Working-class people were more likely to vote for Brexit. However, Lisa Mckenzie takes issue with the notion that these people were simply ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’. They saw Brexit, with all the uncertainties it would bring, as an alternative to the status quo. Deindustrialisation and austerity have taken a heavy toll on working-class communities – one which the middle-class often fails to grasp.
Credit: David Holt (CC BY 2.0)
It’s 22 June 2016. I’m sat in a café in the East End of London with two local women, ‘Sally’ – who is 23, has two small children, and has been on the council house waiting list for four years, along with over 19,000 other people – and Anne, who is in her sixties and calls herself a ‘proper Eastender’. Her children and grandchildren had recently moved out of the area and into Essex because of the lack of an affordable home. It’s the day before the EU referendum, and we are talking about all the politics of the day, including footballer David Beckham’s recent intervention in the debate: he has recently declared his support for the Remain campaign. The women are not happy. The conversation goes:
‘What has that **** Beckham got to say about this?’
‘He hasn’t ever got to be worried about where he is going to live, unless it’s which house.’
‘Well him and Posh can go and live where they want when they want, it’s not the same for us, I’ve been homeless now for two years.’
‘We don’t exist to them, do we?’
‘Well all of us ******* who don’t exist are voting out tomorrow’.
Before the referendum, I had been working with a group of local working-class men and women in London’s East End as part of ‘The Great British Class Survey’ at the LSE. I have collected hundreds of stories about working-class life in the last four years in the East End, and thousands over the last 12 years. These small stories can often seem unrelated to the big political debates of the day, if you don’t understand the context to them. As a working-class woman, I value the art of storytelling: I know that a story is never just a story. It is used by working-class people to explain who they are, where they come from, and where they belong. These small stories are too often missed in wider political analysis in favour of macro trends, which has often meant that the poorest people in the UK go unrepresented.
Fortunately – as an ethnographer, a working-class academic, the daughter of a Nottinghamshire striking miner, and hosiery factory worker (and I have lived in council housing for most of my life) – I rarely focus on the macro. My life and my work is rooted within working-class communities; my focus and my politics are about exposing those inequalities that are invisible to many, but sit in plain sight.
Having collected these narratives since 2005, I knew something different was happening around the referendum. The debates in pubs, cafes, nail bars, and the hairdressers in working-class communities seemed infectious. People were interested, and argued about the finer points of the EU, but also made broader points about where power rested in the UK, making links between the two. However, for most working class people like ‘Sally’ and the other women, the debates were centred upon the constant struggle of their own lives, and they connected those struggles to their mothers’ and grandmothers’ hardships, but also to their children’s future. They saw little hope that life would become fairer for them.
The referendum was a turning point for the women in east London. They had not voted in the 2015 General Election: they had little interest or faith in a political system seated only three miles away when their daily and immediate situation needed constant attention. When ‘Sally’ told me she was going to use her vote for the first time to leave, I asked her if she thought things would change for the better if we were to Brexit. She said she didn’t know, and didn’t care. She just couldn’t stand things being the same.
Since the vote, interest in what has been happening to the ‘left behind’ has sharpened, along with stigmatising and cruel rhetoric about those from working-class communities who voted to leave or didn’t vote at all. They have been derided as ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ – as ‘stupid’, ‘spiteful’ and racist. My most recent research with the International Inequalities Institute at the LSE has taken me to the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire mining towns where I was born and raised. These communities overwhelmingly voted to leave the EU, and their reasons were varied and broad.
This part of the UK was decimated during the 1980s and 1990s. They are proud places and people who kept the lights on with their labour down the ‘pits’, and kept the good people of the middle-class and middle England in their nice Marks and Spencer undies. These communities were heavily industrialised, and filled with skilled manual labour jobs for both men and women. They were wiped clean by de-industrialisation, and left void of work and investment for decades. In the last ten years, particularly since the 2008 banking crash, new jobs have emerged in warehouse and distribution work, payday loan companies, and slum landlording. De-industrialised areas are fertile ground for exploitative industries. Land, people and labour are cheap. Warehouses can be constructed in days and disassembled and taken somewhere else if the land, the people or the labour ask for more.
Migrant workers from eastern Europe have been recruited into the area to work and live in these exploitative industries. Women like ‘Sally’ from east London have been socially cleansed out of the expensive land of the global city and are being rehoused in the privately owned and rented ‘pit houses’ owned by slum landlords in the deindustrialised North and Midlands.
