The Question
They could be a member of your family, or a friend or acquaintance, or a work colleague. They voted in good faith for Brexit, and unless the person is an ideological zealot they will be disappointed at the outcome so far. Can we define a type for these people?
Leaning in from the Right
I decided to read around the sound bites. I thought that insights from an academic might help, so I got stuck into 'Values, Voice and Virtue', by Matthew Goodwin, who is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent.
After a first read I felt that I had been taken through a repetitive rant on the vicissitudes of UK society, with little to help answer my question. On a second read, the mist lifted, and themes emerged, albeit that there is a danger of stereotyping in these exercises.
Two 'types' came out in the themes, the second more germane numerically to the anger and frustration that led to the Vote Leave majority.
The first, which can be disposed of quickly, is what Goodwin calls 'Backbone Conservatives': older, wealthier, predominantly white, living in villages and small towns, seen as nostalgic, patriotic, and loving of British history and heritage. Immediately there is picture in one's mind: the local newsagent stuffed with Daily Telegraphs; a coffee morning at the Conservative Club involving wistful musings over whether it was right to vote for Liz Truss; a good Sunday lunch with family at the local pub.
I am not going to get into discussion over patriotism and nationalism, and whether the latter has nasty shades of xenophobia. Enough to say that Backbone Conservatives have pride in what they see as the traditions of their country, and resent anything that threatens to destabilise their world. For them, the top institutional villain is the EU.
The core type for my piece, from Goodwin's analysis, is a different breed, though attitudinally they share the concerns of the Backbone Conservatives. Goodwin bundles them into the two categories of Disengaged Traditionalists and Loyal Nationalists. The labels lack the intuitive impression of a 'Backbone Conservative' - the differences between the two seem to come through degree of extremity of view, but I reckon you can synthesise Goodwin's classifications as reflecting people:
- Of working class or non-graduate background;
- Disillusioned and feeling forgotten;
- Alarmed at the pace of change in society;
- Antipathetic to a global, cosmopolitan view of life;
- Hostile to graduate elites in London and in other relatively prosperous parts of the UK.
Now to the EU. There were concerns over sending money to Brussels; there was the perception of our own justice system being subservient to some European Court (pointing out that the European Court of Human Rights is outside the EU aegis would no doubt have zero impact - it's the feeling of alien power that matters), but I read an overarching sense of island independence and a detestation of interference with it - thus the attraction of 'take back control'.
However, to me it is the socio-economic angle from Goodwin's analysis that rules. The left behind generally have a lower standard of education, from which flows a lower expectation of earning power and employment opportunities, contrasted with a perception of a different world for metropolitan graduates, the graduates who will become the metropolitan elite.
The left behind then see themselves as an endangered species, feeling that they have no say in government and that they have been taken for granted by UK Governments of all complexions - Labour took the pain on this in the Red Wall factor from the 2019 General Election.
A further factor Goodwin points out is resistance to the pace of change. The left behind yearn for an ordered society, not rejecting change outright but seeking a gentler trajectory (I see this as critical and will come back to it in my own thinking later).
The above manifests not just through economic factors eg redundancies in traditional industries, but in cultural norms. Goodwin notes revised interpretations of history being viewed as problematical - I read here concerns on new, whether complementary or downright revisionist, historical constructs adding context on class, race and gender to established narratives, I suspect that this is in terms of mood music rather than specifics - for example, if the question were asked on the value of profiling the individuals who served some grand 18th century family, then I bet the answer would be that this is welcome.
The big one, though, is immigration, and you can immediately see how this chimes with the pace of change issue and the current Conservative obsession with stopping the boats. To an extent it is the raw figures that scare the left behind - Goodwin quotes (p80) the independent Pew Research Centre suggesting that '...while the share of Muslims in Britain was 6.3% in 2016, by 2050 it will rise to 9.3% (with no future immigration), 16.7% (with medium levels of immigration), and more than 17% with high immigration similar to current levels.
