Remaining Engaged
A favoured genre of reporting since the 2016 election has been to travel to a town North of London, and report back on the musings of those there who voted Leave. Whether it be Blackpool, Stoke-on-Trent, or the perennial classic of Sunderland, the good people of these towns have been bothered at great length by journalists, commentators, and their entourage of support staff for their views on everything; Brexit especially, but more widely on politics, society, the economy, immigration and more. Of course, politicians have got in on the act — the latest major offering in this was by the Labour MP for Ashfield, Gloria de Piero — talking about what their constituents do or do not want.
There are many reasons to find this genre depressing. At its worst, it feels like a safari for alien elites to descend on the humble locals and divine cosmic truths from their utterances; giving them simultaneously a wisdom and a simplicity that does not do much for either party involved in the exchange. However, even at its best — the Financial Times’ report on Blackpool above is often cited as a good example of this done well — this reporting still faces significant challenges.
The Worst Map In British Politics
To begin to consider these, I want to present you with the Worst Map In British Politics. It gains this dubious title as a result of it singularly expressing in one image the simplistic thinking that underpins many such trips to the English seaside or post-industrial landscape by those seeking to understand this country. It portrays the country as neatly all one thing or another — all Remain, or all Leave. In doing so, it encapsulates a tendency to imagine places as being Leave, or Remain — and purely one thing or another.
But even in the Most Leave city — Stoke-on-Trent, some 36,000 people voted Remain (~30%); even in the Most Remain city — Edinburgh, around 64,000 people (~25%) cast a vote for Leave. Talking about Scotland as a Remain area ignores the fact that just over a million Scots voted Leave. There are only 8 counting areas where the losing side won less than 25% of the vote; only 1 (Gibraltar) where they won less than 20% of the vote. In any part of the UK there is at least a 1-in-5 chance, therefore, that a person who voted in 2016 voted for the side not represented on the Worst Map In British Politics.
It can be useful to begin to think about things in simplistic terms and then break them down. Voyages to the blue areas on the Worst Map In British Politics often include a cursory Remain voter, for example. But these efforts are cursory so much of the time — and worse, the areas chosen are all of a type. They are all a good frame for beginning to understand something, but not for going beyond the beginning — and with so little time left before the 29th March, we are beyond the point of needing to move deeper. I cannot recall a lengthy analysis by a major commentator on why the people of relatively posh bits of east Surrey chose to vote Leave, for example — why we do not watch long specials on Channel 4 or BBC One or Sky News about the views of the Leave voters of Tandridge, or Spelthorne, or South Bucks?
For that matter, why do we not see many pieces on the views of Remain voters? My argument about simple thinking here takes on its third layer; not only have we stuck in a beginning frame of mind when it comes to thinking of the country as all one thing or another; all Leave in this place, all Remain in that place; and that beginning frame also applies to the sort of places we focus on; Northern towns for Leave — but that we focus on one side of this result far, far more than the other side, to the point where it is out of proportion to the result of the referendum.
What about the other lot?
Remain voters are a comparatively under-researched and under-valued set of voters. There is a clear logic to focusing on Leave voters first and foremost; after all, they were the unexpected winners of the referendum, and their choice has defined the politics of the UK ever since June 2016 — and probably will do for a while yet. But my contention is that this focus has become too lopsided; that we focus too much on Leave and not enough on Remain (indeed, too much on one very specific type of Leave voter; white, north of London, working class).
Remain voters are, on average, younger than Leave voters. They are, on average, more likely to be a member of an ethnic minority than Leave voters. It is more likely, on average, they have been to university than a Leave voter. These are three groups who define the future of the British electorate. The young of 2016 will be in the electorate the longest of any group who voted; and the country continues to see a growing share of university graduates, and ethnic minority voters, entering the electorate. None of this makes them in some sense ‘better’ than Leave voters. But it does make them very important for how the country operates over the medium to longer term. Their desires, interests, and values are the ones that are going to become increasingly important as time goes by.
Neither of the two main party leaderships have shown themselves to be sensible to the views of Remain voters — the commentary focuses on how they might be perceived in Leave voting areas, or how they imagine those areas (or at least, the commonly imagined view of those areas) will receive their positioning on Brexit and its many semi-detached issues like immigration. Briefly, these voters do appear to cross their minds from time to time, but the thought does not dwell long, nor is it well acted upon. It is almost exactly a year since Boris Johnson, then still Foreign Secretary, was deployed to ‘reach out to Remainers’ in a speech given at Policy Exchange; an effort that appears to have begun when the spinning for the speech began, and ended when the Foreign Secretary sat down.
