EPICENTRE OF THE EURO EARTHQUAKE
A powerful dispatch from the ‘neglected’ North East
IT WAS the seismic moment when everything changed.
At 12.20am on Friday, the referendum result in Sunderland was declared – an astonishing landslide for Brexit with 61 per cent of the vote, in a stunning indication that Britain may leave the EU.
The shock in Labour’s North East heartland was the first chapter of a historic night as millions of working-class people formed an unlikely alliance with Middle England.
These traditional Labour voters had felt abandoned by an establishment in Westminster and Brussels far removed from the devastating effects of mass immigration and the bleak plight of the local economy.
Leave triumphed in every North East area except Newcastle. In Hartlepool – once the constituency of former EU commissioner Peter Mandelson – the margin was 70-30.
‘Tony Blair made a promise – that even though all these new east European countries were joining us, EU immigration would only be a trickle,’ said Gillian Harrison, 58, a carer for the disabled speaking yesterday at the Gateshead Interchange shopping centre, which overlooks the Tyne Bridge.
‘I believed him. I never for a moment thought it would be a flood. I’m from an old Labour family. But these days, Labour just ignores the people of this area. At election time, they don’t even bother to knock on our doors. They take us for granted, because we’re working-class.
‘So I voted to leave. It might not be easy, but I honestly believe that if we make our own rules and regulations, we can get back control.’
Many others voiced sentiments in line with hers. But what they said went far beyond immigration, which some barely mentioned, or saw as a symptom of deeper betrayals.
Taken together, testimony from the people of the North East starts to explain perhaps the least expected aspect of the political crisis rocking Britain: that the biggest Leave majorities came from workingclass communities that have voted Labour for 100 years.
Speaker after speaker complained their region was neglected, disregarded by a political establishment that, as waitress Julie Lumsden, 57, put it, ‘seems to think it’s perfectly OK that everything good starts south of here’.
There is no more vivid illustration of that neglect than the fact that the Remain campaign seems barely to have tried – offering little sign of its presence in the North East.
A few saw it coming. Before polling day I met the Leave cam- paign’s North East chief, Tory election agent Dominic Coupe. He insisted: not only would Brexit win, it would do so by big majorities – piling up votes in the most deprived, solidly Labour neighbourhoods.
‘Years ago I went canvassing for [Tory Defence Minister] Alan Clarke in Chelsea,’ he told me. ‘That wasn’t exactly hard.
‘But I never felt support anything like as strong as I have knocking on doors and asking people to vote Leave in Sunderland and Gateshead.’
One might say Leave’s North East victories should have been foreseen. Ukip came second in many seats at the General Election and lost to Labour in Hartlepool by just 3,000 votes.
Moreover, behind the seething resentment are hard economic facts. At almost eight per cent, the North East has the UK’s highest unemployment rate – the only area where it has risen in the past year. It also has the lowest average salary: £24,000 in 2013, £3,000 behind the national average and £11,000 behind London.
Mr Coupe said on Friday that these areas have been abandoned by both the Tories and Labour, adding: ‘All we did was engage with them, talk to them, actually take the trouble to knock on their doors and ask for their vote. But the response was simply incredible: a passion and enthusiasm that I, as a 30-year political veteran, have never experienced before.’
I interviewed Mr Coupe with three of his volunteers: cargo ship radio officer Michael Marchetti, 27, the son of Italian immigrants, Allyn Roberts, 47, a telecoms project manager, and student Matthew McPherson, 20. For all three, this was their first campaign.
‘I got involved because I’m sick of the status quo,’ Mr Marchetti said. ‘But I couldn’t believe the response we got. I’d knock on doors and people wanted to take selfies with me. We just couldn’t get enough Leave T-shirts.’
MRROBERTSrecalled being asked for a Leave poster by a publican. ‘I warned him, “This might harm your trade.” He said I had to be joking. With Leave posters, it could only increase.’
Mr Coupe admitted immigration was Leave’s biggest selling point – although in the North East, recent immigration has been comparatively light.
But in areas with high deprivation, its impact is more keenly felt, and it acts as a lightning rod for other issues. ‘I know for a fact that they’ve just taken in some Syrian children in our local primary,’ said Hellen Bewick, 52, at her home on a 1950s council estate. ‘Yet I have a friend who lives one street away, and she can’t get her child into that school’s nursery class. How can that be right?
‘When benefits and public services are being cut, you feel as if your country has given up on you. Yet the migrants seem to get them. I don’t think politicians in Westminster have any idea what life in the North East is like, let alone care.’
For Brian Wilden, 31, the key issue was ‘red tape’. He used to work for a cosmetics firm forced to change products because their ingredients did not conform to EU rules.
‘The other thing – all that money we send,’ he said. But surely the EU had spent heavily on regeneration in the North East? Mr Wilden laughed, citing the Sage concert hall on the banks of the Tyne. ‘How many people from here do you think got jobs from that – though it cost millions? None of my family has ever been there.’
What next? Beyond a hope that now, somehow, politicians would find a way to enact tougher immigration rules, no one had much idea. But in Gateshead yesterday, the devil was not in the detail.
‘I have very little confidence in politicians,’ Mrs Lumsden said at the Interchange. ‘But I think that now, we in the North East may have our chance. They’ve got to start taking notice of us, because we’ve forced it on them.’