Despite the obvious geographical differences between both groups – one lives in a global city that has great wealth and is an economic powerhouse on the world stage, while the other group live in small isolated communities – there is a commonality in experience. They knew they were at the bottom, they knew they had been at the bottom for generations, and rather than being ‘left behind’ – a term that suggests they could not keep up – they knew they had been ‘left out’ of the purposeful act of wealth being redistributed upwards.
Working-class Leavers were derided as turkeys voting for Christmas, but it is the middle-class Remainers who have been running around like headless chickens since the vote. Like Henny Penny, they think the sky is falling in, but whether the sky falls in or not, Brexit has made a difference to working-class people dubbed ‘the left behind’. They have become visible for the first time in generations, and to some extent feared.
In January 2018, few could deny that the government’s Brexit plans are chaotic. But for working-class people all over the UK, the chaos of the NHS, Universal Credit, social cleansing and housing is their priority. And in truth, the UK’s middle class has been left relatively unscathed by eight years of austerity. Those who don’t fear the shame of the foodbank, or the looming prospect of a job in the warehouse/workhouse for their children – and instead think the crisis is about the colour of passports – should think themselves lucky.
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Note: This article is based on the author’s recent paper in the British Journal of Sociology and first appeared at our sister site, LSE Brexit. It gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics.
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Lisa Mckenzie – Middlesex University
Lisa Mckenzie is a Lecturer in Sociological Practice at Middlesex University.
Articles like this are just rationalisation of irrational behaviour with the added benefit that it makes the authors make themselves feel good about themselves.
At the end of the day it is about turkeys voting for Christmas because they don’t know for what other purpose they are being reared.
What I’m finding extraordinary and rather depressing about the commentary surrounding brexit is that many people seem to have lost all respect for leave voters generally. We live in a democracy (unlike the EU which is anti democratic by its very nature – who on earth voted for juncker?)
Democracy means that each person has the right to exercise choice. If that choice is misinformed that is generally an issue with the press but does not diminish that right. Calling 52% of the voting population turkeys is not only childish, rude and inappropriate, it will almost certainly fuel further determination by leave voters to continue voting and believing in their opinion. What it most definitely won’t do is make people change their minds. This immature bitching is something I thought most people came to terms with in primary school. Perhaps the real turkeys in this literal chasm dividing our nation are the name callers who think they know better. Even if you’re right, it will only deepen divisions ad nauseum. So please can you busy keep quiet and let people have their say in peace
reply to Anon
Remainers differ widely amongst themselves as do Leavers .For example I had a very tetchy exchange with an Oxford professor this week because I criticised the way in which the Whitehall review of EU powers was conducted in 2013. He probably took me for a Leaver ( I was in 1975 but no longer) So the polarisation is not as simple as you say
Remainers should accept that many of Farage’s criticism are valid . The EU institutions are defective – I know as I worked in the Commission. But then so are all man made institutions
The excellent article that started this off was about the working class and Brexit and made some good points. I would add that Free movement of people is hellishly difficult to sell to someone who has no interest in getting free medical services in Poland but finds it hard to stomach that the three people in front of him in the doctors surgery queue are Polish mothers with their children.
the other justification for free movement – that it dilutes nationalism and makes war more difficult was articulated by the late Peter Sutherland before a House of Lords committee. Their Lordships spat the dummy so no wonder the abjectly run Remain campaign( Will Straw of that elite dynasty) did not dare put it forward in the campaign.
There are consolations to be had; political awareness will increase as a result of the public debate about the perilous future facing the UK and its reduced place in the world . And at a personal level I am pleased that what the mostly Northern working class have probably brought upon themselves will not be witnessed by my working class parents
Anon didn’t notice the 2014 elections for President of the Commission. Jean-Claude Juncker won this election. The candidate I voted for lost. The public debates of the candidates were on live TV across the EU. If Anon still thinks Jean-Claude Juncker was not elected, how does s/he account for this live broadcast : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhafgcPeXes ? Just because this election was ignored by all UK political parties and by all UK TV channels, doesn’t mean that it did not happen. I watched the debates and switched by vote from Martin Schultz to the Green candidate.
Thanks David. I think we have different understanding of the word democracy.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/eu-democratic-bandwagon-juncker-president-wanted
We hear these arguments a lot: that the working class (although really we mean a particular type of working class voter) backed Brexit because they were fed up with the status quo and that Remainers living in their middle class bubbles simply “don’t understand” that.
