium effects (Germany and most other countries restricting free movement for the whole discretionary period) may have contributed to the discrepancy between the projections and actually realized migration flows.

Or, as Daniel Kahneman might say, analysts of migration live in a zero-validity environment....

Thoughts on Trump: policy, geopolitics, ideology

These are short, sketchy and incomplete. I had to write some ideas down. Time will tell how far they are right.

Policy:

1. The media – which, yes, leans Democrat – focused on Trump's personality, which was indeed a massive minus. However, Trump won because of his protectionist and isolationist policies, despite his personality. We know little about these, partly because the media didn't report them very well, partly because many were made up on the fly and are not serious.
2. But Trump will do what he says in some respects. He will protect existing industries; prevent immigration, increase deportations; and spend money on stimulus policies – which were the first point of his victory speech, not migration or the border wall. Stimulus policy is Keynesianism, but pursued too late, at a point in the cycle where it will be procyclical not countercyclical. Also, although the US could probably do with some public investment, the money is unlikely to be well spent: Republicans are less competent at public investment than Democrats. Expect a short-term boom, followed by the bills coming due. At that point, Trump may try to undermine the Federal Reserve and print money.
3. So, expect further long-term decline in the US economy. The US may now have entered the cycle of populism that parts of Latin America went through in the last century.
4. Also expect the legislature to continue its slide towards irrelevance. Trump is pushy and strong-willed; he will build on Bush II and Obama's rule by executive decree. Political systems always have a demand for political decisions; if one institution can't supply this demand, others will take its place.
5. Trump's policies have more continuity with Obama than is obvious. Obama pivoted towards Asia (i.e. away from Europe) before being forced back by events. Trump continues this with his attitude to NATO. The pendulum has also been moving away from free trade for a while. Obama has deported many illegal immigrants and this will increase.

Geopolitics:

1. The logic of the situation, post-Brexit, is likely to push Britain, the US and Russia closer and away from Germany. France might also slip away from Germany if Le Pen is indeed elected. This is more with respect to trade than in terms of conflict, but the border between these is not solid. This situation is pretty sad, given that Germany is a liberal democracy and Russia is run by Putin who poisons UK citizens on the streets of London, but I think strong forces are pushing for it. If France does fall to Le Pen, then we can probably predict the end of the Euro in the next ten years. Geopolitically Europe might then look as if the twentieth century hadn't happened.
2. I cannot imagine Russia will not try to play more in Eastern Europe. Trump has made the terrible mistake here of publicly announcing his weakness of will. It is hard to see Europe stepping into the breach to defend, say, Latvia.
3. I'm not clear what will happen with respect to China. Will the US try to split Russia from China, Nixon's ploy in reverse? Or could Trump become a wholly owned local subsidiary of the Authoritarian International, à la Berlusconi?

Ideology:

1. What's Left? Not much. The radical Left has a discredited economic programme, plus cultural politics that electorates hate (internationalism, multiculturalism....)The moderate Left has an economic programme that made people richer, but increased inequality and left bitter losers...  plus the same cultural politics that electorates hate, except also it is tied to their disliked internationalist economic programme. (Key campaign moment: the leaked Clinton speech which supposedly revealed her desire for open borders.)
2. This is another step in the divorce between liberalism and democracy. For example, Trump has promised to torture terror suspects. I see no reason to dismiss this or to assume he will be prevented by the US's checks and balances: Bush wasn't. It's time to admit that democratic tyranny is a real possibility. It may even be that liberals – in the straightforward sense of people committed to human rights and civil freedoms – will need to organize and struggle politically against some democratic regimes. Maybe Tim Garton Ash can lead the first Liberal International.
3. Democracy itself is more threatened by the elites who are disgusted by Trump and horrified by Brexit than it is by Trump's authoritarian tendencies. If Trump's policies fail, then expect a further round of middle-class disillusionment with democracy.
4. Democracy has already become somewhat hollowed out. We are far from the days in the 1970s when Lord Hailsham could warn of "elective tyranny". Now, government decisions can be challenged in court, even in areas of "high politics" such as Brexit; much policy, including monetary policy, is delegated to unelected bureaucrats; at local level in the UK, non-democratic bodies get a lot done. Actually existing resistance to democracy, driven by people who have money to lose, currently focuses on these rival centres of power. But institutions need coordination by the political centre. If that centre loses authority, different institutions start serving their own constituencies rather than the national interest. In newer, marginal democracies, expect anti-democrats to push for non-democratic political institutions and take steps away from democracy. In established democracies, expect continued institutional sclerosis.

