GRIMSBY, United Kingdom — More than three years after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, the important questions have yet to be answered.
Not just how Britain will leave, or when, or even whether it should — though incredibly all of these remain unresolved. But also why it chose to do so.
It’s a question that’s still unresolved despite a sea of focus groups and opinion polls, despite a swamp of articles about distant elites and “left behinds.” Everyone has a theory, normally one that fits their world view — on immigration, on austerity, on sovereignty or whatever else.
But can any of them really explain why one of my older mates got himself registered, got out of his house and went and voted for the very first time in June 2016 (It was also his last trip to the ballot box, he said. “I’m 1-0 up and I’m quitting while I’m ahead.”)
We’d never even heard him mention the EU before. And there were millions like him. Friends of Dominic Cummings say the Brexit referendum was the first time the campaign director for Vote Leave and now chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson cast a ballot.
Why? What on earth happened?
Obviously, Britain’s hopeless train service didn’t actually trigger the Leave vote. But it might be indicative of a something broader.
Clues can be found in the soaraway success of Cummings’ greatest work, a campaign slogan that resonated more strongly than any other in modern British political history: “Take back control.”
Instead of spending three years throwing rocks at one another about backstops and people’s votes, the political class would have been wise to do a little more thinking about just why Cummings’ slogan worked so well.
Across the rest of Europe too, it feels like little of the hard thinking has been done. It’s so much easier to blame lying Brexiteers than to consider why 17 million people in one of the bloc’s richest member states were so disillusioned with the carefully constructed Union that they preferred a leap into the unknown.
Of course, Brexit is complicated. People voted Leave for a multitude of reasons. But we do know one thing for sure: Whatever other motives they might have had, the British people voted to take back control.
Three years on, is anybody doing anything about it?
Disconnect
Two weeks touring Brexit-voting constituencies for London Playbook was never going to provide a pat answer, nor an easy solution to where we go from here. But it did offer up some nice lines to chuck into the bubbling pot.
My favorite came from Melanie Onn, the Remain-voting MP for the Brexit-backing port of Grimsby.
She grew up in the town; all her family live there; she knows the place inside out. Her theory is that when people voting to leave cast their ballots against the distant elites, their target was actually much closer to home.
“Before I became MP here, I remember talking to people about how they felt things were stacked against them, a sense of unfairness,” she told me.
“You can’t get to see anybody face to face any more,” she said. “Everything is done remotely, and there is a frustratingly long process of being put on hold, or you have to go through the internet, which was a bit of a battle for lots of people.
“And I think that fed all the way through, whether it was their council, their bank, their GP, their electric company,” she said. “Or whether it was their politicians.”
“And the EU symbolized all of that remoteness — decisions being made on their behalf they didn’t have any sense of connection to whatsoever,” she continued. “Even if the rules the EU brought in were relatively inconsequential to their lives, it didn’t matter. They were making decisions that they felt should have been made closer to home and that they should have had some say over in some way.”
Angry and angsty
I was pondering Onn’s call-center theory while stuck on yet another overcrowded train across England a few days later.
I stopped writing about every dire train journey in my daily Playbook dispatches because eventually it gets boring. But regular readers will know they were a dominant feature of the two-week tour.
Popular perception here is the problem is all about delays. But it’s not — it’s the multiple cancellations of services people depend on; it’s the tiny little train crammed with far too many passengers, making everybody’s journey miserable.
After I’d made this point in Playbook for the umpteenth time, a WhatsApp message arrived from a long-time reader up north: “Theory: Brits are angry and angsty (see binge drinking and violence) because they have to suffer awful public transport experiences daily.” “I was just reading Playbook on a tiny, jam-packed, hot and stuffy, two-carriage Pacer train (around 30 years old) — you know the type with the benches that bounces around,” the message continued. “I’d also been hoping to do some work on the way home … no chance. Instead you just get angry and arrive feeling grim. No wonder everyone’s depressed. And the alternative is sitting in traffic!”
Obviously, Britain’s hopeless train service didn’t actually trigger the Leave vote. But it might be indicative of a something broader, something Cummings tapped into with such great effect.
What could be more symbolic of an out-of-control era than the sight of Chris Grayling, the (now former) transport secretary, sitting before an elected body of MPs following a total network failure, calmly telling them he is not in charge of the railways?
There is no “taking back control” of your daily commute. Somewhere, a faceless civil servant has agreed a complex contract with a multinational transport company. Your train driver is as angry and as helpless as you are. There’s no alternative, and no way out. No wonder people are angry.
Local concerns
There is plenty the national government could do. Leave-voting Bradford has a council leader, Susan Hinchliffe, working night and day to bring her city up to speed with its wealthier (and Remain-voting) neighbors Leeds and Manchester. But she needs the tools to do it.
A city center stop on the proposed new Leeds-Manchester rail line is essential to trigger real urban regeneration, she told me. But she is reduced to begging the Department for Transport to see sense.
Civic leaders across Yorkshire would love to take back control; but for all the talk, meaningful devolution never reached these parts. And, of course, it’s not just trains. From North Yorkshire to North Shropshire, I heard about campaigns to have key roads widened which have gone on for decades.