Well you’d be hard pressed to find many people who don’t “understand” this sentiment now. The problem is that understanding why people voted for something doesn’t mean you have to agree with it. People were upset with the status quo and voted for Brexit, despite the EU having little if anything to do with their actual problems and despite the fact Brexit will simply make their situation worse. That’s a pretty good argument for why having an EU referendum was a bad idea in the first place. The only reason this issue became a referendum on people’s happiness with the status quo is because it was convenient fodder for parties like UKIP, Eurosceptic politicians mainly in the Conservative Party, and journalists who long ago realised that stories about the EU “telling us what to do” and banning everything under the sun were a great way to sell more newspapers.
But more importantly than that, I also think we’re pushing a misrepresentation of why many people did vote Leave. The narrative that was pushed through the campaign was a convincing one if you know nothing about the EU. We were told that hundreds of millions of pounds were being sent to a corrupt foreign organisation that hates Britain. We were told that streams of immigrants were flooding into the country due to our EU membership, causing unemployment, spiraling crime, a housing crisis and terrorism, as well as undermining public services. We were told that our own parliament could no longer make its own laws because a group of foreign bureaucrats now had the power to dictate how we lived our lives, seemingly in almost every policy area. We were also told we could leave all of this, restore our sovereignty, cut immigration and get richer at the same time.
Almost all of that was complete nonsense, cobbled together from willfully misleading soundbites, myths, exaggerations and lies. But it was convincing in comparison to the other side of the argument so people voted for it. The arguments mattered as much as the underlying sentiments and we’re actually doing Leave voters a disservice by suggesting they were all simply casting a glorified protest vote. A great many people in this country now passionately believe Brexit is going to lead to a great revival of the country. When that fails to materialise I don’t expect they’ll be any more happy with the status quo than they are now.
Very right and very well written. Thank you
The idea that millions of people (working class or not) voted to leave the EU because they were told lies is laughable, these people can see what is happening around them and to their communities and country. Yes some of the people who have come to Britain from other EU member countries have come to work in skilled jobs, are making a valuable contribution to our economy and are integrating into the local community, but there are many more who are not doing any of those things and are a net drain on the economy, as well as placing a burden on public services, the housing stock, transport, the NHS etc. A sizeable proportion of those EU migrants who have come here to work are in low paid employment, they are here to send money back home and live as cheaply as possible here in order to maximise the amount they can send and are competing with British citizens for those jobs.
Your comment starts off by saying it’s laughable anyone voted to leave on the basis of misleading campaigning. You’ve then listed some points that are frankly misleading, but which you seem to believe.
You’ve said EU immigrants are a “net drain on the economy”. There’s no basis for that statement in existing research. The most relevant studies find EU immigrants are a net benefit to the public finances (i.e. their contribution is higher than what they take out in terms of using public services/public spending). Dustmann and Frattini is the gold standard here and it simply doesn’t tally with what you’ve said. Among the logical reasons for this are that migrants who come to the UK at a working age are contributing to the economy without having gone through childhood/education in the UK (i.e. we get all the benefits from them as workers without having to pay to educate them).
And these calculations include what they take out in their use of public services. An immigrant who makes a net contribution to the economy isn’t making public services worse in this calculation, they’re increasing the potential funding available. Your final mischaracterisation is more of an old-fashioned stereotype rather than an argument: the idea immigrants flock here to maximise their earnings, live cheaply, and send money back home. It’s also quite badly out of date given real wages have been falling in the UK since the pound’s collapse. The UK is now an economy with high living costs and mediocre to poor wages. Immigration will likely fall for this reason alone even if we don’t go through with Brexit.
All in all, the factual accuracy of your comment here is pretty lacking and you haven’t provided any evidence to back up those claims that could at least be debatable. It’s certainly not a ringing endorsement of your principle that nobody was duped into voting for Brexit. If people voted leave for the reasons you’ve given here then that’s absolutely a case of them doing so on the basis of misleading information.
My net feeling is that David Cameron is the greatest traitor in British history. The naivety, ignorance of society in 21st Century Britain and gross failure of leadership he showed in risking the inevitable protest vote enabled encouraged (only a little encouragement was needed) by lying ego maniacs trying to boost their own status is stunning. All this to solve a relatively minor tribal dispute Cameron couldn’t face is still appalling. Trump is diplomatic genius beside Cameron. The laziness, sloppiness and arrogance that lost Clinton the Presidency matches Cameron’s disgraceful failure to lead with all of this hinging on greed and inequity nationally and internationally. Who could blame the poorer people hitting back when they get a clear chance. Democracy is working the issue is the questions asked of the people are put bereft of leadership and based on arrogant ignorance (heads in the sand of the drawing rooms) in the pre-existing establishment.
Very interesting article.