Some Adorno quotes

Not wishing to add to the general alarm, but does any of this ring a bell?

The agitators spend a large part of their time in speaking either about themselves or about their audiences.They present themselves as lone wolves, as healthy, sound American citizens with robust instincts, as unselfish and indefatigable; and they incessantly divulge real or fictitious intimacies about their lives and those of their families. Moreover, they appear to take a warm human interest in the small daily worries of their listeners, whom they depict as poor but honest, common-sense but non-intellectual, native Christians....

They identify themselves with their listeners and lay particular emphasis upon being simultaneously both modest little men and leaders of great calibre....

Another favorite scheme of personalization is to dwell upon petty financial needs and to beg for small amounts of money....

All these demagogues substitute means for ends. They prate about “this great movement,” about their organization, about a general American revival they hope to bring about, but they very rarely say anything about what such a movement is supposed to lead to, what the organization is good for or what the mysterious revival is intended positively to achieve....

Scandal stories, mostly fictitious, particularly of sexual excesses and atrocities are constantly told; the indignation at filth and cruelty is but a very thin, purposely transparent rationalization of the pleasure these stories convey to the listener....

Conditions prevailing in our society tend to transform neurosis and even mild lunacy into a commodity which the afflicted can easily sell, once he has discovered that many others have an affinity for his own illness.The fascist agitator is usually a masterly salesman of his own psychological defects....

Hitler was liked, not in spite of his cheap antics, but just because of them, because of his false tones and his clowning. They are observed as such, and appreciated.

Adorno, Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda

Epistocracy is a stupid idea for clever people

Unsurprisingly some people in the UK and America are disenchanted with democracy and are casting about for alternatives. One is epistocracy, meaning rule of those who understand. Specifically, the idea is to restrict the vote to qualified voters – say, by having some kind of exam. Jason Brennan argues for this trenchantly in his book Against Democracy. Chapter 3 is called “Ignorant, Irrational, Misinformed Nationalists”. He is refreshingly relaxed about offending the Left Behind.

Yes, voters are ignorant and misinformed. No, the solution is not restricting the franchise.

The cause of voter ignorance was well put by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. The private citizen “is a member of an unworkable committee, the committee of the whole nation, and this is why he expends less disciplined effort on mastering a political problem than he expends on a game of bridge.” In other words, my vote will never decide an election, so I do not spend much time thinking about how to vote.

Notice that this has nothing to do with my brain power. In fact, Schumpeter uses a highly qualified professional as an example:

We need only compare a lawyer’s attitude to his brief and the same lawyer’s attitude to the statements of political fact presented in his newspaper in order to see what is the matter. In the one case the lawyer has qualified for appreciating the relevance of his facts by years of purposeful labor done under the definite stimulus of interest in his professional competence…. In the other case, he has not taken the trouble to qualify; he does not care to absorb the information or to apply to it the canons of criticism he knows so well how to handle; and he is impatient of long or complicated argument.

The problem of political ignorance is not lack of ability. It is lack of incentives. I have a PhD in political science. For my PhD, I mastered the intricacies of some obscure Californian referendums. At the same time, I certainly had no idea about, say, the size of the UK defence budget. Why the difference? Because a thesis on  referendums would get me a job. Knowing the size of the defence budget would help me decide if it should be increased or decreased. This was of no use to me.

OK, but surely smart, informed people know more about politics than stupid uninformed people. If we could aggregate all those smart people’s opinions, wouldn’t we be better off than if we also added all the noise from the uninformed people?

No. The problem is not one of information aggregation, but of information production. The plans for Obamacare were not lying around in different people’s heads, waiting to be put together. They were created by a few people’s deliberate effort, working twelve hour days. This kind of work is subject to what computer programmers call the mythical man-month. The full-time effort of a few cannot be replaced by the leisure hour attention of a million, no matter how clever the million.

