As a ‘Remain’ voter who lives and works in Labour’s semi-mythical ‘Northern Heartland’, I have to say that the key motivation of the Brexit voters I know has been badly misunderstood or mischaracterized by politicians and the media. Yes of course there are racists and xenophobes in England as there are anywhere else (Yes, I’m looking at you Scottish ‘fuck the English they are all racists’ commentators), and yes they all voted Brexit because they want it to be 1957 again.
But talking to Brexit voting friends and colleagues these last couple of days, I have come to the realization that it is deeply simplistic to tar all such voters with the same brush. Without exception all the people I spoke to had only good things to say about our new Polish and Slovakian neighbors, none of them, not a single one I spoke to, resented foreigners working here. This was a surprise, and caused me to reexamine my own prejudices.
The truth is most Northern Brexit voters are the victims of Neo-liberalism. Their jobs have gone elsewhere, their health centres have closed, their libraries have closed, their shops are boarded and shuttered up, their legal right have been curtailed, and their social security cut. Conservative governments have worked out that northern working class voters effectively no longer have a general election vote because without Scottish Labour votes (who have all turned to the S.N.P.) the Tories now have enough seats in the relatively prosperous Tory heartlands of Southern England to be able to ignore the North and treat its voters with impunity. Now due to this disenfranchisement every penny can be squeezed out of the North. Their social rights can be taken away; they can be forced into unemployment, or worse, the living hell of zero-hour contracts. None of this has any consequences for the Conservative government because these are the forgotten people of another England, a different England, a lesser England, an England the political bubble hardly knows exists.
This is what the vast majority Northern Brexiters were voting against, for them it was not a referendum on Europe, it was a referendum on the English political classes. Effectively they were saying;
“NOW our vote finally counts for something, NOW you WILL listen to us, NOW you will pay for treating us like shit and laughing at our suffering.”
This was not the rage of embittered Little Englanders; this was a cry of despair from the victims of modern capitalism.