They forget that in the general election of 2017, less than two years after becoming leader, he gained 3.5 million extra Labour votes (and 1.5 million more than David Cameron had for his majority government in 2015). It is of little importance to them that Labour, as a national political party, has to listen to the voices of its northern voters nor that Corbyn has, so far, played a tactically astute game. “Why won’t Labour’s leader help us and make all this nightmare end?” they say. The people must be wrong,” seems to be their mantra.Īnd in the face of their impotence over changing hearts and minds, and as Theresa May drives on towards the cliff edge, they turn to the one person they know they can damage: Jeremy Corbyn. The notion of the “metropolitan elite” used to seem like a ridiculous putdown yet, more and more, it seems to be becoming a truth. The same is true of almost all remainer commentators in the media. ”Ĭertainly, few of them are likely to be persuaded by the leading voices in the people’s vote campaign – almost all wealthy and middle class, and most of them southerners. To wake up every morning and look around and think – yeah, this is pretty much how it should be.” The same is true over the EU vote: working-class Brexiters could equally think, “It must be glorious being a remainer. At the end of another long day pounding the streets, trying to show voters how her party can improve their lives, she says wistfully: “What a glorious peace, it must be, to be on the Right. There’s a great scene in James Graham’s 2017 play Labour of Love, which centres on a Nottingham Labour MP and his constituency agent, played in its original production by Tamsin Greig. Photograph: Niklas Halle’n/AFP/Getty Images All these remainer arguments do is make people feel their protest vote is being ignored, and that establishment voices just want things to carry on as before.Īctivists hold up placards from the Leave Means Leave campaign group outside the Houses of Parliament this month. Nor will that other continuously repeated phrase: “You were lied to.” As if leave voters are so gullible they’d believe anything politicians tell them: in fact, they voted Brexit because they totally distrusted politicians.
Yet since 2016, remarkably, most remainers seem to feel that if they keep repeating this message, somehow people will change their minds. So, during the referendum campaign, to raise the economy as a reason for staying in Europe was always likely to fall on deaf ears – and it did. The only two regions of the UK that have recovered after the 2008 crash are London and the south-east. None of that was felt anywhere near us.Īnd little has changed. I also remember feeling incredulous when the media, over the following years, reported the economic boom: the yuppies, the “big bang” in the City of London, the “share-owning democracy”. I remember the Thatcher recession of the 1980s, and the hit the city took, along with the collapse of its fishing industry. I was born and raised in Hull, a medium-sized, solidly working-class city in east Yorkshire. Yet they fail to realise that these parts of the country have mostly been untouched by economic growth, even in the so-called boom years. Yes, of course it’s clear that all the predictions are for the economy to take a hit and the poorer, northern regions to take the biggest hit of all: “What on earth were you thinking,” the liberal commentariat say (it’s a statement, not a question). There’s been little attempt to acknowledge the widespread poverty, deprivation, insecurity and marginalisation of so many towns and cities that led them to seek such a drastic solution to their problems. It often seems the message to them from remainers can be boiled down to two words: “Stupid northerners.” All the talk switched to meaningful votes – yet in vast stretches of the UK, what they want is meaningful lives.Īnd amid the panic to stop Brexit, their stories have been forgotten. What happened? Before long the Westminster village reverted to type, and began obsessing about political plots, obscure article wording, and parliamentary procedures. Remember that brief moment after the referendum, when commentators started acknowledging the “left behind”, admitting that they’d been ignored for far too long? The swaths of the country beyond the M25 where industries had been lost, where communities had been torn apart, and where the idea of prosperity was a long-forgotten dream.