In one part of Brennan’s argument he appeals to economists’ expertise on immigration:

...the consensus among published economic work on immigration is that the restrictions on labor mobility introduced by mostly closed borders is the single most inefficient thing governments do. They estimate, on average, that the deadweight loss of these restrictions is around 100 percent of world product—that is, that we should be at around $140 trillion in world product, but we are only at $70 trillion, because of immigration restrictions…*

It is extremely plausible that at the margin, less restricted migration could make a lot of poor people richer. The idea that we could double world GDP by getting rid of all these restrictions is bullshit. Nobody has a clue what would happen if we did that. The models economists use do not include political instability or cultural change. We have no idea how to predict or value those outcomes. In France, after recent terror attacks by people who entered Europe posing as refugees, there is an ongoing state of emergency and a fascist party riding high in the polls. What is the cost of that? I make this point not to argue against open borders, but against delusions of expertise.

Those who consider themselves informed are often narrow-minded zealots, or nerds who can’t see beyond their assumptions. Restricing the vote to them would leave politics just as dumb, but more extreme.

Brennan thinks democracy is like passengers voting on how to fly the plane. But epistocracy is like restricting that vote to First Class passengers. A better solution is to have a pilot. You might then want a way to get rid of a pilot who is drunk, suicidal or has joined Islamic State.

People are not politically very bright. You and me included. They are generally able, however, to watch someone debate for half an hour and decide what they think of him. This requires common sense and judgment, not expertise. Democracy should require no more.

Today’s problems with democracy are as much about the supply side as the demand side. Stop asking “why do people support Trump?” Ask, how did the political system let this demagogue emerge? The answer seems to be that party elites lost control of the Republican nomination process. Democracy works best when highly-motivated professionals are held to account by those they serve. We should work on that angle. Direct democratic nonsense, stuff like reading Tweets out in Prime Minister’s Questions, is a distraction. So is epistocracy.


* in "How Smart is Democracy? You Can't Answer that Question a Priori", Critical Review 26:1-2, 33-58.

Is populism dumb?

After the Brexit vote, a standard story is doing the rounds: the poor and uneducated are threatened by globalization. They respond atavistically, asserting their superiority over ethnic outsiders. As a result, they are fooled into voting against their own interests, for racist parties who do not really care about them.

This explanation comes in various flavours. To make it more left-wing, substitute “neoliberal world order” for “globalization”. But the basic recipe is widely reused. Obama talked about people “clinging to guns and religion”. This year, we are told it explains why people are voting for Trump.

There are some specific problems with applying this idea to Brexit. The context for the British vote was not just “globalization”: it was free movement of labour in the EU, combined with policy failures elsewhere that have led large numbers of people to seek employment in the UK.

Here’s a more basic question. Is nationalism truly irrational?

Thinking so has a long history. Adorno and Horkheimer, exiles from the Nazis, wrote a psychological study of the rigid “authoritarian personality”, who craved the certainty and leadership of fascism. The most serious science behind this argument, though, comes from social psychologists studying group identity. In lab experiments in the 1970s, Henri Tajfel showed that when people were put into completely trivial, “minimal” groups – say, people who preferred an abstract painting by Klee to one by Kandinsky – they would discriminate against the other group, giving them less money, even if they themselves lost out by this.

Tajfel’s interpretation was that people were managing their self-esteem. If threatened – say by a negative evaluation from the experimenter, or in the real world, by poverty or economic insecurity – people respond by trying to boost their self-concept. Part of that self-concept is their social identity as a member of a particular group. White people, say, or Brits. So, they boost this by boasting of their membership, and denigrating rival identities – Black people or immigrants.

This interpretation provides a scientific justification for the benign contempt in which many people hold working class nationalism. Rather than goal-directed action, it is seen as a self-soothing response to economic trauma, the collective equivalent of holding yourself and rocking. 

But this is doubtful. Starting from the scientific end, there are many alternative explanations for the phenomena Tajfel observed. One is put forward by the Japanese scientist Toshio Yamagishi. He describes human groups as “containers for generalized reciprocity”. In other words, you support your group above others, because you expect them to do the same for you.

This is intuitive. Football fans, clans, and families – all are expected to look out for each other. All organizations rely on informal, unspoken contracts, in which each of us is expected to “do our bit”. This is how collective actors are created – something so basic to social organization that it is embedded in our grammar. We.