My wife is a GP in central Southampton in an area of great deprivation and large scale immigration from mainly Middle East and Asia, many asylum seekers plus some EU migrants. The differences in educational and prosperity levels between the various migrant communities are huge and impossible to gloss over.
The waiting room has signs up to discourage racist and threatening comments and behaviour. There is general agreement in waiting room chatter that the vote represents a view on the strains on public services created by immigration. The area is not well off, and has limited investment. But it is very clear what type of immigration concerns people and drove the vote, and it was nothing much to do with the EU.
Nobody denies that the Brexit referendum got working-class people involved and discussing politics actively (the turn-out shows that). The article seems to support the view that people treat referendums, whatever the precise subject, as an opportunity to pass judgement on the government (in this case protesting against austerity policies). There are three other main reasons for voting Leave, among all classes, and it would be interesting to get some studies into the relative percentages:
– nationalism (disliking taking instructions from abroad on principle);
– wanting to reduce immigration.
– believing the Leave campaign’s promise of more money for the NHS.
However, it is possible that many working-class people voted in a way that will make them personally poorer (through rising prices or losing their job). For those feeling that they have nothing to lose, then voting Leave was simply a case of kicking the entire political class where it hurts.
I liked the article until the last comment about blue passports which I hope was tongue in cheek. Having voted Remain I run a business which today is investing in the EU27 because of Brexit. It makes me terribly sad that this is the case as without Brexit the investment would have been in the UK. I know several other businesses beginning to do the same and while individually none of these investments are huge together these investments will change the UK making it poorer. As we were before being a member of the EEC the UK will begin to fall behind our EU partners. Already the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights is to be excluded. Already the UK Government claims credit for EU legislation (on credit cards and the environment) that we would not have done without them. Already the UK is with Italy at the bottom of the growth league in the EU. It is just the beginning.
very good article and worthwhile research – perhaps its because it backs my own experience of listening to weekly commuters on the 7.18 train from KC to Sunderland for the last 15 years.
its a tragedy that the folk who voted to leave in order to be noticed will probably continue to be ignored
This is an interesting article but it does nothing to dispel the idea about turkeys and Christmas. What the author is arguing has basically nothing to do with the EU at all. It is about reasons for working class people to protest against the way the UK has been governed over the past couple of decades. That may be the case, but as an EU citizen who studied at the LSE and Oxford and who would like the UK to be some part of the European future, all I can say to an article like this is, well, by all means get on with the psycho-social issues that are affecting the country, but at the end of the day it would be useful to understand what kind of relationship you want with the EU. This article offers nothing in that respect, and nor does it help us to understand the civil war in the Conservative Party which is where the UK’s European future is being played out.
I understand Lisa McKenzie’s argument perfectly but I have to agree with Max Johnson’s analysis of why a particular sector of the British population voted the way they did. Certain tabloid newspapers did all they could to ensure that their anger and dissatisfaction was directed towards the EU and leaving is certainly going to make their situation worse. Without the grants from the EU many of the poorer areas of the country will be worse off. What we need is not less EU but less investment in the south (rail infrastructure for example) fewer vanity projects like HS2 which will benefit few apart from HS2 Ltd, and more investment in these poorer areas. Not just the north and east; some rural areas too suffer from very high housing costs and few jobs viz Cornwall.
Let’s hope it’s not too late to negotiate a Brexit which will not write off Britain for the foreseeable future. The Labour Party, which has been hitherto useless in this context, needs to get behind this immediately.
in response to Christine
this is true . I saw a billboard publicising an EU grant in the Cumbrian market town of Kirkby Stephen just before the referendum. It had been defaced. Cumbria voted for Brexit; will it get grants from Westminster once we leave? I somehow doubt it
Interesting article which corroborates a lot of what I have heard myself. The irony is that one of the main strategies of the EU was to increase the investment in and to uplift the economies of the poorer parts of EU, so as to promote stability. But whilst the UK government went along with this, it didnt do enough to increase standards of living within the UK.
So the EU was blamed for the shortcomings of successive UK governments.
My own view is that far from things not being able to get worse, Brexit will lead to a poorer UK.
I really get – and sympathise with – Leavers who voted because they couldn’t bear things to remain the same. I also agree there was value in the protest vote that produced the successful Leave result. Perhaps policymakers will now consider these people more.
