Something has gone wrong in Britain, and the EU referendum result showed us – or at least, those of us who weren’t already aware – what it is. The campaign and its aftermath exposed a society that has split along lines of class, region, age and culture, with fewer binding threads than at any point in recent history.

On the day, huge swaths of the country voted by class and geography. This was hardly surprising, considering how tensions between the classes have been exploited mercilessly by politicians. Social and economic inequalities, particularly between the south-east and the rest of the country, and between major cities and outlying towns, have grown, and that growth been tolerated, for decades – to a point where it now threatens social and political stability.

Looking at the coverage of the Brexit result, we were led to believe that the population of Britain can be easily sliced into tribes. The tribes to which the writers of newspaper articles and the producers of television news belong do not have to be named – they are, simply, “people”. Anyone who falls outside the urban, middle-class tribe is a “community” – usually identified (however erroneously) by race or religion. In the absence of anything other than token representation, people who appear to fall into these groups have to be “understood”, rather than making their own case on their own terms.

The late Richard Hoggart observed the widely held belief that a “bloodless revolution” had taken place in Britain following the second world war, based on the founding of the welfare state and the slow re-emergence of a consumer economy. But while we have been anticipating the classless society for decades, Hoggart pointed out that what he termed the “coffin” of class remains empty. Now, the coffin has been shoved under the carpet. Anyone can see its outline if they look close enough, yet it stays there because no one knows what to do with it.

British politicians have in recent years tended to treat both the idea of a distinct working class and the very words “working class” as rhetorical poison, and have made strenuous efforts to avoid using them. Instead, they use such phrases as “hard-working families”, or “ordinary voters”, for fear of alienating both middle-class voters and “aspirational” working-class voters. More recently, however, they have found a different way to mention class: by prefixing “working class” with the word “white”.

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People who are perceived to be part of this group, once created and labelled, can be called upon to express an opinion – for, of course, there is only one opinion – whenever a reporter or an MP in a marginal seat needs to appear as though they are in touch with a world outside the metropolis. In these circumstances the phrase “white working class” comes to mean “people who sort of look like us but who don’t seem to be like us, and we can’t work out why”.

The idea that, in a group as heterogeneous as the British working class, it is only the white members who have been “abandoned” has proved magnetic to both columnists and politicians. It seems to date back to the electoral surge of the British National party at local elections in the early- to mid-2000s, and at the European parliamentary elections in 2009, in which it won two seats. When the BNP looked to be on the verge of a breakthrough, public figures in the mainstream of political and media life asked why “the white working class” – a loosely defined yet apparently clod-like mass – was supporting this regressive movement en masse.

The assumption is that working-class people, when they feel marginalised, vote for fascists. But to be fearful and resentful is a choice; it does not go away with an increased pay packet. There are legions of well-housed, well-paid people – working class as well as middle class, and by no means always white – who consider themselves superior to others based on their skin colour, and countless more badly housed, badly off people who are no more driven to fascism than to veganism.

The Labour party has, in its clumsy way, tacitly endorsed the idea of the “white working class” as a single electoral bloc in its attempts to address its unpopularity among some working-class voters. Under Ed Miliband’s leadership, two key figures, the Labour peer Maurice Glasman and MP Jon Cruddas, developed a formula of “conservative socialism” to appeal to working-class voters based on “family, faith and flag”. Glasman waded in and out of arguments for limiting – and even stopping – immigration to Britain.

In the run-up to the 2015 general election, Ed Miliband hired Arnie Graf, an American community organiser, as an adviser. Once the election was over, Graf wrote an article for the Labour List website telling how Labour’s central staff had found it impossible to find a worker on the minimum wage to speak to Miliband for a press call, because none of them knew any. Which kind of says it all.

Far more than in other western European countries, if you are born poor in Britain, in a poor area, the chances are that you will remain poor for the rest of your life. If you are born rich, in a rich area, the likelihood is that you will find a way – or will have ways come to you – to stay wealthy and privileged throughout your life, and your children will do the same. Advantage is hoarded by the privileged sticking close to those who are similarly privileged. There is a subtle collusion shared by both left and right to maintain the solidity of this structure, while continuing to deny it.

Research on economic inequality and its social ramifications has shown that those near the top of the earnings scale consistently underestimate how well-off they are in comparison to others. In 2009, the TUC created a “Middlebritainometer”, allowing wage-earners to input their income and find out where theirs lay in relation to the average. It showed that richer people believed themselves to be far closer to the average than they really were. Those earning £35,000 a year, which in 2009 put them in the top 20% of UK earners, placed themselves an average of 26 percentage points lower than their actual position.