When people have discussed Remainers, it is usually as an exclusively elite cabal of people who sit in Westminster and plot to destroy democracy; or as an out-of-touch group with #FBPE in their Twitter handles, waving EU flags outside the Houses of Parliament. This is entirely bizarre, because we are discussing the second largest voting group in British electoral history — more people voted Remain than have voted for any party in a general election (nearly 3 million more than voted for the record holder; John Major in 1992). In Gloria de Piero’s Ashfield constituency, roughly 20,000 people voted Remain; an awful lot of people whom the local MP has not sat down an interviewed, or tweeted screenshots of e-mails from. The MP for Ashfield is not alone in this, of course; her only reason for being cited here is the recentness of her lengthy piece on Leave voters; but her behaviour for MPs in Leave areas on the Worst Map In British Politics is, it seems, all too typical.
What makes this even more curious is that we know that the Remain identity possess just as strong a pull as the Leave identity; indeed, it may well be slightly larger now than Leave. As Evans and Schaffner argue in their chapter in the above report, this has remained a powerful force since the referendum, producing two clear differentiated groupings:
There was an increasing sense of similarity with their own side — regardless of Brexit views — (from 56% to 75%) for Remainers after the referendum. Remainers also felt very little connection with Leavers (9%). Leavers increased their sense of similarity with other Leavers though not by as much (66% to 70%) and were also a little more open to a sense of similarity with Remainers (12% up to 21%). These responses had hardly changed six months later
The lack of connection is an interesting point. It is tempting to simply dismiss this as evidence of a trend noted elsewhere in countries such as the US — self-identified progressive voters are less open to, for example, personal relationships with conservative voters than vice-versa. But in this specific context, I want to make the argument that this is because their “loser” status has only been amplified since June 2016.
It has been almost as though 16.8 million people fell into a memory hole on the 24th June 2016, and since then have been beyond our ability to conceptualise. The only Remain voters left behind have been the tiny groups outlined above; others have only featured briefly, then slipped away without notice again. Their views, ideas, or any other motivation have been quietly ignored. When they view the news, listen to most politicians, read most newspapers; they may as well not exist — the elite is entirely captured, it must feel, by a discussion about what the other lot want, and they are not invited to the table.
When politicians do show up to talk to them — Boris Johnson for example — it is a terrible choice of messenger (his ratings among Remain voters are truly abysmal) with a terrible message. The Johnson speech essentially amounted to “none of your concerns are valid, please disregard them.” This, given the way that Remain politicians messaging to Leave voters are often (fairly) described, is rich. Very few seem all that curious about, or invested in, these voters — who are, let’s not forget, at least 1-in-5 of the voters in every single part of the United Kingdom; as well as being in many ways more representative of the future electorate than the Leave voter bloc.
So that is my argument — that we are engaging in simplistic thought about the types of voters we’re confronting, and focusing far too much on a sub-group of a half of the electorate; and that there is a very large bloc of voters out there who we ignore. It is telling that those who shout very loudly about populism being the future, for example, do not appear to have thought very much at all about how Remain voters might react to that — or, indeed, if those sorts of voters might be mobilised by their own equivalent, as yet unseen movement.
That, then, is the view forwards from here — ignoring these voters is sowing seeds of discontent. It is commonplace to talk about how “betraying” the referendum result will result in deep anger and upset. But there is little sign that those feelings among Remainers are abating; and plenty of sign that they are just as intense as they were in 2016. This identity, as the UKandEU report above shows, formed relatively quickly in 2016 — it is relatively new — but it is also very powerful. How these voters will react to Brexit of any kind is unknown; how their preferences will change with regards to politics in general cannot yet be seen.
But the signs are not good. These voters have been persistently ignored or maligned since 2016. Their views, values, places, identities and more have been either treated as non-existent, or actively harmful. They’ve been derided as rootless cosmopolitans, as anywheres, as Citizens of Nowhere. The places where they congregate most — cities — have been described as problematic, barriers to change, overly receiving of funds and research. We know precious little about them, and seem to care even less as a whole; and even delight in that gap.
The consequences of these conscious decisions to speak of these people, treat them in this way, will be all too real I fear. The message they are getting from on high is that they do not at all count; and they can be ignored. In 2017, we saw the Conservative Party punished in Remain areas for messaging loudly that they were not welcome; Brighton, Bath, Twickenham, anywhere with a university, turned on that party. They have robbed one government of a majority already; they may well cost others the same. Unless we learn about them, treat them as a complex and important part of the electorate — and start to speak in terms that reflect their values, interests, and desires — we are going to make the problems that will arise even worse. That, surely, should be reason enough to send our journalists to Manchester, Ceredigion and West Oxfordshire and ask Remainers — what on Earth do you want from all of this?