I do not think that you can understand a left behind's position without knowing where they live. For a Backbone Conservative the picture is pretty clear, nimbyism this time not directed to planning proposals but to immigrants on the doorstep. If you live, as I do, in inner suburban London, immigrants (as the left behind would narrowly understand them) around you is mostly a non-event, so dissolved are our multifarious ethnic types into the capital's pot. But elsewhere it will be different. A community may have absorbed a certain degree of immigration over the years, and there will have been intermarriage, but you can't reject the apprehension over accelerated arrivals (and for these purposes I am not distinguishing between one type and another type of migration status - apprehension is from emotion not reason).
So I see the immigration thing not in its narrowest sense but as a symptom of people feeling a loss of control over their environment. That ought to be a good close of analysis, but it lacks the dimension of how did it all come about. Also Prof. Goodwin is politically a populist right-wing champion for the white British working class. That does not disqualify him from being listened to, but any decent history student will know the importance of understanding an academic's views in the context of whatever ideology they may have. So impartial viewpoint it ain't.
Leaning in from the Left
For a contrast I went to social historian David Kynaston, not just because he comes from the left of the political spectrum but because I came across a detailed article in The New European where he puts a persuasive case for how Brexit came about.
'Birth of a Catastrophe: How the Seeds of Brexit were sown in the 1960s', says it all. and starts with a hark back to a Private Eye cover of 2014:
Cab driver: 'Where to Guv?'
UKIP supporter: '1957 - and step on it.'
So thus you have the thesis that Brexit was less to do with Europe and was more - note the synchronising with Goodwin's language - '...a grumble-cum--howl of protest, or even despair, about the modern world'.
From there Kynaston does a historian's analysis of '...a long, slow-burning fuse', starting with a big factor, de-industrialisation.
For stats, he points to employment at the beginning of the 1960s being split roughly equally between manufacturing and services, but with the balance tipping to the latter by the end of the decade. Where was the decline centred? He cites the staple industries of textiles, coal mining, shipbuilding and steel.To this he adds the social and psychological impact on communities, quoting author and journalist Jeremy Seabrook passionately describing the '...ravages of drugs and alcohol and self-harm in silent former pit villages and derelict factory towns.'
Accompanying this, Kynaston points to the growing proportion of women in the workplace, with their supplanting of traditional male domination.
On now to the Brexiteers' hate, the dreaded 'globalisation', starting as early as 1960 with Nestle taking over Crosse & Blackwell, and being driven on with London becoming a centre of international finance and then Margaret Thatcher's 1980's Big Bang deregulation. Kynaston sets this alongside the demise of traditional, even paternalistic, family capitalism and the arrival of 'American-style management consultants'.
Up to now I was nodding in approbation of Kynaston's insight, but at this point he ascends his soapbox and rails against what happened to city and town centres: 'a trail of wanton destruction, all too often to make way for uncompromising brutalist replacements'. I don't doubt the sense of what he argues - I will happily accept, for example, the degradation of traditional high streets - but this is a little too purple-passage for analytical historian work.
Back to cooler temperament commentary and, of course, immigration. Kynaston references Enoch Powell's 1968 'rivers of blood speech'. where he spoke of ordinary men and women who had '...found themselves made strangers in their own country'. Was this fear of strain on social services or for the burden on taxpayers? Kynaston concludes that it was more a fear of cultural loss, of immigrants bringing alien ways of behaving.
Then we move to social conservatism, a reactive response to: satire; the Pill; the abolition of capital punishment; the decriminalisation of homosexuality; the decline in moral values as epitomised in Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners Association agitating for less sex on the television (I know: 'Keep it to the carpet').
Kynaston rounds off with the perhaps controversial suggestion that Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 not so much because of her free-market beliefs but because she thought that she was the person to restore traditional values. To round it back to 2016, he tells a story of 1969, when a pub in Goole, East Yorkshire refused to serve a woman because she was wearing trousers. His point was that in Goole the Leave vote was higher than almost anywhere else.
Leaning in from the Centre
I will discount Backbone Conservatives - presumably many of them will fall into the welcoming arms of Reform later this year (despite Jacob Rees-Mogg's suggestion a few months before a General Election that Reform voters will scuttle back under Tory Nanny's skirts once they have done their protest).
