A divided nation: the revolt against the elite

An archduke falls, a wall comes down, a plane flies into a building. Just occasionally, said Dominic Sandbrook in the Daily Mail, we feel history being made, the ground shifting beneath our feet. Early on Friday morning came one such moment. Even now, I can barely believe it. “Britain has voted to leave the EU.” And for once, all the clichés are justified. What happened last week was not just a political earthquake, it was a “popular revolt” against the political, financial and cultural elite. The Establishment is in shock; they wheeled out their biggest guns to make the case for Remain – and were defied. Yet they can hardly say they weren’t warned. A dangerous chasm between the metropolitan ruling classes and ordinary people has been widening for years. Of course the Tories – with their Old Etonian PM and equally privileged Chancellor – were out of touch; but so too was Labour, with its fatal disdain for the concerns of working-class people in its northern heartlands. It was a revolution all right, but one that was a long time coming.

What this referendum has exposed is not so much a country divided between North and South, but one in which the rich are pitted against the poor, the old against the young, said Philip Collins in The Times. Polls suggest that the 18-24s voted overwhelmingly to remain, whereas 60% of over-55s wanted to leave. Among graduates, 70% wanted In; while 63% of unskilled workers voted Out. But even more than that, we’re divided by place. Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU, and in Scotland, Remain won in every district. But the map of England and Wales looks very different, said Tom Clark in The Guardian: vast swathes of Leave wins, interrupted only by tiny pockets of Remain clustered around university towns and metropolitan hubs – Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester in the North, Oxford and Cambridge further south. And then there is London, looking like an In capital stranded in an Out state: 28 London boroughs voted to Remain; only five bucked the trend – and all of them lie on the city’s fringes, far away from its buzzing centre.

You could call this rift Hampstead vs. Hull; or the cosmopolitans vs. the “left behind”, said Stephen Bush in The New Statesman. Of course, it has to do with class, income and education, but social factors can’t explain the chasm between towns in Scotland and those in northern England. No, the divisions here are also about culture, nationalism – and optimism, “or lack of it”. There’s the rub, said Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times. All over England there are towns that feel abandoned, where factories have closed; wealth and life have drained away to Manchester, or London; and austerity is biting. Politicians urge them to have faith in the system – but why would they, when the “banksters” are still making billions, while their own benefits are cut, their high streets boarded up?

“Sneering Remain sophisticates bang on about how the EU means Bach and Bergman”, minibreaks in Paris, and a decent Polish builder, said Janice Turner in The Times; but if they deigned to move out of their privileged worlds, they’d find communities for whom the EU means something else: the prospect of an endless supply of workers willing to work antisocial hours in miserable conditions for low pay. For them, the EU means having to accept short-term contracts packing vegetables, when what they want is a decent, secure job with predictable hours so that they can pay a mortgage and bring up their children. Immigration became the focus of the Brexit campaign, and “the unsaid was now said, often and crudely, feeding viciousness and rancour”. But “52% of Britain is not racist”; they are anxious about a door that cannot be closed. Free movement suits big business; it suits cosmopolitan types living in multicultural cities; but it looks different in “poor provincial towns”, where people get no benefit from the globalised world, and may not even own a passport.

With this referendum, a disparate band of alienated voters found a cause to unite behind, said The Observer – and they seized their chance to put the boot into the Establishment. They felt they had nothing to lose, and perhaps it was cathartic. But the EU is not the source of all their problems: it’s not the EU’S fault that unions are weak, or that public services have been cut. And Brexit won’t make anything better. We still live in a globalised, late-capitalist economy, and exchanging one Old Etonian PM for (probably) another isn’t much of a rebuke to the elite. The new challenge is to restore unity, after a vote that not only exposed bitter divisions but deepened them, said David Olusoga in the same paper. A society that once seemed integrated and at ease with itself appears riven with anger and xenophobic hatred. The Ukippers fantasise about getting their country back. Now I want mine back too.

“Free movement suits cosmopolitan types in multicultural cities. It looks different in ‘poor provincial towns’”