The left-behind residents of working-class, provincial towns kicking back at the out-of-touch metropolitan elite: it’s a familiar story, and a key component of the dominant explanation for the political tumult of the past few years. If you live in Scunthorpe, you’ve been forgotten; if you live within the M25, third way liberalism and, latterly, the more #FBPE-friendly elements of Corbynism have worked out well for you, right?

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But it’s just not as simple as that, and to continue to talk up this fake binary is not only misguided, it’s actively harmful.

Yes, as a rule, if you live in a small town rather than a major city, you are generally more likely to have conservative attitudes to issues like immigration and the welfare state, and to have voted leave in the 2016 EU referendum. And, again generally, the opposite is true of residents of major urban areas. Yet to view superficial characteristics of the place in which one lives as a reliable indicator of one’s political attitudes is to invent a counterproductive, unnecessary divide.

Let’s look at some examples. As Anthony Barnett points out, two otherwise very similar towns, Wigan and Paisley, voted near-opposites in the EU referendum. Yes, they’re in different parts of the UK, but they’re both small towns, close to regional centres, both post-industrial and predominantly working class.

Sunderland and Brighton are two small cities with very similar populations (approximately 277k and 230k respectively), both within easy reach of regional centres (Newcastle and London), and both with overwhelming majorities of white residents (93% and 89% respectively). Yet they, too, returned markedly different results in the referendum and are commonly exemplified as “typical” remain and leave areas in the media. Clearly, it’s economic and material differences that should be focused on here, not simply “small towns in the middle of nowhere” v “multicultural cities”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘And that metropolitan elite? According to a 2018 study, 14 of the constituencies with the highest rates of child poverty are in London, Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham.’ Bethnal Green, London. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

What’s more, local politics is full of significant contradictions – and surely we must operate at a local, specific level if we are to take seriously the variables at play. Take my home town, Macclesfield – precisely the kind of small provincial town that gets caricatured again and again. It’s been a safe Conservative seat for decades, yet in 2017 support for Labour increased by 14%, higher than the 9.6% rise in the party’s national vote share, and the majority of local councillors are now Labour. Macclesfield LGBTQ+ Pride attracted thousands of attendees in 2018, and the town voted remain in 2016. All the while, David Rutley, an emphatic social and fiscal Conservative, is the local MP.

A superficial summary of Macclesfield – a post-industrial town in the north west with low levels of immigration and a smattering of moneyed conservatism, thanks to the affluence of the surrounding footballer-inhabited villages – makes it sound parodically one-dimensional, a Royston Vasey for the Cheshire set. This kind of description is not a metric by which we may understand modern Britain – it’s a cliche.

Some facts: 59% of the leave vote came from older, middle-class people, overwhelmingly in England, many in the comparatively wealthy and internationalist south-east. And that so-called metropolitan elite? According to a 2018 study, 14 of the parliamentary constituencies with the highest rates of child poverty are in parts of London, Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham. The recent furore around LGBT issues in the national curriculum began at a primary school in Birmingham. These are not stereotypically white, working-class provincial areas, yet their social issues and attitudes are hardly characteristic of some city-dwelling ruling class.

There are valid arguments to be made about the disproportionate influence of certain political ideas, but to attribute them to some inherently metropolitan, anti-local elite, is inaccurate and dangerous. Just look at the (justified) outrage caused by Blue Labour activist Paul Embery’s use of the term “rootless cosmopolitan” in relation to “a divide in our society”. Whether or not Embery knew its historical links, that term harks back to the antisemitic propaganda of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. Yet, to the average person, “rootless cosmopolitan” is hardly a leap from “metropolitan elitist”. By cleaving to lazy caricatures in our public discourse, we make it easier for genuine bigotry to permeate the conversation.

To attribute the leave vote and all the associated, stereotypical attitudes to disaffected ex-miners in provincial towns is false, and conveniently so – they’re an all too easy scapegoat in a tradition that can be traced directly back to Thatcher. But the fact that the contemporary British working class is far from uniformly white and post-industrial is difficult to crowbar into this narrative, and by reinforcing that outdated image of the working class, we obscure its significant non-white constituency. According to a 2017 audit, BAME Britons are paid 13% less than their white colleagues. Under any circumstances, that’s a significant disparity; in a low-income family, part of the social fabric of the working class, that’s a life-altering deficit.

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If we consistently resort to cliches like the provincial conservative/metropolitan liberal binary, we flatten vital complexities in political attitudes and fail to recognise the true nature of the problems faced by vulnerable people. And it could be argued that such cliches may themselves help fuel the rising xenophobia, nationalism and pernicious nostalgia with which we’re struggling. The first past the post electoral system is important here too – if votes do not equate to representation, it’s easier for baseless stereotypes to become dominant. As nuance becomes an increasingly rare commodity, we must resist the temptation to fall back on them.

• Luke Cartledge is a musician and writer on music, culture and politics