Before going further, I should say briefly where I come from. I am white, born into a family that was at most lower middle-class, with an English father and an Irish immigrant mother, a Grammar School boy who had a full grant to go to University, who started with very little other than an education, and built a fairly successful career as a lawyer followed by a second career in legal education and training. So coming from 'pulled up by bootstraps', if I sat anywhere politically it would probably be fractionally right of centre, though these days I feel most comfortable articulating a sceptical sideways view of the political world.
I am not going to regurgitate all the insights from Goodwin and Kynaston. I am going to argue that the best answer to the question of type comes exactly from my heading, the 'Left Behind'.
Without falling further into autobiography, I became a lawyer as I worked out that, love'em or hate'em, people would always need them, and that here was a career path that offered security plus decent reward for talent and effort. The following sounds like a soppy metaphor, but the education and training also enabled me to get my head above the trees and see the landscape around. Maybe this contributed to my seeing what I see now.
Consulting my consciousness, I reckon that the left behind thought first came to me when, some time in the 1990s, an excursion on a family cottage break to Wales led us to the Big Pit National Coal Museum in Pontypool. Much as I loved the Disney Theme Park experience, this one revolved around a real pit. My kids loved the descent to shaft level. In truth we all did.
But though it may have been a real pit (1890 to 1980, with the Museum opening in 1983), it was a dead pit. Ninety years of operation. Consider the generations whose lives would have depended it, whose men thought they were engaged in noble and valuable work and whose families depended on the steady income and job security. Then we have the infrastructure of schools, shops, pubs and other community facilities.
So there was coal, and steel, and textiles (all largely wiped out by uneconomic cost of production against foreign competition). There was shipbuilding, where the UK seems to have fought back but where Billy Connolly's recollections of the Glasgow yards are today no more than hilarious and brilliant stories of the past.
It was the Guide in the Big Pit that got me. He put on an excellent show and tried to stay professional. But he was bitter about the centrepiece of his community being turned into a tourist exhibit.
I could ramble on and go way outside my zone of competence. I understand economic necessities, and although Norman Tebbit's simplistic Tory Conference-pleasing 'get on your bike' jibe was appalling, I could scarcely not be a standard-bearer for self-reliance. But being able to see the landscape, to pivot and adjust to evolving work scenarios, requires having the right set of skills and resources. Ok, some will get it (wholly or partly) from privilege - say, parental wealth and achievement boosting opportunities - and some will drag themselves way up above their boot straps from nature not nurture talent coupled with an appetite for hard work. But millions in traditional manufacturing industries thought that the State would look after them provided that they worked hard and paid their taxes.
How do you square all this? There is an argument that the job of Government is not to nanny every member of the community through a comfortable, secure life. There are the cards a person is dealt, by way of family background; education opportunities; physical appearance; propensity to physical or mental illness, even the part of the UK into which a person is born. You could make the harsh but partially true observation that there is inevitable collateral damage as the world lurches forward. Life for most might not be as short as it would have been years back, but it can still be nasty and brutish, to pinch from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.
Maybe the erstwhile Prime Minister with the chiffon blouse and big hair was right, that you can't buck the market. Margaret Thatcher is appearing on our TV screens again as programmes mark the 40th anniversary of the 1984 Miner's Strike. I swear that when I started developing this piece that anniversary was not in my mind. But I can't help but be moved by the ex-miner who pleaded that his community might have coped better if unavoidable change had been more gradual.
So I am going to conclude that Governments could have done better to ease the pain, that indeed in this respect we could have done with more intervention (and yes, I am not an ideological fan of low tax; low regulation; leave 'em to it and it's the survival of the fittest).
Time to stop, partly as events are moving quickly in a General Election year. As I finish this, the George Galloway political opportunist circus will be returning to Parliament, and below his racial rhetoric there was a bellow over a 'left behind' town. Never mind though - he is pledging to bring a Primark to Rochdale, so surely all must be well. God help us.
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