It might be argued that a primary aspect of working-class experience is loss

This is how privilege becomes truly concentrated – through the systematic denial of the way economic, social and cultural capital works, by the very people who are hogging it. Such blanket denial serves to convince members of the middle class that, generation after generation, they have to tighten their grip on the advantages they have, because they are always at risk of losing them.

When I was growing up, in the 1980s and 90s in Solihull, no one ever used the term “working class”. Instead it was “people like us”, or “the likes of us”, by which I took to mean a discrete group bound by occupation and geography who could expect certain things out of life but not others. Casual violence – symbolic, domestic and public – was endemic. Casual racism was part of daily conversation. Casual cynicism pervaded: a consequence of casual exploitation and casual displacement, which fed into people’s souls and manifested in them treating everything like one great frigging joke, because that was how they felt they had been treated their entire lives. To be casual about horrific things was a cover for fear.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Writer Lynsey Hanley at home in Liverpool. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

There was a collective conviction that there was no point. It might be argued that a primary aspect of working-class experience, a feeling that most defines a certain way of being in the world, is loss. Loss is everywhere: the loss of optimism as experience victory-laps hope; the loss of loved ones to war, workplace accidents or ill health; the loss of a sense of home, going back generations, as families move repeatedly in search of relief from poverty; and the loss of a sense of place in a changing environment, such as when local businesses, which were one major employers, close down.

From the 60s, when docks and mines began to close and Harold Wilson’s Labour government anticipated the coming death of heavy industry by heralding “the white heat of the technological revolution”, Britain began to move from a production model of what it meant to be working class – the class that makes things – to a consumption model – the class that buys things.

In theory, this ought to have made the experience of being working class a lot more like the experience of being middle class, in the sense that anyone who had enough money could express their worldview partly through what they bought, and would be freed from some of the more stifling aspects of social interdependence by home and car ownership. Instead, their position, their status, was diminished in three ways.

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First, through the dismantling of trade union power, which established and then protected rights and benefits for people who were out of work. Second, through negative propaganda, which sought to isolate the badly off from an upwardly mobile, consumerist working class. Third, through populist policy-making: for example, the right to buy, which divided local authority tenants into the “aspirational” and the “non-aspirational”, depending on whether or not they bought their council house.

In the mid-70s, a sociologist named Paul Willis investigated the ways in which a group of schoolboys in the industrial West Midlands town of Wolverhampton subverted all attempts by teachers to get them to accept that they could play a part in a world outside the one they knew. Willis concluded that boys and girls respond in much the same ways to the imposition of values and practices that seem ridiculous to them and merely divert them from ways of life they know to be “real”, settled and achievable.

“The lads”, as Willis called them, worked hard to gain victories on their own terms: they were obsessed with “having a laff”, which meant getting one over on the teacher, developing a parallel language of in-jokes and shared mumbles, while their work gave no indication of their actual capabilities.

I knew those lads. You know, the funny thing is I never sat in the front row at school. I was always at the back: in the same row as the lads, but never with them. I thought they were throwing their lives away. They knew they were throwing their lives away, and yet they refused to acknowledge that that was what they were doing. The cost of one of them saying, “Come on lads, we can have a laff outside of school, we’re here to learn so we don’t have to do jobs we hate later on,” would have been too much for any one of them to stand. In any case, Willis argued, working-class males are trusted so little within the wider social structure, that even if “the lads” had changed their minds and decided to work hard, there was no guarantee that it would have got them better jobs.

Willis wasn’t exactly saying that resistance, in the form of mild yet persistent insubordination, was futile – more that it was the boys’ own habits of playing up, as much as the unfairness of “the system”, that led them to become trapped in low-paid and unfulfilling jobs. He concluded: “There is an element of self-damnation in the taking on of subordinate roles in western capitalism … however, this damnation is experienced, paradoxically, as true learning, affirmation, appropriation, and as a form of resistance.” Solidarity made sense to the lads because they understood that they were all headed for the same destiny and would need mates when they got there. In this way a survival strategy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It needs to be acknowledged that “helplessness” or “dependency” – as defined by politicians seeking to blame individuals for structural failings – is an adaptive stance rather than an innate fact of character. You can express your power, maintain the illusion of autonomy, preserve your dignity, by refusing to comply with what is asked of you by society. To feel that you lack power is to believe that none of your actions has any consequence – which means, perversely, that you give yourself the licence to do what you like, on the assumption that it doesn’t matter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Communities that voted to leave the EU – such as Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, pictured – were accused of ignorance, racism and even self-sabotage. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

That is what it means to be “rough”: to draw what strength you can from your place on the margins, to let it all go to pieces. To be “respectable” is to define yourself against that feeling: it is to believe, and to enact, the idea that you have power as an individual, as a household or as a community, in spite of your relative powerlessness in society. In the context of the referendum, “respectability” expressed itself in a sense that Britain – once proud, autonomous, dominant – had been taken away by Brussels, and that it was time to “take it back”. People had a chance to cast a vote that, for once, had equal weight wherever it was placed. That voting to leave might have huge, destabilising consequences – precisely because of the fact that every individual vote counted – was beside the point. It was a stab at dignity.

