Brexit Reveals A Deeply Divided Britain

All night, I watched the referendum results rolling in. The BBC relayed the results live, color-coding the decisions on a map of the UK. Yellow for Remain, blue for Leave.  As district after district announced its decision to Leave the European Union, the map slowly turned blue.

As dawn broke, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage, claimed victory. “This is a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people. We fought against the multinationals, the merchant bankers and big politics”, he said. “Let June 23rd go down in history as our Independence Day”.

But the truth is very different. This was not a victory for “real people” against “the establishment”. Nor was it an angry British population lashing out against its oppressors. No, the truth is that this was a victory of some groups of British people over other groups. It was a victory of the old over the young: rural and coastal dwellers over city dwellers: the old industrial heartlands over the upstart London: England over Scotland. Brexit has revealed deep rifts in the social fabric of the UK. The referendum ripped the sticking plaster off the gaping wounds that are the legacy of the Thatcher years. The United Kingdom can no longer claim to be united.

The cracks were already showing long before the referendum. UKIP had been growing in popularity for several years, particularly in coastal and rural areas where concern over immigration and anger at the EU’s many policy failures are at their highest. The area where I live, Rochester & Strood, briefly elected a UKIP member of Parliament in a high-profile by-election, though we threw him out at the General Election six months later. UKIP supporters were easily recognizable: middle-aged and elderly working-class men, the kind who sit drinking beer in the Working Men’s Club in Strood and moan about immigration, bankers, employers and – above all – the EU. Older women, too, who chat in the supermarkets about the cost of living and how they can’t get appointments at the local health center because of the immigrants. The referendum gave these people a chance to go beyond merely complaining that “Britain is going to the dogs”. For once, they could act to change it. And they did.

The EU is their scapegoat, a proxy for everything that they hate. Petty laws telling them what they can and can’t do, such as the EU’s recent decision to control e-cigarettes. Taxes, particularly the hated Value Added Tax (VAT): most recently, what was seen as the EU’s imposition of VAT on women’s sanitary products helped to fuel the Brexit campaign. And above all, immigrants. Immigrants from Eastern Europe coming here because of the EU’s free movement of people policy, taking our jobs, undercutting our wages, living in our houses, sending their children to our schools, clogging up the health service. Refugees from the Middle East coming here because the EU can’t control its borders, threatening our security and ruining our culture.