Wendy McDonald is worried that the referendum is stirring up what she calls ‘the r-word’.

As the daughter of a man who sailed to Britain on the Empire Windrush — the ship that brought the first postwar immigrants from the Caribbean in 1948 — any prospect of racial tensions appals her.

But you won’t hear Wendy blaming Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson or others in the Brexit campaign. In her opinion, the culprit is obvious: the European Union and the Remain brigade. ‘It’s the EU that breeds this resentment,’ she tells me. ‘I’m afraid it is creating racism. The sooner we’re out of it, the better.’

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People in the North of England feel disenfranchised when it comes to their concerns over Europe being heard

Having worked in social housing in the Greater Manchester area for 20 years, Wendy says she knows only too well how community cohesion is eroded when, for example, a family from Eastern Europe gets given a terrace house by the council ahead of a local lad who is left to ‘sleep outside Asda’ night after night.

‘That’s not a racist issue for me. It’s a simple question of how we are supposed to carry on letting in more and more people if we can’t house them all.’

It is a view shared by huge numbers of voters just like Wendy who live here in a part of Britain which many believe is fast driving this country towards the EU exit — the Labour heartlands of the North.

These are people who don’t just feel patronised. When it comes to their concerns about Europe, they feel disenfranchised. For there is no other part of the country where you find voters quite so divorced from the people elected to represent them on this key issue.

Yesterday, former Labour leader Ed Miliband gave a perfect illustration of the chasm between the parliamentary party and so many of its ordinary supporters. Speaking on Radio 4, he refused to acknowledge a link between immigration and public services, insisting: ‘I don’t believe it’s immigration causing the problems in the NHS. I believe it is Jeremy Hunt [the Health Secretary] and David Cameron.’

And let’s not forget that Jeremy Corbyn has been criticised for blocking any mention of immigration in Labour’s referendum leaflet.

Out in the real world, meanwhile, the other EU referendum debate continues. It is a debate among people who aren’t listening to the views of the CBI or international panjandrums such as Christine Lagarde of the IMF or the Governor of the Bank of England, and who didn’t watch the latest two-hour TV debate because they had better things to do, like trying to find a GP.

It is a debate among millions of working-class people who don’t care what political party leaders have to say because, in their view, Westminster long ago forfeited their trust.

Pictured, young mothers with their prams on the Brinnington estate in Stockport, a town in the North of England - a supposed Labour heartland that is hoping for a Brexit

They see an ivory-towered elite telling them that the debate should be about the economy and not immigration — on pain of being labelled ‘racist’, as Labour frontbencher Pat Glass called an entire Derbyshire village the other day — when the voters themselves regard these key issues as one and the same thing.

And they certainly don’t see themselves as anti-immigrant.

That is hardly surprising. For here is a crucial point: many of them are from immigrant families themselves.

It’s enough to make a Hampstead liberal weep. But therein lies the problem.

After years of chattering among their own ilk around the scrubbed pine dinner tables of North London, the metropolitan grandees of the Labour Party have simply ignored the grumbles of their tiresome provincial supporters on one of the key issues of our age.

Only now are they are starting to realise their mistake. As former Labour Cabinet minister Andy Burnham put it this week: ‘We have definitely been far too much Hampstead and not enough Hull in recent times and we need to change that.’ But is it too late?

Two famously outspoken Labour MPs, Dennis Skinner and John Mann, clearly think so because, yesterday, both finally announced that they were declaring for Brexit.

Steven Wolfe UKIP MEP for the North West talks to Wendy McDonald while campaigning for Vote Leave

A Remain spokesman assures me they are not giving up, and that 600 volunteers will be organising 150 pro-EU events in the North this weekend.

So I have come to hear the debate in these supposedly solid Labour areas — but it should be said that there isn’t a great amount of debating going on. Because most people already seem to have made up their minds: to leave.

The main national media coverage is a diet of ‘blue-on-blue’ battles between the rival wings of the Tory Party, garnished with the occasional half-hearted mumble from Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn.

There will be a couple of photo-opportunities featuring the main players — usually involving hard hats or a titan of international finance — then it’s ‘back to the studio’ in London, where the usual commentators mull over who has scored the most points.