The lack of capacity is holding back economic development in areas that urgently need it. Yet nothing ever happens. Again, they are reduced to begging Westminster for support.
The Treasury’s inflexible approach to project funding — the dreaded “green book” — was raised time and again by local politicians.
Whitehall officials use this well-meaning system for cost-benefit analyses to ensure value for money and maximize GDP growth. The trouble is that it inevitably favors wealthier, more highly populated areas — basically London and the South East.
The sense of frustration is palpable when you speak to business leaders in other regions about this stuff — they are seething. They look at the £18 billion Crossrail project being built across London and then read about developing plans for Crossrail 2, and they get angrier still.
Ghost towns
Another issue that came up time and again as I spoke to MPs and people in struggling towns around England was the state of the high street: boarded-up shops; rows of bookies and vape stores where there used to be a bustling town center.
In Westminster, this kind of stuff is far down the priority list. But in much of the country, it’s something people talk about all the time. It’s hard to see how the EU can be blamed — take a look instead at a flatlining economy and the rise of internet shopping. But it plays into a sense of declining civic pride, a feeling that things are not as good as they used to be.
There are efforts to push back against the decline. In the Pennine town of Halifax, local MP Holly Lynch showed me how a series of major regeneration projects have transformed the town center and brought tourists flocking in. People feel the place is on the up.
But in south Wales coalfield towns like Port Talbot and Blaenavon, in Yorkshire’s more down-at-heel centers like Bradford and Grimsby, the opposite is true.
Many saw it as their first opportunity to affect real change, and they may well have been right.
Local politicians showed me their big ideas — a regeneration project in Bradford, a ports revival in Grimsby, a cutting-edge art gallery in Port Talbot — but they do not have the power or the funding to implement them without serious Westminster support.
Sometimes it is forthcoming; mostly it is not. The dynamic leaves these towns at the mercy of market forces that have proven an incredible force for development and wealth creation overall, but which can leave people in struggling areas feeling utterly powerless when the tide turns against them.
There’s a more fundamental issue, too, about trying to build up well-paid jobs in places where the industries of the 19th and 20th centuries have been lost.
Speak to the handful of engineering firms paying decent wages in low-pay places like Scarborough and they will tell you that training up local skills is key to their growth.
But there are few issues less glamorous on the political agenda. Neither Westminster nor Fleet Street seem to care. Again, local leaders say local control over training budgets is needed, to drive the workforce in a targeted direction. Some areas are making progress; others are not.
Unaccountable elites
None of this is to suggest the Brexit vote was not a vote against the EU. Of course, it was. People know an unaccountable elite when they see one and are happy to vote against it, regardless of whether they actually care about the rules governing “standards of paint,” as Melanie Onn puts it.
Many saw it as their first opportunity to affect real change, and they may well have been right.
Back in Leave-supporting North Shropshire, the Brexiteer MP Owen Paterson has a story he loves to tell about the day of the Brexit vote.“On polling day, I saw the returning officer and asked him how it was going,” Paterson told me. “He said, ‘It’s extraordinary.’ I asked why. He said, ‘I’ve just never seen anything like it. It’s quite unlike any election we’ve ever had. We’ve just never seen such numbers.’”
In Leave-supporting North Shropshire, the Brexiteer MP Owen Paterson, tells an anecdote about constituents casting ballots for the first time on the day of the Brexit vote | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The official told Paterson how he literally had to show people how to vote. “‘They’ve never done it before,’ Paterson was told. “They don’t know what to do.’”
Paterson headed to a polling station to see for himself. “I was there with my Vote Leave stickers on, and people were going in stern faced, but they were coming out beaming, ‘We did it!’,” he recalled. “And the best bit at the end was these guys coming off a building site. Boots covered in dust. No messing around. ‘Good to see you Mr. Paterson, good to see you.’
“And then one of them said: ‘It’s about them, isn’t it?’’ And he’s pointing outside. ‘It’s about them.’ I said sorry, who’s them?’
‘It’s about them. You can’t do anything about them. They tell you what to do. We can get rid of you Mr. Paterson. But we can’t get rid of them.’”
Paterson shrugged. “And in my view, it was as simple as that,” he said.
Give back control
There’s nothing simple about Brexit, of course, as the past three years have conclusively shown.
But as the nation gears up for a final battle to the death over how and indeed whether Britain leaves the EU, all sides of this ugly debate need to start thinking seriously about this promise of control.
Brexit, assuming it happens, can be used to reset the clock on some of Britain’s ailments, but it’s going to take bravery and imagination from national politicians and, crucially, a willingness to give away much of the power — the control — they spent their lifetime grasping to achieve.
The Whitehall machine clings tightly to the levers of state — the Treasury, the department for transport, the ministry of housing, communities and local government are all complicit.
How many politicians win power only to give it away?
By accident or design, Cummings struck a nerve with the British public like few campaigners before him.
Whatever the outcome now — hard Brexit or soft; Leave or Remain — it is time for politicians to deliver.
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