Did call centres cause Brexit?
Over a generation, millions of ordinary interactions with government, utility providers, financial institutions and corporate giants became remote, standardised and procedural. Each individual change was introduced in the name of operational efficiency. But accumulated across a lifetime, they altered something more fundamental: our sense that an individual can make things happen, says Lucy Harris
Did call centres cause Brexit? Of course not. But after years of listening to voters talk about politics and wasting a non-trivial portion of my own life shouting “speak to an adviser” into an unfeeling automated voice-recognition system, I have come to suspect that these mundane, everyday frustrations tell us something profound about Britain’s anti-establishment mood.
We have spent the past decade asking why “Take Back Control” became the most potent political slogan of modern British history. Dominic Cummings understood that people felt they had lost control, but his diagnosis stopped short. The more vital question comes one step earlier: where, exactly, did that pervasive feeling of powerlessness originate?
The answer lies in places so ordinary we barely notice them until they break: the contact-centre queue, the endless online portal, the web form that resets when you hit submit, the representative who sympathises but “isn’t authorised” to act, and the mysterious decision-maker whom nobody can put you through to. It is the political philosophy of the ‘spinning pizza wheel of doom’.
Over a generation, millions of ordinary interactions with government, utility providers, financial institutions and corporate giants became remote, standardised and procedural. Each individual change was sensible, incremental and almost always introduced in the name of operational efficiency. But accumulated across a lifetime, they altered something more fundamental: our sense that an individual can make things happen.
The rise of ‘processification’
In the decades leading up to 2016 and the expansion of globalisation, Britain became a larger, more complex and vastly more consolidated society. As mass markets expanded and local institutions merged into national behemoths, organisations faced a logistical challenge: how to manage tens of millions of citizens and customers simultaneously.
The corporate and state answer was systemic scale. They built databases, established sprawling contact centres, standardised every conceivable interaction and outsourced operational delivery to mega-contractors like Capita. This was the “processification” of daily life, the systematic replacement of personal relationships and individual discretion with strict procedural workflows.
The model brought undeniable benefits. Goods and services grew cheaper, access broadened and administrative decisions could be made more consistently. Crucially for leadership, it also outsourced operational responsibility. Just as Whitehall surrendered legislative discretion to European directives, local managers surrendered practical discretion to software.
In this shift, something essential was lost. The individual no longer encountered an institution through a human being who knew their name, understood their local context and possessed the authority to resolve an edge case. The bank manager vanished into a call-centre queue; the council officer became a digital contact form; the shopkeeper was replaced by a customer-service bot.
UK contact-centre positions expanded from 144,000 in 1995 to over 600,000 within a decade. The call centre became the primary arena of British civic life. You could find yourself speaking to a fellow human being while remaining entirely unable to reach anyone with the actual authority to help you. Negotiability evaporated. Responsibility was dispersed across committees, software workflows and management consultants, creating a culture where following the correct process became a substitute for owning a decision.
This administrative style helps explain much of the political friction we see today. Keir Starmer has faced significant political headwinds precisely because he often personifies this institutional mindset: procedural, managerial and cautious about personal ownership. To an electorate exhausted by faceless bureaucracy, a leadership style that prioritises demonstrating that the correct process was followed over projecting clear individual agency carries a heavy political cost.
The agency gap
This systemic transformation did not affect everyone equally. Modern “self-service” governance operates on the assumption that every citizen is fully capable of navigating administrative jargon, comprehending regulatory logic, and arguing their case within complex procedural guidelines.
It ignores what can be termed the ‘agency gap’: the vast distance between what a modern administrative system demands of an individual (often created and designed by university graduates) and what that individual can actually deliver without help. OECD data indicates that roughly one in five adults in England functions at or below basic levels of literacy and adaptive problem-solving. Age and educational attainment widen this divide exponentially.
For a university-educated professional, an online portal is a convenient timesaver. For someone with lower digital confidence or complex life circumstances, that same portal is an impassable wall, and unnecessarily complex. As public services like HMRC pushed automation, driving digital self-service past 70 per cent while call wait times ballooned, the burden of administrative failure was quietly transferred from the system to the citizen. The public’s time became an expendable resource for the state.
Political movements are actively tapping into this resentment toward system-first administration. Reform UK’s policy proposal linking tax rebates to HMRC call-waiting times might seem niche, but it directly weaponises this widespread rage against administrative paralysis.
This dynamic yields an acute form of institutional isolation. A citizen can spend hours dealing with an organisation, speaking to multiple representatives, yet walk away feeling utterly unseen. Nobody knows their history; nobody owns their problem. Repeated across years of tax queries, benefit claims, energy bills and parking appeals, these micro-experiences aggregate into a devastating political premise: “Nobody in power listens to people like me.”
When Vote Leave offered a button marked “Take Back Control,” millions pressed it. They were casting sincere votes for national sovereignty, democracy, and border control. But the slogan gained emotional velocity from decades of mundane administrative powerlessness.
When people say they have “had enough of experts”, perhaps they are expressing something more personal than a rejection of expertise. They are frustrated by a world governed by rules they did not write and systems they do not understand, yet which increasingly control their everyday lives.
It also holds up a mirror to class: someone else wrote the rules, someone else understands the language, and someone else seems to know how to make the system work, while you simply live with the consequences. That quiet accumulation of exclusion, frustration and powerlessness may be one of modern Britain’s least acknowledged divides and one source of the instinct to reject the establishment.
Lucy Harris is an expert political strategist and consultant working with a range of businesses and is a former Brexit Party and Conservative MEP, grassroots campaigner and Conservative government special adviser.
This is an abridged version of a Linkedin post, read the extended version here