There is this idea that I keep coming back to: one of stalled mobility, the long-term psychological and social effect of the limitations placed on working-class people. This has nothing whatsoever to do with stunted intellect. It is in the interests of institutionally powerful people to tell you that you’re thick.

Social boundaries make us, and in turn we remake, or reproduce, them. Back and forth it goes, between what we are told (albeit rarely explicitly) we are entitled to in terms of education, social standing, pay and political power, and what we tell others through our cultural choices. These boundaries are remade and reinforced through the places we find ourselves living and the places we tell ourselves we cannot go.

In my experience, growing up and being educated in a working-class environment, it went without saying that some things were “for us” and others were not. My grandparents read the Sun and my parents read the Mirror, while the Daily Mail seemed unattainably posh. I didn’t see a broadsheet until after I left school.

Class tropes – expressed through which newspaper you read as much as the level of education you were expected to attain – appeared so solid and immutable as to be simple “common sense”. University was a place – or rather, an idea – as distant as the sun, though one I moved hell and high water to get to.

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The idea that “working-class respectability” no longer exists appeals to people who believe that the social and political changes of the last 35 years have somehow separated the wheat from the chaff. But the meaning attached to such respectability has changed. In the 80s, it was regarded as shorthand for the politically favoured affluent wing of the working class. A split that was already present was deliberately driven open, and to a great extent it worked. Organised labour no longer had a chance once you had to pick sides: unambitious council tenant or aspirational owner-occupier, sponging welfare dependant or dynamic entrepreneur.

Respectability was recast, through policy and media, not just as a way for individuals and communities to hold depredation at bay, but as a moral crusade. Come the mid-90s, Labour’s ideological spine was of a piece with the individualism of the 80s. But it sought to dress up the blunt Conservative language of “You’re on your own, mate” with a sophisticated, positive-thinking lexicon based on the persistent meme of “livin’ the dream”. To feel discomfort about constant change – an emergent feature of globalisation – was to be inherently rightwing; yet equally, to believe in the strength of collective public institutions – such as unions, publicly funded health and education systems – was unhelpfully Bolshevik.

For two generations now, the state has presented ever more forcefully the idea that working-class individuals need to change in order to qualify as full citizens. In the words of the sociologist Val Gillies, the education strategy of recent governments can be summed up thus: “For the sake of their children’s future, and for the stability and security of society as a whole, working-class parents must be taught how to raise middle-class subjects.”

This process starts early, in accordance with notions of “early intervention” being imperative for children from poor families if they are not to fail at school. The government offers 15 free hours of nursery care universally to three-and four-year-olds. Two-year-olds also qualify if their parents are eligible for certain state benefits. While this latter allowance has been heralded as a way for low-income parents to return to paid work more easily, the subtext is that working-class children need to be removed from the malign influence of their working-class parents and educated into middle-class norms as early as possible.

By comparison, middle-class parents and their children’s teachers are from the same class, and therefore speak the same language. Whether the symbols of social class are encoded in clothes or hand gestures, or are made explicit through abstractions and vocabulary, they show to each other that they have similar sets of assumptions and the same broad understanding of the world. They will have the same broad set of desires for the child, and will understand implicitly what is required of the child in order for it to progress successfully and reproduce the state of “being middle class”.

In the education system, as in the workplace, what is at stake for members of each class is represented by the conflict between individual advancement and solidarity with others. The irony is that the middle-class focus on doing well as individuals helps to consolidate the success of the group as a whole, while the relative working-class emphasis on solidarity can serve to increase tension and frustration between individuals.

This is the paradox of trying to achieve social mobility through education, which is nothing more than a finely tuned replica of the larger social system it serves. Education is presented as a system in which anyone who works hard enough can achieve their potential, as is illustrated by the many cliches used in newspaper-speak and political rhetoric: as a “bright but poor child” on a “tough estate”, you “do the right thing” and “get on your bike” to places of greater opportunity without waiting to be “lifted out of poverty”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The state has long presented the idea that working-class people need to change in order to qualify as full citizens’ … pictured, terraced homes in Oldham. Photograph: Getty Images

The late Chris Woodhead, a former chief inspector of schools, believed that middle-class children do better at school because they have “better genes”, and felt that any attempt to raise the attainment of working-class children is unlikely to bear much fruit, owing to the simple fact that their teachers will inevitably be working with damaged, dunderheaded goods.

