It was not much more than a year ago. The result of the EU referendum was still being pored over, and the political moment seemed to be all about two things: a view of much of the leave vote as a cry of pain and resentment from parts of the country beyond London, and the urgent need to do something. Journalists were still being dispatched to the supposed Brexit heartlands; among politicians, the idea was that now that such places as south Wales, the east of England, the Midlands and the non-urban north had spoken so loudly that their deep problems were finally going to be addressed.

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If you want a taste of what was briefly afoot, have a look at the text of Theresa May’s Conservative conference speech from October 2016, delivered in the days when she was still in the business of strong and stable leadership and her backdrops did not collapse, both literally and metaphorically. She used the word “revolution” four times. “In June people voted for change,” she said. “And a change is going to come … this is a turning point for our country.”

She did not mean this only in terms of our exit from the EU: the referendum, she said, was nothing less than a “call for a change in the way our country works – and the people for whom it works – forever”. Among other things, there was to be “an economic and cultural revival of all of our great regional cities”, while the power of government would be placed “squarely at the service of ordinary working-class people”, and the gap between “the wealth of London and the rest of the country” would be narrowed.

Now, as her government decays, most of her words read like the founding statement of a project that never was. Clearly, even if most of the people who voted for Brexit still seem convinced that it was the right thing to do, there are few signs of any changes to the places where they live. Quite the reverse, in fact. Though the creation of the capital’s beloved £15bn Crossrail continues apace, plans to modernise railway lines in Wales, Yorkshire, the Midlands and Cumbria have all been shelved. Philip Hammond has promised train services in the north a derisory extra £300m (by way of comparison, the cost of HS2 is put at £400m per mile).

Meanwhile, the austerity imposed on city and local government carries on, and the loudest sound coming from the most neglected parts of the country is the great howl of pain arising from the government’s cruel changes to the benefits system. The Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil became something of a byword for Brexit, and it seems just as symbolic of what has happened since: universal credit will arrive there next March, and the local council is facing at least another two years of cuts. Not that far away in Newport, Gwent, where 56% of people voted to leave the EU, the council leader also happens to be the head of the Welsh Local Government Association.

The only rebalancing … will be London becoming a bit less rich thanks to the downsizing of the City

“Services are wearing down to the point of collapse, and the public are rightly growing frustrated in terms of paying council tax and yet seeing key community functions cut or closed,” Debbie Wilcox says. “The whole position is unsustainable.”

At the heart of all this is the political irony that defines our times: that the very thing so many places voted for makes any attempt at their area’s revival even less likely. The only economic rebalancing that looks set to arise from Brexit will be London becoming a bit less rich thanks to the downsizing of the City. The Herculean effort needed to even begin meaningful negotiations is so consuming to the machinery of government that it clearly has no capacity for anything else.

And just look at this week’s Brexit headlines: news that £500m has already been spent on preparing to leave the EU, that next year’s outlays will be about £1m a day, and that the number of extra civil servants who will be needed to deal with our departure is now put at 8,000. Imagine if all that money and effort were devoted to a policy aimed at reversing the country’s long decline and thinking creatively about the future.

That mess of contradictions might look like good news for the people who think Brexit has to be overturned. But in the context of the places that ensured that leave had a majority, they have their own set of problems.

Whenever I spend time in Brexit-supporting areas, a few questions usually rattle through my mind. In the 17 months since the vote, has the coalition of forces – Labour and Tory remainers, Liberal Democrats, Greens – that now demands it is nullified given any serious thought to why so much of the country failed to heed its warnings, and continues to ignore them, even as promises go unmet, and Brexit grows dangerous and ever more complex? Do they have any kind of offer to leave voters in neglected places, beyond a second referendum and a return to the pre-2016 status quo? And hand on heart: if you are one of those people for whom a remain vote is now a matter of deep personal identity, has your view of the average Brexit supporter progressed much beyond a lazy caricature of Little Englander nastiness?

Even if the prime minister has failed to make good on her promises of a rebalanced country, the Brexit moment embodies one aspect of her vision: the fact that, for the first time in decades, people and places that were long overlooked – sneered at, even – now sit at the core of our national politics. Though the Labour party’s acceptance of Brexit and its failure to come up with much of an alternative might seem maddening, its position on the EU is not just down to the Eurosceptic instincts of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Clearly, it is also locked into its position by the fact that most of the constituencies it holds – seven out of 10, according to credible estimates – voted to leave Europe, and the assumption that a critical number of the people who live in them are still of the opinion that Brexit has to happen, no matter what.

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If you want to be patronising about it, you could take the view that all this is down to the lies of the leave campaign and a mess of nastiness surrounding immigration. But from a more enlightened perspective, it might be more instructive to understand a lot of support for leave as the climax of years of decline, neglect and condescension – and something that is hardly going to be abandoned in a hurry.

Forget, for a moment, all that noise about the fine details of the negotiations or whatever Liam Fox has said recently about chicken, and think about how the politics of Brexit will actually play out. If the government’s weak grip on power offers the chance of renewed questioning of where the country is headed, some of the answer will arise from those remain-supporting MPs who now reluctantly back leaving the EU out of fear of their leave-voting constituents.

Will those voters change their minds? If there is a contrast between the promises of national revival made only a year ago and the lack of action since, a lot will hang on whether that discrepancy has any traction, or collides with people’s ingrained fatalism and fades away. Just as much will depend on the trade-off between economic damage and a deep belief in national sovereignty that runs much deeper among working-class leave supporters than some people would like to think. The future suddenly pivots on Merthyr and Mansfield, Walsall and Blackburn: symbolic of these unexpected, upturned times.