The self-esteem based explanation for nationalism focuses on its opposition to the outgroup. This dimension is surely important. Conflict with outsiders strengthens group identity, as politicians have discovered, from Bismarck to Daniel Arap Moi and, yes, Trump. But another aspect has been underplayed. Nationalism involves an appeal to others in the ingroup. It says: “we have an especial claim on your help.”

Most people fudge their thinking on this topic. Ask someone in the modern West: are the lives of my countrymen worth more than those of people elsewhere, and you will likely get a shocked “no”. But our political system implicitly acknowledges the claims of nationality: all European welfare states spend far more to make the lives of their citizens better than they do on the lives of much poorer people around the world. (A Peter-Singer-style “effective altruist” ought, surely, to demand the immediate dismantling of our health and social security systems so that we could use the money on foreign aid.)

The nationalism or populism of the present day is a creeping suspicion that the elites of these reciprocity containers  are reneging on the bargain.

This is not obviously stupid. Here’s a picture of the change in the global income distribution over the past generation: on the left, the growth in the incomes of the world’s poorest; on the right, that of the richest:

     

Every Peter Singer type should rejoice at that great big left-hand camel’s hump. That’s billions of people being lifted out of poverty, maybe the greatest increase ever in human happiness. But those in between the humps are the poor of the rich nations. They may suspect that China and India’s gain is their loss.

Economists – the controversial “experts” of the referendum campaign – have responded that really, the free movement of goods and labour is everybody’s gain, that losses are just illusory. But it is sadly true that economists often change their mind. Ten years ago most economists thought that globalization didn’t harm America’s poor. Now, the facts seem to have changed. No bad faith need be involved – just the complexity of the social world.

In the UK, most economists believe that immigration has increased our wealth without harming the poor, or not many of them. This is serious research. Jonathan Portes will tell you about it. But statisticians look at averages and can easily miss variation; they examine the past which may not be a guide to the future. If I thought I’d lost my job to an Eastern European, I might not be persuaded that on average, I had not. And I might also think that a wholesale commitment to freedom of movement in the EU would, sooner or later, lead to at least some equalization of wages between the UK and, say, Romania. Economic theory would suggest it. So would common sense.

And then I might think to myself: can I trust those people up there to protect me? Do they care about me more, or about the Romanians? Perhaps I should get rid of this elite and find another. This may be selfish, since the average Romanian worker is indeed needier than the average British one. It may be mistaken: the insurgent politicians of the populist Right are, to say the very least, unknown quantities. But it is not obviously stupid.

All societies have some form of ruling elite. But elite rule rests ultimately on the  consent of the governed, and that requires the trust of the governed that the elite have their interests at heart – their interests, and not, say, a nebulous idea of global fraternity. British society was traditionally snobbish, inward-looking and paternalistic. Upper class ladies would make visits to the deserving poor. Foreigners were beyond the pale. Nobody could accuse the modern elite, today’s residents of central London, of being snobbish or xenophobic. They will accept anyone from anywhere (so long as their money is good). Visits to the poor? You must be joking.

Wise researchers are sceptical of a simple opposition between rationality and emotions. We use rational models as benchmarks, sure, but real human reason is made up of a variety of cognitive heuristics, different tricks the mind has for making sense of the world. There is no reason to treat group identity any differently. Racism and xenophobia can inflict great damage, and lead to collective madness in its most unequivocal sense. That does not mean that every appeal to identity is a symptom of confusion. If we treat it that way, we may be patronizing, and letting down, people who have legitimate expectations of our support.

Some related papers:

Tajfel and Turner (1978) 'An integrative theory of intergroup conflict' 

Yamagishi (2000)'The group as the container of generalized reciprocity' 

Quick update on the relationship between migration and immigration sentiment

Chris Hanretty commented he'd found a positive relationship at constituency level between migration levels and positive migration sentiment. I wondered if there might be some hidden non-linearity there too. Chris kindly (and like a good scientist) provided his data along with his blog post so I downloaded it (plus migration data from the 2011 census) and took a look. Here is mean immigration sentiment by quantile decile of immigration stock:

 
So, the relationship here is consistently positive. But note that until you get to the last 3 quantiles deciles, it's basically flat. The story here again seems to be: places with lots of immigrants are pro-immigrant, rather than places with no immigrants are anti-immigrant.

