Think
the north and the poor caused Brexit? Think again
Zoe Williams
If we don’t
explode the divisive myths, we’ll never truly understand why people
voted as they did
Laura Kuenssberg,
the BBC’s political editor, will spill the inside beans of Brexit
on Monday: how was it possible for David Cameron to have entered this
referendum so unprepared, so lukewarm, when it was his idea in the
first place? Was Jeremy Corbyn ineffective because he was
indifferent, or was he a perfectly effective campaigner, scuppered by
a hostile media? How did Michael Gove make his peace with the epic
public mendacity his case required? What happened to turn the Labour
heartlands to Ukip?
The first three
questions are fascinating at the level of character; the Brexit
decision was so significant, and the human flaws and vanities that
created the moment so petty, that it is impossible not to get drawn
in. Yet that final question about Labour heartlands – a well-worn
euphemism for “deprived north” – is everything. Already an
orthodoxy and inevitability have shaped around it: if you take what
was traditionally red, add a bolt of blue in the form of defensive
nationalism, then of course you get purple – it has the solidity of
a physical law.
How history judges
Cameron – between hapless victim and appalling bungler – will not
have a huge impact on our political landscape; the verdict on Gove,
even less. There will be some lasting effect on Labour’s truths and
confidence from an analysis of Corbyn, but we can’t hang anything
off his performance during the referendum until we accept that both
sides are right: he was beset by a hostile media and he was
ambivalent.
This story about the
deprived north, however, will have lasting and profoundly misleading
consequences for the political landscape, if we don’t think more
deeply about it.
The prevailing
assumption is that the vote was one in the eye for metropolitan
elites, and that the white working classes, the disenfranchised and
unheeded, the voters hidden on estates, had finally given a message
to the Westminster bubble that knew nothing and cared less about
their concerns. In fact, most leave voters were in the south: the
south-east, south-west – indeed the entire south apart from London
voted leave.
They did so by
slightly smaller margins – though it is interesting to note that
Wales, apparently the hotbed of a self-sabotaging leave movement,
driven by a deprivation that only the EU was interested in
alleviating, voted out by a smaller margin than the south-west. Yet
southerners voted in greater numbers; their votes were decisive.
Furthermore, most leave voters are middle class, or at least were of
the generation whose housing and pension windfalls put them squarely
in the category of wealth.
Analysing voting
data by education – where the more degrees you had, the more likely
you were to want to remain – is misleading: it was much less
common, before Tony Blair’s 1999 pledge to provide tertiary
education for 50% of the nation, to go to university, and a degree
was by no means a prerequisite for membership of the middle classes.
The more
enlightening figures are those that plot voting against housing; yes,
social and council tenants voted leave, but so did those who owned
their houses outright, the people we might describe as society’s
winners. By housing type, the only groups where remain prevailed were
private renters and people with mortgages.
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In other words, the
very most we can say is that leave had some popularity with the
disaffected and the disenfranchised; but it was not limited to that
group, and the people who swung the vote were affluent, older
southerners. Instead, we’ve taken it as a kicking-off point that
the Brexit vote was won by a council estate in Bolton.
The result is,
firstly, the othering of the north: people think differently up
there, and nobody in London could possibly understand them. In the
media and, to a lesser degree, parliament, this has turned into a
performative defeatism belied by competitive authenticity: you’re
more metropolitan elite than me, because I’ve done some polling in
Rochdale; ah, but my grandmother is northern and I met someone once
from Wirral South, and I can tell you, on the contrary, that you’re
the one who will never understand.
Perhaps defeatism
from the elite sounds like a good thing, not a moment too soon;
except it carries an attendant assumption that poverty has an
immovable set of opinions, which cannot be shifted and which it is
disrespectful of the wealthy even to name, let alone discuss. Because
we wouldn’t understand.
For every one person
who voted leave because the global rat race had left them behind,
there was more than one person pretty well served by the economy, who
voted leave because they believed the line about sovereignty, or
because they were still huffy about the European directive on clean
beaches, or because they simply associated the EU with faceless
change and preferred things to stay the same. The picture cannot be
drawn in simple, binary lines between rich and poor. The divisions
are, like the crosscurrents in a family, much more layered; and, like
a family, insoluble without the presumption of a fundamental ability
and ardent desire to accommodate one another.
Secondly, of course,
it has become the immigration election, despite the fact that only a
third of leave voters cited borders as their chief concern. And this
brings with it a host of assumptions that we might loosely class as
swallowing Nigel Farage whole: that people who oppose free movement
will always oppose it; that it is pointless explaining the lump of
labour fallacy, because that is yet more elitist sneering; that
public services are under pressure because of foreigners rather than
underfunding; that housing is expensive because of demand rather than
rent extraction by a capital class empowered by inequality; that the
voters have spoken, and now our humanitarian duties to refugees must
come second, to the point that we don’t even mention them; that the
metropolitan elite must simply accept that it let immigration get out
of control and must pay the price of a mistrust of unknowable
proportions and unguessable length.
Remaking this
picture, so that it resembles reality rather than regurgitates false
absolutes, is far more important than any discussion about a second
referendum, or a snap election, or a progressive alliance. It is more
important even than the terms under which we exit the EU, if indeed
we meaningfully do. At stake is our ability to cohere. For the sake
of national unity, we must question, rather than merely accept, the
new nationalism.
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