Those that, in common political parlance, qualify as Labour’s working-class ‘heartlands’ generally include the small towns of Northern England and the Midlands, many of which did vote Leave in decisive numbers. But the concept of heartlands generally excludes major urban centres such as Liverpool, Manchester or indeed London, where many working-class communities voted Remain. Indeed, many of the poorest communities in London—like Tower Hamlets and Hackney—voted heavily against leaving the EU. While 56 per cent of private renters nationally voted Remain, 58 per cent of those who owned their home outright voted Leave. Over two-thirds of black and minority ethnic Britons voted to Remain, too.3
All too often, the common image of a working-class Briton is someone who is male, middle-aged, straight, white, lives in a small town and holds socially conservative views: this portrayal became more entrenched as a result of Brexit. Unquestionably, this does represent an important layer of working-class Britain: but there are others, too. It specifically erases younger working-class people, working-class people of colour, those who are not straight, and those who live in major urban centres.
That is not to say that there was not an important working-class element to Brexit. Many communities had suffered the loss of traditional industries—mines, steelworks, factories, docks—which stripped away secure, skilled work which had more status. The jobs that filled the vacuum were often lower-paid and more insecure. After the crash and austerity, many of these communities were hammered by cuts to social security and public services, while workers suffered the most protracted squeeze in wages since the Napoleonic era. Many of these communities voted Leave in large numbers, partly driven by understandable dissatisfaction and fury at a society rigged against their interests. They were often voting more against Westminster than Brussels.
Undoubtedly, many saw their problems—stagnating living standards, a lack of secure well-paid jobs and depleted affordable housing —through the prism of immigration. As one academic who researched the topic found: ‘My analysis shows that voters hit hardest by the cuts were more receptive to the Leave campaign, which shouldn’t be surprising as campaigners promised fiscal windfalls from leaving the EU that could prop up ailing public services.’ He concluded that ‘the tight 2016 EU referendum could have resulted in a victory for Remain had it not been for austerity. Leave won by a margin of 3.8 percentage points.’4
From the referendum campaign onwards, there was often a complacency within Labour’s ranks that Brexit would always prove more politically destructive to the Conservatives. It proved far more so for Labour for a few reasons. Firstly, Brexit unleashed an increasingly acrimonious culture war and, as Corbynism tragically discovered, culture wars are poisonous to a left politics founded on class politics. Labour’s slogan in the 2017 election had captured the essence of that class politics: ‘For the many, not the few.’ It provided a narrative for the party’s redistributive policies, such as hiking taxes on the well-off and big business to fund investment in public services. But a culture war cuts across the real divide in society—who has wealth and power, and who doesn’t.
Instead the British people were driven into two crudely defined boxes: Remainers and Leavers. Working-class communities were divided. Labour represented communities stretching from Hackney— which voted decisively to Remain—to Hull—which voted in large numbers to Leave. The ascendant right-wing populism within the Conservative Party had secured a means to win over older working-class people in the very communities ravaged by Thatcherism.
When Labour deprived the Conservatives of a majority in 2017 against all the odds, triumphalism overwhelmed the Corbyn project and its supporters. But the result—a hung Parliament—sowed the seeds of destruction for Corbyn’s leadership. With Theresa May deprived of a majority to drive through any possible Brexit deal, leading Remainers increasingly abandoned an acceptance of the referendum result and began pushing for its reversal with increasing assertiveness. Leading Leave voices ever more loudly declared that a democratic result was imperilled and exploited the instability to push for an ever more radical break from the EU. Both factions fed each other. The consequence was ever-growing radicalisation over this constitutional issue.
With Brexit conquering the political landscape, Labour’s popular domestic policies—founded in class politics—no longer got a hearing. The party’s attempt to strike a compromise—to leave the EU but maintain a close relationship and then pivot back to domestic issues— was rendered increasingly unlikely; it straddled a divide between two planks which were ever farther apart, and Labour risked falling through the middle. With most of its members and indeed voters having voted Remain, the party’s leadership increasingly zigzagged and pivoted towards supporting a new referendum: in the process, messages of clarity on domestic issues were replaced by confusion over Brexit. The right-wing populists stole the anti-establishment mantle from Corbynism, claiming to be representing the voice of the people against an elite which was conspiring to overturn a mass democratic vote. Corbynism itself could increasingly be cast as part of the establishment.
Brexit both highlighted and exacerbated a new divide which imperilled Labour’s electoral chances: an unprecedented generational gap. Traditionally, there was no great political chasm between older and younger voters. When Margaret Thatcher secured her crushing 1983 landslide, she won a decisive mandate among the young, too.5 But in the 2017 election, Labour won more support from younger voters than at any point in its history, including Tony Blair’s landslide victory two decades earlier. Two thirds of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds voted Labour, with less than a fifth opting for the Conservatives. This lead was nearly replicated for the under thirties, and 55 per cent of thirty-to thirty-nine-year-olds also opted for Corbyn’s party, as opposed to 29 per cent for Theresa May’s troops. But among older Britons, Labour had been reduced to a virtual fringe party: 58 per cent of those aged between sixty and sixty-nine years old voted Tory, and just 27 per cent Labour, while a staggering 69 per cent of those over seventy opted for candidates wearing blue rosettes, with just 19 per cent backing the red team.
This matters a lot: around a quarter of the electorate are pensioners, and they are the most motivated to vote. While Labour’s support dropped by a disastrous eight points two and a half years later, it retained a staggering lead among the young and a catastrophic deficit among the old. While its lead among the young had diminished, that was almost entirely due to defections to the Lib Dems and Greens, rather than a Conservative revival, and its advantage in those demographics remained overwhelming.6
This generational divide led the eminent psephologist Sir John Curtice to tell one Labour MP during the 2019 election, ‘But of course you are no longer a party of the working class. You’re a party of young people.’7 In doing so, he counterposed young people and the working class as discrete, separate categories: that so many from both groups owned no capital and worked for often low wages in precarious circumstances was irrelevant. Indeed, it is worth noting that the demographic who most decisively voted for Labour in 2017 were those classified as working-class people under the age of thirty-five: here, the party had a fifty-two-point lead over the Conservatives, compared to a twenty-two-point lead among those classified as middle-class in the same age group.8
For those of us whose worldview is founded in class politics—in a belief that the interests of the majority are not just different but on a collision course with those at the top—this generational divide is discomforting but nonetheless real. That does not necessitate becoming generational warriors. While there are affluent pensioners, 1.9 million live in poverty, a higher rate than in most European countries. There are those who advocate scrapping the ‘triple lock’ that secures generous annual increases in pensions and using the savings to invest in young people. But young people are themselves aspirational pensioners. Stripping back entitlements for older people leaves the young with the worst of all worlds: insecurity not just in youth but in retirement, too.
How did this generational divide become so entrenched to the extent it has severely disrupted class politics? A million pensioners were lifted out of poverty by New Labour in the noughties, and their living standards have been protected by