Note also: this uses stock of international immigrants. My previous post used flows over the past 10 years, which is presumably more relevant to the EU debate – the EU had nothing to do with UK immigration to the UK in, say, the 50s, 60s and 70s. But I couldn't find constituency-level data on flows.

Did areas with the fewest immigrants vote for brexit?

Well, as the Germans say, "jein". (By the way, wouldn't it be great if we could declare that as the referendum result?)

Here's a plot of areas' vote for Leave, against their international immigration net inflows 2004-14. I've added a line from a linear regression. Yep, there's a clear negative slope.




But here's the same data with a local smoother, which lets the relationship vary at different parts of the data.


 

This tells a different story. For low levels of migration of up to 5% – which includes more than 80% of all local authorities – vote to leave is flat or increasing with migration. Then there is a long tail of local authorities with very high levels of immigration, and here the leave vote declines with migration.

Running linear regressions confirms the story. When you exclude the influential observations with really really high migration, the correlation of migration flows and vote to leave becomes significantly positive.

Regressions of vote to leave on migration inflows

	All Local Authorities	Local Authorities with < 5% inflows
(Intercept)	55.27***	53.65***
	(0.59)	(0.65)
inflow_int_pct	-0.62***	0.98**
	(0.09)	(0.36)
R2	0.12	0.02
Adj. R2	0.11	0.02
Num. obs.	380	299
RMSE	9.80	8.82
***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05

Moral: beware of superficially convincing statistics.

Better still, beware of self-righteous memes, which make us feel better about losing an argument, by telling us that our opponents were fools.

Update: Chris Hanretty said, how about a Scotland dummy? And he should know, so I threw one in. Then I threw in all the regions, because of omitted variable bias and what the heck. This is still only local authorities with < 5% inflows:

Regressions of vote to leave on migration inflows

	Scotland dummy	Regional dummies
(Intercept)	55.87***	56.95***
	(0.60)	(1.16)
inflow_int_pct	0.31	0.59*
	(0.31)	(0.29)
I(Region == "Scotland")TRUE	-16.10***
	(1.56)
RegionEast Midlands		1.95
		(1.66)
RegionLondon		-14.37***
		(2.70)
RegionNorth East		2.35
		(2.44)
RegionNorth West		-0.45
		(1.62)
RegionScotland		-17.24***
		(1.75)
RegionSouth East		-5.13***
		(1.45)
RegionSouth West		-2.70
		(1.63)
RegionWales		-3.53
		(1.87)
RegionWest Midlands		2.79
		(1.77)
RegionYorkshire and The Humber		2.48
		(2.05)
R2	0.28	0.43
Adj. R2	0.28	0.41
Num. obs.	299	299
RMSE	7.58	6.86
***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05

Results are a bit wobbly but still nothing that looks like a negative slope. Your mileage may vary.  All goods subject to status. Objects in the rear view mirror may look like the European Union.

Second update. 
Someone on twitter said that my second picture above "focuses on tiny variations in the middle but ignores the vast trend". This is an understandable mistake and I worried that someone might make it. The 'tiny variations in the middle', where the trendline goes up, look small on the graph, but that is where 80% of the data is. To clarify, here is the same data, divided into deciles. Each column shows 1/10 of the data, from the 10% of areas with the least migrant inflow, to the 10% of areas with the most. This is hump shaped, as I said, and the only decline is in the top two deciles. (But to be fair, the only increase is in the bottom two deciles, so maybe my regression above is also a bit misleading; there's no reason to lump the middle of the data either with the bottom or the top.)

One obvious point to make is that in the top two deciles, migrants with UK citizenship may have voted to remain. So I don't think this data proves much about "exposure to immigration"; we have to be careful of the ecological fallacy here, i.e. of inferring individual attitudes from aggregate data.

A Brexit anecdote

I took the Tube in London last Friday. The train was quite full and when it pulled in at Embankment there was a guy sitting at the platform. In his fifties -ish, short grey hair. He didn't try to get on, just looked at us gloomily. "It's the foreigner bullet, innit?" he said. Then louder: "It's the Bosnia bullet!" The carriage was indeed full of people from around the world, this being London, and nobody was quick enough to reply, e.g., "Say it to our faces if you're going to talk about us," before the train was moving again; there was a moment of awkwardness. I glanced out. There he sat – glum, grey, resentful – as the bullet sped past.