But the fact remains that Brexit is very likely to change things for the worse and the people who will suffer most of all need to be warned that they may have blamed the wrong thing. So, why isn’t Labour making a concerted effort to show working-class Leave voters that it isn’t the EU that’s been wrecking the country but the government? Much of the discontent and hopelessness that pushed so many towards Leave can persuasively be blamed on the Tories (austerity) and their friends (bankers particularly) and Labour could not only win back these voters but also make a softer Brexit position (or, better still, a no-Brexit position)considerably more popular by telling this story and persuading working-class Leavers that they blamed the wrong thing for their woes.
It was not just all working class people who voted Brexit, many of the Brexiteers are the ‘upper/middle class who have instigated the lies and misinformation on the supposed disadvantages of being an open Britain within a large economic trading area. This was largely a folly of the Conservative elite led by David Cameron and Co, wanting to ensure they remain in power and also one helped by the absence or ineffective opposition parties such as the Labour leadership in not providing credible counter-facts. There are many in society who have/are working towards a fair and just society and that comes from taking personal ownership of ones situation and not one which expects a right to have facilities provided by Government/State as free. In the end all these services are paid for by all taxpayers – from all classes be they young, old, working, middle or so-called upper class! The above article seems to be skewed as if all working class people wanted Brexit….
“People were interested, and argued about the finer points of the EU” – Lisa, I would be really interested in some specific examples of what these “finer points” were that you observed being discussed.
Sorry, but the same tired, self-pitying excuses from “salt of the earth” working class Brexit voters. I’m rural middle class, whose mum never worked, father always did, went to grammar school, pure WASP from Lincolnshire. Let me tell you my and my middle class contemporaries’ privileged background: plunged into the worst recession since the Great Depression under Thatcher; no staying at home near mum and dad for us: grotty flatshres and squats in the roughest areas of London, often doing menial jobs way under our abilities (because local Londoners like Sally &Co wouldn’t do: secretarial, cleaning, nannying, caring or gruelling apprenticeships into the professions….. only to find the 1992 crash wiped them out. In my case retained as a TEFL teacher in my forties and had to travel the world to find work to pay my interest only mortgage after being made redundant. £30k negative equity so my private pension has gone, as well as my savings. And you know what? When I return to Humberside, ALL the jobs, production and professional, are being more than ably done by our wonderful EU colleagues. Bringing income, money, tax, work ethic and ambition to our dying communities. And the response? Send them all home. Well, folks, just wait when it happens. I’ve moved abroad for good and so are most of my young relatives.
One of the very few rational articles by someone who “gets it”. Middle class Remain voters are consoling themselves that Leavers were “lied to” but most Leavers needed no advice whatsoever to know how they were going to vote. Twenty-plus years of being told to shut up and go away saw to that, and I for one am loving this middle class Miners’ Strike!
I would like to point out that it was not working class voters delivering Brexit. It was UK’s middle class.
See prof. Bhambra’s excellent Tedx Talk on the matter, link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkBnkBT_x-M
Furthermore, simple glance at the current (or past) polls confirms this indisputable fact. About 70% of Tory voters back hard Brexit. Only 23% of Labor voters do so. I believe Labor is still representing the working class people.
Please, stop spreading this false narrative about Brexit roots. It was UK’s white middle class voters, bulk of which were English pensioners.
Many of us abstained on principle, some of us voted leave because:
The worst possible outcome would have been a narrow remain vote, business as usual for the tory party, UKIP and the fash. There would have been a significant right-wing backlash capable of drawing on popular anger. Meanwhile a gloating Dave Cameron (remember him?) would pander to it by being extremely unpleasant to non-EU ‘non white’ migrants.
We regard European political union as a white supremacist project, promoting the global hegemony not just of European culture but of North Western European culture. Southern Europeans have always been second class, consider the treatment of Greek workers by the EU.
The EU was hastily constructed when the European powers began to lose their empires – and how the British ruling class scrambled to get in as its last dominoes fell.
Ask agricultural workers in the Southern hemisphere what they think.
We can’t condone any entity that enshrines private property and the enforcement of debt in its constitution.
Any collusion between ruling classes is against our interests, we’d rather fight in a phone box than a field.
We want an end to the European arrest warrant.
We remember how the British bourgeoisie marshalled its tame media to swing the vote last time round (and watched with glee as the leave campaign tried to throw the game this time).
We knew full well the politicians couldn’t deliver ‘brexit’ and we wanted to watch our enemies beating each other up, saves us the bother. Careers have been ruined, fortunes lost, representative politics utterly discredited and bankrupt – and there’s still no end to it!
With a push and a shove the UK and the EU could break up, Scotland could be independent, Britain lose its last colony in Ireland and the sun finally sets on its empire.
Give us a spanner and we’ll chuck it, thanks, be rude not to.
Are we stupid then?