In January 2018, I joined a team of researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE) who were starting to work on a project about the local-level impact of Britain’s departure from the European Union in five British local authorities. We set ourselves a double challenge: firstly, we wanted to understand why people voted the way they did in those five areas in the 2016 EU referendum, in light of the local context and the issues that were considered politically significant locally. Secondly, we wanted to do a little experiment: If we produced a report about the impacts of Brexit that was locally relevant, combining the results of existing quantitative studies with the evidence collected through our own field work in each local authority, would it be possible to bring Leavers and Remainers together in one room and spark a forward-looking, evidence-based discussion about Brexit within each local community?
A year later, and after three visits to my case study area, Mansfield, I would like to share some of the findings from our work in Mansfield with regard to our original questions. You can also find out more in our report ‘Understanding Brexit impacts at a local level: Mansfield case study‘
Explaining the Brexit vote in Mansfield
Mansfield is a town of about 100,000 inhabitants in Nottinghamshire. For most of the twentieth century, Mansfield was one of the major and most productive centres of coal mining in the region. However, in the late 1980s and 1990s most of the pits in Mansfield and the surrounding area closed down, while other traditional sectors, such as textiles and engineering, also faced a steep decline. Ever since, Mansfield has been undergoing a painful process of industrial restructuring, and has experienced a significant increase in low value-added, low-paid service sector employment. In the social mobility index compiled by the British government’s Social Mobility Commission, Mansfield and two of its neighbouring local authorities occupy three of the ten bottom places of the index, ranked 315, 317 and 323 respectively. These developments contribute in a powerful way to a sense of being left behind by the UK’s current economic model, which heavily relies on linkages with global markets.
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