Most of this whistles straight over the heads of the people I am talking to here in Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire — such as carer Danny Lambert, 40, a lifelong Labour voter (except for 2010 when he flirted with the Lib Dems). ‘We need immigrants and we want them but we should be allowed to control it ourselves. That’s all there is to it. I’m Out,’ he says.

These folk couldn’t care less what Boris said about what Dave said about Nigel. Most of the people I meet have no time for the Tories and never did.

They are not greatly enamoured of Mr Corbyn, either, though they are quite glad he isn’t Tony Blair. In the main, they are just cheesed off with politics generally.

But this referendum is another matter. Because they feel energised and, by a very substantial margin, are charging for the EU exit. I am not merely surprised by the level of antipathy for the EU here. I am astonished.

Mr Wolfe talks to a local taxi driver as he hands out Brexit leaflets while campaigning in Stockport

According to received referendum wisdom, as dictated by the experts, old people are more likely to want to leave the EU, while younger people are more likely to want to stay and the middle-aged are wobblers.

According to my own straw poll in this part of the North, the old want to leave, the middle-aged want to leave and the young aren’t bothered. The challenge is finding anyone who is actually happy to speak up for the EU.

What makes this so striking is that this part of the electoral map is dominated by a party which, with a few exceptions, is overwhelmingly pro-EU.

You’d expect strong Euroscepticism in Tory areas. You’d certainly expect it along what I call the Ukip Riviera (from the Humber down to Kent, via the Essex stronghold of the party’s only MP in Clacton).

But in urban Yorkshire? On paper, it should be solid Euroland. Until Mr Mann’s defection yesterday, every Labour MP in this vast county supported staying in the EU. Now there is just one dissenter. Yet the people who voted all these MPs into office seem to be overwhelmingly opposed.

I come to the outskirts of Leeds. Vote Leave activist Bill Palfreman, 38, a UKIP supporter, is knocking on doors in the (staunchly Labour) streets around his home with Amy Green, 33, a paid-up member of the Conservative Party — and still a firm fan of David Cameron on all other matters. She says their little group frequently includes a few Labour Party members, too. ‘We’ve forged quite a few unlikely friendships,’ she explains.

These are back-to-back, red-brick terrace houses with no gardens and a surprising lack of cars. Children really do play in the streets. Quite a few front doors stand open. I walk down a road called Recreation Street, which looks just like ITV’s Coronation Street.

Bill, an IT expert, is renting in the area, having recently moved from his native Hull. His family were involved in the old fishing industry there. He still goes back to campaign at weekends. ‘In Hull, everyone is for Brexit. You can go 50 houses in a row and not find a single Remainer. Here it’s a bit more mixed,’ he says.

Hardly. In three streets, we find only two EU fans and one isn’t sure. One of the first doors we knock on is opened by Shahzad Mehmood, 37. Bill politely asks if he has given the referendum much thought. Shahzad looks faintly puzzled that there is any need for discussion. Of course he is for leaving.

Brexit campaigners Bill Palfreman and Amy Green hand out leaflets as they spread the word in Leeds

‘The most important thing you have is your sovereignty. So why do we elect people who then hide behind the unelected EU? This is a country which once ruled much of the world without the EU. What are we afraid of?’

Like Wendy McDonald, Pakistan-born Shahzad, who works for a well-known bank, believes the EU is discriminatory and breeds ill-feeling — among British-born people and Commonwealth migrants alike. He wants the sort of immigration points system proposed by the Leave camp.

‘Why discriminate against someone from Pakistan who has the right skills for a job which needs doing in favour of an unskilled person from another country who has no job to go to?’

Next door, a pensioner who won’t give her name says it would ‘take an earthquake’ to unseat the local MP, Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, whom she likes. What about Europe? ‘I think I’ll be No. We did well enough before we joined them and look what they’ve done to fishing.’

Round the corner, Theo Ocan, 50, is clearing out his delivery van. He migrated from Ghana to Italy in his youth, speaks fluent Italian and has an Italian passport. Then, three years ago, he moved to Leeds. Surely, as an EU citizen, he favours remaining in the EU? ‘What’s the point? The rest of Europe is just going down. All my friends in Italy think Britain should leave the EU. What are the positives?’

