(CC BY-NC 2.0) courtesy of urbanartcore.eu / Flickr
Amongst many other things, the UK’s vote to leave the EU was a cry for recognition from people with very different lives and opportunities across the UK. It was also a stark reminder of ‒ or, for some, a sudden insight into ‒ different priorities and viewpoints and the deep inequalities between people and places.
Lord Ashcroft’s poll on Referendum day revealed some of reasons why leavers and remainers voted as they did. It exposed the already much-discussed divisions of age, education, employment status and place. Less famously, it also showed polarised attitudes about whether or not the following approaches were forces for ill (majority leave) or good (majority remain): multiculturalism; social liberalism; feminism; the green movement; globalisation; and capitalism. Attitudes to the internet split evenly across both groups.
The spatial map was gradually coloured in over a long but increasingly inevitable night. It revealed the unsurprisingly different average views of Scotland and Northern Ireland, but perhaps a more startling divide between some (but not all) large cities, particularly London, and everywhere else.
As is now fairly clear, some of the strongest leave votes came from those places that have not done well out of globalisation. In many cases the sense of detachment from the preoccupations and success of many (but obviously not all) of those in cities, has developed over decades. Having lived half my life in a seaside town and half in London, I’ve felt, and no doubt been part of, the personal and wider impacts of these cultural and economic divides drifting further apart.
The EU referendum was in some sense a release valve, an opportunity to make a point. Whilst much of this is known to anyone who lives in these places or travels without blinkers around the UK, some metropolitan commentary was at times pretty shocking and prejudiced, reflecting a real lack of understanding and empathy. This was not helped by the fact that reputable data, crunched into various scenarios, could not be broken down to the local level in order to reveal how different places were actually affected. Instead we got generalisations, often at the level of the UK as a whole. (And in some cases the point being made was a recognition that, on balance and despite subsidies, some places have not benefited from EU membership and free movement of people, and that change is happening too fast.)
None of this discussion denies the misinformation in the campaigns. But it is dangerous to think that people unthinkingly followed the polarised and media-reinforced campaign. Some of the most thought-provoking commentary and feelings come from the people interviewed in a series of videos by John Harris from the Guardian in the run up to the vote. You can’t listen to the final video, EU Referendum: welcome to the divided, angry Kingdom, without feeling that we really do need to stop and reflect how little we all know, and possibly even care, about the diversity of other people’s lives and experiences.
But it is very unclear how these divisions are going to be addressed in the coming years. Theresa May recognised some of these implications in her first speech as Prime Minister when she outlined the challenges facing many people in the UK, and added: “The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of a privileged few, but by yours.” There have also been subsequent hints that there would be a renewed focus on industrial policy. But we also need to start thinking about places in their own terms, and make sure politicians and policymakers understand and are responsive to these differences. Devolution may be an important part of this shift, but alongside increased powers comes an increased danger of losing the sense of togetherness necessary for any kind of democracy, as well as the difficulties of decision-making when you don’t have adequate resources to do much.
John Lotherington, FDSD trustee, raises the challenge in What future do we want? We need to rethink how our democracy engages people, otherwise “the solidarity necessary for democracy to flourish will be undermined”.
It often takes outsiders to cut through the confusion. An article in the New York Times by Steven Erlanger sums up this lack of cohesion and draws John Harris’ views together with some from the other side of the political spectrum, James Bartholomew’s blog in the Spectator, when he says: “Amid the overwhelming confusion about the next few years, it will take more than a few reassuring words about a festival of democracy to begin to bring Britain back together”. He was referring to representative democracy. The referendum was direct democracy.
What we are missing is the bit in the middle. At the very least, the divisions exposed by the Referendum show that we need to create spaces where we can all discuss different views and visions, as well as crucially problem-solve our futures. This means negotiating ways forward with anyone who is relevant to a problem or affected by it. And we need to understand more about the people and places we live with and in, well beyond party walls.
There also needs to be a rebalance in the current tendency to focus political and policy attention on ‘cities’. The recent policy trend of ‘city regions’ presumes this focus will lift income levels and job opportunities for the surrounding areas – a new version perhaps of ‘trickle-down’, more accurately perhaps called ‘trickle out’. But that doesn’t necessarily work for areas such as the northwest coast or Cumbria, which are relatively far (or linked by very slow and intermittent trains) from the city centres of Manchester, Liverpool or Newcastle, for example.
The redefinition of some towns to ‘cities’ reinforces this not-so-subtle dash for cash and support. By implication, it reduces the relevance of other places – rural areas, market and seaside towns. You might reply that this approach is justified by the inevitable global trends for populations to move to cities. But some example international statistics provided by The Guardian seem to focus on ‘urban centres’, not large cities. Again, we need to get a bit more sophisticated in our analysis and start breaking information down to what is happening at particular times in particular places. And it is pretty clear that some people are not happy with what is happening, with the clustering of UKIP voters around the east coast as just one example.
Widening participation and reducing inequalities are key parts of sustainable development, made more concrete in the recently agreed international Sustainable Development Goals with their overarching principle of ‘no-one left behind’. It might seem a bit naïve to talk about a UN initiative in the current political climate. However, it was interesting to see that when Wales had its Wales We Want national conversation, the seven objectives that resulted mapped pretty closely to the SDGs, and both are now embedded in national legislation. On the other hand, Wales’ split referendum result revealed some polarised and deeply-held views that were probably not raised in those fora. We still have a lot to do.
