BEING a Eurosceptic in a university city is a lonely business. In the drizzle outside the Cambridge Union a student in a roll-neck is trying to hand anti-EU leaflets to the cliques hurrying past. Most ignore him. One, having taken a folded piece of card, glances at it and sighs “nah”, shoving it back into the campaigner’s hand. Inside, in the neo-Gothic chamber, pro-EU luminaries ply their arguments to cheers. When Richard Tice, an anti-EU campaigner, delivers his speech students bob up and down, machine-gunning him rebarbative questions. Did regulation not exist before Britain joined the union? Why do so many firms support membership? If Britain doesn’t control its borders why do foreign students struggle to get visas? When Mr Tice quotes “the highly respected economist, Tim Congdon” (a notorious Eurosceptic) the chamber resounds to laughter and sarcastic applause.

This attitude is not limited to Cambridge’s student population. A recent debate among residents produced an even more overwhelming pro-EU vote: about 300 to six, reports Julian Huppert, a former local MP. The city’s exceptionalism is borne out by a ranking, produced by Chris Hanretty and other political scientists using polling and demographic data, of parliamentary seats in England, Scotland and Wales by their level of Euroscepticism. Cambridge came 619th of 632 with an estimated Out vote of merely 27%. Compare that with Peterborough, a similarly sized city at the other end of Cambridgeshire. At a public debate there locals voted decisively in favour of Brexit. “I asked rhetorically what the audience would put at risk to leave the EU,” recalls Mr Huppert. “They shouted back: ‘Everything’.” Sure enough, it came 49th on the ranking, with a projected 62% voting Out.

Which is curious and especially relevant today (as The Economist went to press David Cameron was in Brussels, hoping to finalise his EU renegotiation ahead of an in-out referendum). Cambridge and Peterborough are in the same part of the country. Both are about an hour by train from cosmopolitan London, are growing fast, have younger-than-average populations and mostly white-collar workforces. Both benefit from EU funds. And according to the census in 2011 they have a near-identical share of residents born in other EU countries—around one in ten. Yet one is a bastion of Europhilia, the other of Euroscepticism.

The walk outwards from both cities’ centres adumbrates the difference. In Cambridge the route cuts through Victorian terraces housing academics, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves glimpsed through bay windows. It skirts the city’s airport, where a near-daily flight from Gothenburg ferries in AstraZeneca executives. And it ends in a belt of commercial labs and high-tech business parks. In Peterborough, the stroll takes in new middle-class suburbs serving the city’s booming retail and logistics industries, streets where betting shops, pubs and hair salons mingle with Polish delis and supermarkets and finally vegetable fields (often worked by eastern European migrants) stretching out into the flat, big-skied fenland. Thus just as Cambridge bears the hallmarks of an economy in which one in two has gone to university, Peterborough is visibly a city of school-leavers.

When it comes to the EU, this difference is everything. Education levels are “an extremely strong predictor” of an individual’s views on the subject, stresses Robert Ford, an expert on public opinion: the more qualifications someone has, the more pro-European he or she is likely to be. According to polls by YouGov, those educated only to 16 oppose EU membership by 57% to 43%, but among graduates it is 38% to 62%. When education is controlled for, other factors affecting an individual’s views on Europe—like income, choice of newspaper and even age—diminish.

What is it about those five years of study between 16 and 21? The answer has two parts. First, the self-interested one. “Having a degree is increasingly a prerequisite of getting on in life,” observes Mr Ford, adding: “Both sides are aware that there is a drawbridge called university and that those who don’t get across it are disadvantaged.” In other words, the mighty churn of global economic integration, of which the EU is both cause and symptom, disproportionately benefits the well educated and can leave those in unskilled jobs feeling left behind.

The second, cultural driver mostly concerns immigration. Whereas many in Cambridge see incomers as highly educated Germans and Swedes bringing their expertise to research projects, startups and product-development meetings, in Peterborough they are Lithuanian potato-pickers who, if not competing with locals for unskilled work, are at least nipping at their heels. Anyone who expresses “intense concern” about immigration is 15 times more likely to back Brexit, notes Matthew Goodwin, a political scientist. This spills into questions of identity. People without higher education are more likely to call themselves English than British; the former label—much stronger in Peterborough than Cambridge—functions as a badge of perceived exclusion.

Two-nation Britain

In the long term, this bodes well for pro-Europeans. University attendance has exploded, which suggests that Britain will become more internationalist and comfortable with EU co-operation. Yet in the meantime it seems the country will be increasingly polarised: liberal, Cambridge-like places on the one side; nationalist, Peterborough-like ones on the other and an ever-shrinking middle ground between the two, as the population bifurcates into those whose skills make them globally competitive and those who must compete with robots and the mass workforces of the emerging economies. Democracy—especially in a system as centralised and majoritarian as that of Britain—assumes some common premises and experiences, a foundation that thanks to the great educational-cultural divide is now at risk. Eventually Britain will look more like Cambridge than it does today. But until then decades of division and mutual alienation await.

Economist.com/blogs/bagehot