Finally, we find a fully fledged Remainer — in a pair of Union Jack shorts. ‘I will vote to stay because most of Europe is in the EU,’ says Neno, 32, a forklift driver. Unfortunately for the Remain camp, Neno cannot vote in this contest as he is Bulgarian (EU citizens can vote in local and European elections in the UK but not in this referendum).

The truth is, the experts should have spotted Labour voters’ Brexit leanings long ago.

At the last election, the UKIP vote shot up in these parts — by 15 per cent in this constituency alone. It certainly comes as no surprise to one of the area’s relatively few Tory MPs, pro-Brexiter Philip Davies.

He suggests that last year’s general election result in Scotland, where Labour’s historic dominance shrivelled to a single MP overnight, could be reflected in the June 23 result as ordinary Labour voters reject the party line outright.

He says: ‘You’ve now got a Labour leadership who wouldn’t know an ordinary working-class Northern voter if they fell over one.’

Bulgarian Leeds resident Nino is handed a Vote Leave leaflet (left) and Brexit UKIP MEP Mr Wolfe campaigns in Stockport

It may be a stereotype to refer to plain-talking Northern folk but it’s one they enjoy round here.

Last year’s general election campaign only really came to life after all the party leaders took a drubbing during a barnstorming TV debate in Leeds.

During the previous general election in 2010, it was a walkabout in Greater Manchester which provided a defining moment of the whole campaign.

Pensioner Gillian Duffy, from Rochdale — a Labour voter, let it be remembered — was the woman who took then prime minister Gordon Brown to task about immigration. After a microphone caught him muttering later that she was ‘bigoted’, his fortunes never recovered.

It is hardly surprising that Labour’s Northern heartlands are so anti-EU, says Dr Mark Baimbridge, senior economics lecturer at Bradford University and one of the authors of The Labour Case For Brexit.

‘EU enlargement, particularly in 2004 and 2007 with the admission of Central and Eastern European countries, impacted on the transfer of funds from the EU budget to economically depressed areas such as the North of England. [But] these funds have now essentially dried up,’ he says. ‘This will make economic regeneration a much harder and longer task.’

Across the Pennines, in Stockport town centre, I meet a local star of the Vote Leave campaign. Steven Woolfe, 48, grew up in a council house here, won a scholarship to a private school and became a high-flying barrister and hedge fund consultant in the City of London.

Two years ago, Steven, a former Labour activist, gave up the City to return home and stand — successfully — as a UKIP MEP for the North West. He is now the party spokesman on both financial affairs and migration.

Clearly one to watch, he has no truck with accusations that the Brexit camp is stirring up racism, being from a mixed-race background himself — black American on his father’s side and Irish on his mother’s.

He says the Vote Leave campaign has been hugely bolstered by what he calls ‘the new class divide in politics’. As he puts it: ‘It’s the coalition of the comfortable against those who are suffering the impact.’

Mr Wolfe talks to a PCSO and local people while campaigning for a Brexit in Stockport town centre

Two issues, he says, are driving Labour loyalists to the exit.

‘First, large-scale immigration has pushed down wages for working-class and lower middle-class voters — like members of my own family in the building trade. But the Labour Party say it’s nothing to do with immigration and all down to dodgy employers. Second, people see the pressure on public services. They know it’s related to immigration. But then the media and politicians tell them they’re stupid to think that.’

His team set up shop outside the main shopping centre. Confirmed Brexiteers, naturally, pause for a chat but I stop some of those who pass by. Most say they are undecided but veering towards Brexit. A police officer stops to talk to Steven. I assume she has found fault with his makeshift stall blocking a busy pavement. Instead, she wants to ask what Brexit would mean for cross-Channel border security. Steven tells her it would be much tougher. ‘Good luck,’ she says and walks off.

Town centre footfall, of course, can be misleading. I follow Steven and his team as they spend the afternoon in Brinnington, home to one of the poorest and largest estates in the district.

Young mums and beer-drinking youths are united in their complete lack of interest in the referendum. But at the local working men’s club, an older crowd have no doubts. ‘Out!’ they all cry. Above them, hanging in a frame in pride of place, is the front page of the Daily Herald announcing the historic 1945 election win by Labour hero Clement Attlee.