The ability of average-but-privileged people to regard themselves as “better” than others may go some way towards explaining why unprivileged students disproportionately avoid elite universities, even when they have the grades to apply for them – a tendency that reinforces social disadvantage. The point is that education can break down the defences of class discrimination, but it can also reinforce them.

The revolution, it turned out, never happened. It was stymied by the mechanisms of a class-bound education system, class-segregated housing, a media and cultural landscape that has persistently reinforced class prejudice, and a bizarre historic tendency for members of the British electorate to vote against their own interests.

British society is not so much a pyramid as a diamond, with the lives of those at the top and the bottom resembling each other’s in ways not obvious to the wide band in the middle. The contrast, of course, between the conditions at the top and those at stuck the bottom is that the former set you up for a smooth path through life and the latter for an extraordinarily difficult one.

But there is a concentration of power at both ends of the diamond: the only difference is the milieu in which that power can be used. In the middle, power is diffused by dint of sheer numbers, and yet it is in the middle that power is aggregated and gets used most effectively. Because of its size it is the middle class, and not the “1%”, that sets the rules. This much larger group has the combined wealth, the qualifications, the social and cultural capital and, perhaps above all, the electoral influence to dictate much of our government policy, from tax to education.

It is when people do not care about conforming to the middle-class version of “respectability”, and simply want comfort and security for themselves and their families, that promoters of the creed of social mobility start to worry.

Acceptance is available to the socially mobile, but only if they “do” social mobility the right way. To those on the right who regard social mobility as a good thing in itself, there is almost no point in undertaking upward mobility if it does not involve taking out a wholesale subscription to mainstream values, which often, though not always, means the dominant middle-class set of values.

What does it mean for society when the powerlessness of one class turns into the power to hinder the progress of others?

It is dangerous, not to mention naive, to think you can climb easily out of a world from which no one you know has managed to escape. A distressing series of quotes from school-leavers in an unidentified “northern town”, in response to questions asked by the Social Exclusion Task Force in 2008, reveals a flat landscape scattered with chasms into which they simply assume they will fall. “I want to be an electrician,” says one, “but I am going to go to prison … I don’t want to. That’s just what’s going to happen.” Another shrugs: “There’s no point in trying, because I am no good at anything.” Others point out the injustice of being told not to put your postcode on your CV because it is “the wrong one”.

There are a number of reasons why you are more likely to hear a young person in, say, Blackpool or an estate outside Doncaster state that “there’s no point in trying” because they are “no good at anything” than someone in Bracknell or Tunbridge Wells. It is part of the baggage of coming from a place that is isolated – or has become isolated – and has too few decent jobs to go around. This is where a substandard quality of education, housing and transport collude to strike down individuals and areas that are already disadvantaged.

In towns marked by the waste of assets, the waste of human potential, it is harder to imagine, against all immediate evidence, that it is possible to live anything other than a scrabbling, scrappy kind of life. People so often suppress anger about their circumstances that it forces itself out like steam at jarring points. It might be argued that this is precisely what happened on 23 June: not so much an incoherent howl of rage as a focused hiss of anger. If the rage of leave voters was expressed in the voting booth, the anger of remain voters boiled over after the result. Communities suffering economic hardship that had voted out of the EU were accused of ignorance, racism, isolationism, even self-sabotage.

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Many of us were angry at being asked such a ridiculous, reductive question in the first place. Us or them? Dynamic city or forgotten town? Underheard or over-entitled?

You ask yourself what this means for society, when the powerlessness of one class in relation to another mutates into the power to hinder the progress of others. Nothing is done if not done together. If we refuse, or are unable, to work together because the classes have ossified into groups that do not trust each other and do not meet, does that mean an end to progress? The more polarised we become by advantage and its lack, the more thoughtlessly we will walk into parallel worlds of abundance and poverty, trust and suspicion. This is how the cynics win: by picking apart the unifying threads of culture and society and insisting that there are some people who never belonged, who never wanted to belong, in the first place.

• Main image: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

This is an adapted extract from Respectable: The Experience of Class (Allen Lane, £16.99). Buy it for £12.99 at bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on online orders over £10. A £1.99 charge applies to telephone orders.

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