The constituency that Jamie Reed will soon no longer represent is a curious one. One of the biggest and most remote in England, Copeland covers 470 sq miles and takes in Keswick and the western Lake District fells, as well as 32 miles of Cumbrian coast, from Millom up to Whitehaven.

On paper, its inhabitants enjoy the third highest salaries in the UK – £721 a week, second only to the City of London and Tower Hamlets, according to the Office for National Statistics in 2015.

But visit Whitehaven, the largest town in the constituency, and the wealth is not obvious. Cafes advertise full Christmas dinners for a fiver and a few miles out of town is the Woodhouse estate, which is within the 3% most deprived wards nationally, where a three-bed terrace still costs just £60,000.

The reason for this disparity lies behind a big fence on a two sq mile site by the coastal village of Seascale: Sellafield, a nuclear fuel reprocessing and nuclear decommissioning site where the Windscale nuclear power station once stood. About 10,000 people are directly employed there, with thousands more in the supply chain, many in highly skilled engineering and scientific jobs.

A further 6,000 are due to be employed in the construction of the Moorside nuclear power station, which is to be built next door in the next 10 years. NuGen, the Japanese-backed company behind the project, says Moorside will bring at least £20bn investment into the UK. “It is an unprecedented opportunity for this part of the world to become the fastest growing part of the UK economy,” said Reed, who is quitting politics for a role as head of development and community relations at Sellafield.

Whitehaven in Cumbria. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

“We are a community of two halves,” says Pat Graham, the managing director of Copeland borough council. “As a proportion of our workforce we have got more PhDs per head of population in Copeland than anywhere else in the UK. We have the nuclear-related wealth, which captures the highly skilled and the affluent and the upwardly mobile. But we also have those people who don’t have the ability to access nuclear, so therefore we have the extremes of really attractive, beautiful Lakeland places and poverty and all the challenges that come with deprivation.”

In the EU referendum, Copeland voted by a margin of 62% to leave the EU. Reed was an outspoken remainer, warning constituents that their lives would be worse if the UK left. He was devastated – but not surprised – by the result, telling the Guardian that he had to take some of the blame.

“It is the fault of people like me over a long period of time for not pointing out the benefits of the EU, for allowing myths to go unchallenged and to be cemented as facts in people’s minds,” he said. “It is a tragedy that communities like this have voted to leave a political body which very often did more for them than its national government ever did.”

Reed points to numerous European-funded projects in Copeland, including the harbour redevelopment and the Westlakes Science park, home to engineering company Westlakes Engineering. Its managing director, Andy Hooper, voted to remain and was aghast at the result. “It seems so retrograde to leave. Why do we want to be so insular?” he said.

His firm has designed safety systems for theme park rides across Europe and employed many EU graduates. He can see some positives from Brexit: “From a purely selfish point of view, I suppose we might benefit if it becomes harder for Sellafield and others to contract overseas firms.” But he doesn’t want to only be able to recruit from a small group of people. In the end, he’s trying to look on the bright side: “As an entrepreneur I think change is good and chaos can be creative.”

Gerard Richardson said it was arrogant to say that those who voted to leave the EU were ‘uneducated’. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Hooper is in the minority in Copeland. For the past 22 years Gerard Richardson has run a fine wine shop in Whitehaven town centre. He strongly objects to the idea that those who voted to leave did not understand the consequences.

“The people who voted remain seem to think they are the only ones who made an educated choice. They think that those who voted out are white, thick, racist and unemployed. I’m only one of those,” said Richardson, a 54-year-old grandfather of eight. “It’s so arrogant. They seem to think that to vote leave you are some sort of little Englander flying the Union Jack in your garden.”

He is not anti-European, he insisted – “I’m a fine wine merchant, for goodness sake.” He just did not think the EU and its institutions were fit for purpose. “I don’t have a problem with immigration. I just think Europe has become too unwieldy. When you’ve got a political class who can’t even decide on one home and so create two parliaments just to satisfy two different factions, you’ve got a problem.”

Though he disagrees with Reed on Europe, Richardson respects him, he said. “If I want to talk to my MP, I know where I can find him. I don’t know who my MEPs are. I’ve never seen them campaign in Whitehaven. I’ve never known them to hold a surgery. I shouldn’t have to make an appointment with some pillock in Preston or Manchester. They should come up here. Educated people like us should know what their MEPs do and we don’t. All I know is their wages and expenses are phenomenal. Forget all that rubbish about giving £350m to the NHS. Get rid of all the bloody MEPs and use their money instead.”

Jamie Reed. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Though Reed is generally popular locally, his parliamentary majority has steadily reduced over three general elections. When he first became an MP, in 2005, he had a 6,320 majority. By 2015 that had reduced to 2,564, with the Tories second on 14,186 and Ukip third, gaining more than 5,000 votes on the previous election to win a 15.5% vote share. “They came out of nowhere like a great white shark,” Reed says of Ukip.

The seat, with varying boundaries, has been Labour since 1935, but it cannot be considered in any way “safe”. Last May Copeland chose its first elected mayor, with voters shunning the Labour and Conservative candidates in favour of Mike Starkie, a local businessman who ran as an independent.

Starkie voted for Brexit and was only surprised that even more people in Copeland didn’t follow suit. At his rugby club “everyone” seemed determined to vote out before the referendum, he said, including all the Sellafield workers.

Drinking an afternoon pint in the Manor House pub in St Bees this week, one 58-year-old man working in a factory making chemicals on the Sellafield site, said he voted out because he couldn’t see how it would be detrimental.



Andy Hooper, the managing director of Westlake Engineering, said Copeland had benefited from numerous European funded projects. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

“I think we should be able to decide on our own laws,” he said. He knew Copeland would vote to leave. “Here in the real north-west of England – and I don’t mean Manchester or Liverpool – we are very isolated. Look at our infrastructure. We have two-carriage diesel trains and 300 people trying to get on them each morning to get to Sellafield. We don’t have a dual carriage way out. We are always the last in the pecking order.”

Many local people complain about not being given their share from central government, particularly when the high wages paid contribute so much to the exchequer. They feel unfairly treated by the media too. In 2010 Fleet Street descended on the constituency following the gun rampage of a local taxi driver, Derrick Bird, who killed 12 people and then himself, painting a picture of a community riven with divisions few locally recognised. Four years later the pack came back after statistics suggested Whitehaven was the fattest place in England.

Reed feels strongly that the government – and the Labour party – needs to stop neglecting areas such as Copeland, which are geographically and culturally so far away from Westminster.

“Remotely accessible peripheral areas are overwhelmingly ignored by the centre of government and that has to change. I passionately believe that that sense of grievance is one of the principle factors which fuelled Brexit.

“I’ve talked about our lower league towns, our rugby league towns, it’s true. It’s true that vast swaths of people in our country feel ignored and are unsure of their place in the national story. And that means they are unsure about their sense of worth as a community. And that’s not a good place to be.”