Those who felt they had nothing left to lose used the EU referendum to fight back – and they warn they’ll fight again if another vote is called

Wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Fighting for the community” underneath an image of Redcar’s mothballed steelworks, Frankie Wales is preparing to take a training session at the town’s boxing club. Young men are sparring in the rings; others are hitting punchbags. “Nothing gets you fit like boxing,” says one, exhausted from the ring.

Wales, who set up the club 20 years ago and funds it on a shoestring with various small grants, is proud to be doing his bit for Redcar’s young people. He is a livewire in a community struggling to get off the floor after a series of near knockout blows. The local steelworks ceased production in 2015 with the loss of 3,000 jobs. Someone, he insists, has to help them.

“It is incredibly sad,” he says. “Not long ago they would go and work in the steelworks after school. Men round here made the finest steel in the world. Now they are making lattes and sandwiches on zero-hours contracts. We have lots of entrepreneurial kids, but the only entrepreneurial activity going on around here is selling fags and drugs.”

Few young people care what those who are supposed to run their country – politicians and civic and business leaders – say any more because they feel so let down. “We have lost the steel industry, lost the local shipbuilding, lost the coal. What’s the point? There is nothing left,” says Wales. “We just have to make the best of what we have got and get on with it ourselves.”

Like many communities in England’s north-east, the people of this North Yorkshire town, which bears the scars of industrial decline, and has a youth unemployment rate more than double the national average, made their unhappiness known in June 2016. They fought back. In Redcar, there was a hefty 66% vote for Brexit, similar to that in areas further north up the coast, from Teesside to Tyneside.

“We have to get our country back to where it needs to be,” says Geoff Holding, a caretaker at a government office in the town who voted Leave and whose brother lost his job at the steelworks.

He wants an end to cheap imports of foreign goods, like the Chinese steel that did for the local plant. There is a still a thriving chemicals sector in Redcar, but not enough manufacturing. “We need to bring things back in-house, get industry back on its own feet, make things ourselves.”

Debate may still be raging in London about soft and hard Brexits as Remainers call for a second referendum, but in Redcar it is a done deal. Here the Leave mantra about “taking back control” is to be taken pretty much literally.

The local MP, Labour’s Anna Turley, is a Remainer worried about the consequences of a hard Brexit for her constituents. But she sees her duty as to inform, not to cajole or browbeat. Her constituency office window echoes Wales’s sentiments with a similar slogan, “Fighting back for Redcar”. Holding says he knows that Brexit “could be a massive flop” but says: “We should just get on with it. We have to chance it.”

Last week a leaked government report revealed that leaving the EU’s single market and customs union would hit all parts of the country economically, but the north perhaps hardest of all. On the basis of that report, the justice minister, Phillip Lee, the Tory MP for Bracknell, went public to suggest that if the findings were correct, the government should consider another path than hard Brexit.

But if all the fuss in Westminster leads to another referendum, even Remainers in Redcar would see it as more betrayal.

As the rain lashes in off the sea on the town’s promenade, unemployed laboratory worker Steven Cowie, 27, is walking his dog. He voted Remain and says Brexit will mean the end of EU grants to the area that, among other things, have funded retraining for jobless people like him. But he is adamant that the decision to Leave should stick. It was the people’s vote, and the need to honour it trumps his worries about any negative consequences. “We have had one vote and got a decision. Why should we have another?”

Retired civil servant Denise Partington, who voted to stay, and her friend Tina Walker, who backed Leave, are now of one mind. Both reject, out of hand, talk of revisiting the whole issue. “I think it’s complete rubbish,” says Partington. “I didn’t believe a word Boris Johnson said. I just thought there were foreign workers in our hospitals and picking our fruit and we needed them.”

A year and a half on, she doesn’t trust those who say we should rethink the decision, any more than she did Johnson then. “Why should I believe what they tell us now about staying in? I just think we have to see it through ... yes, just get on with it.”

If Redcar and this part of the north- east reflect the national mood, those wanting to overturn the Brexit decision via a second referendum will have their work cut out. If anything, the majority for getting out of the EU would rise in a second protest vote, driven by fury at a failure to respect the first.

But not every constituency feels it has nothing more to lose. More than 200 miles south, in Lee’s Bracknell constituency, which is within comfortable commuting distance from London, people feel more at the forefront of progress. Companies there are growing, not closing down. Bracknell is home to a large number of major tech firms: Panasonic, Fujitsu, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, Honeywell, Novell and Vodafone.

Bracknell voted Leave by 35,002 to 29,888, 53.9% to 46.1% on a 76.1% turnout. But Berkshire was mostly in favour of remaining. There are Remainer seats aplenty around its borders. If people in the Leave pockets were to change their minds in a new referendum, and enough Leavers in Remain seats do the same, the balance could tilt in favour of staying.

Nationally, there is some evidence of movement and of support for asking the people again. A Guardian/ICM poll showed that those who want a second referendum now have a 16% lead over those who oppose the idea.

Bracknell seems a million miles from Redcar. In the town centre, Jordan Chapman-Smith is meeting friends. He was too young to vote in the referendum but is determined to have his say if another is called. Now 19, he doesn’t have to sell lattes or sandwiches but works as a roofer, and there’s plenty of work on Bracknell’s construction sites.

“I don’t think we should leave. It’s just going to cause chaos,” he says. “More people are regretting voting Leave.” Which people? “Friends and family. People at work.” Life in Bracknell has been improving. It had been hard finding a job when he left school, but now it’s easier. Houses are getting expensive, though.

Outside Patisserie Valerie, Sophia Crebolder is chatting to a friend, who is on a lunch break. “I thought Brexit was a horrendous idea and I voted against it and I think a lot of people are rethinking the consequences,” she says. “People voted perhaps without all the facts and now recognise the economic and cultural impact that it’s going to have.

“I’ve had conversations with people who have changed their minds. Colleagues, friends – I work for a global recruitment company and there’s a big mix of people. They are realising they didn’t really know what would be happening. Now the potential economic impact is more clear.”

Ana Murga, wheeling her toddler in a pushchair, voted against Brexit. “I hope it won’t crush the economy and all the good stuff we have in England. We’ve bought a house here and if the price drops I will be extremely upset.

“I’ve talked to many people who voted pro-Brexit and now they are scared of the changes.” Which people have changed their minds? “People that work here, in big international companies.”

There are still plenty who take the opposite line. Mick Cree, a sales manager with 40 years’ experience in the car industry says: “I think it was a kneejerk reaction, voting to leave, because of the higher number of immigrants. I think some of them are possibly changing their mind. They don’t know. People are nervous. They just want to get it done one way or the other.”

But he is standing by his decision to get out. “I think we should be governing our own country and governing our own destiny. I’m all for free trade but I don’t want to be governed by Brussels.”

Back in Redcar, David Walsh is the former deputy leader of Labour-controlled Redcar and Cleveland council and a strong Remainer. On the day after the referendum result, he went to his local pub and predicted a second referendum. He was taunted and shouted down by his friends for doing so. He still thinks there could be a small shift locally to Remain as people realise that local chemicals firms and other companies cannot cut themselves off from global and EU markets.

But, if there were a second vote, he now suspects it might backfire. “There could be a move to Remain with some people but there are others who maybe did not vote last time – that 20% to 30% – who don’t feel they have a stake in society and who in some cases are violently anti-immigrant, though there is not much immigration here. They could be mobilised by Leave and end up outweighing the number of people who move from Leave to Remain.”

If places such as Bracknell switch to support staying in the EU, Redcar, he fears, will not. It will just fight back.