Understanding the Class Politics of Brexit in the Context of Urban Deindustrialisation

Since 1979, Britain’s most marginal actors have become subject to a neoliberal class-project which has variously entailed: the destruction of industrial jobs and the hollowing out of post-industrial places, widening inequalities between the north and south of England, the dismantling of the welfare state and ratcheting up of punitive conditionality, and widespread deunionisation. These policies and processes have been given legitimacy through a ‘neoliberal common-sense’ which has misrecognised structural problems as individualistic and cultural. Immigrants and unemployment benefit claimants are harnessed for political gain through a series of discourses which blame these groups for structural problems across the country, deflecting attention from elites. This has occurred in parallel to the atrophying of political representation for the working-class, which has left them without a traditional ‘political home’ and their interests are increasingly marginalised as a result. These interrelated themes and processes provide an important contextual backdrop to the experiences of, and opportunities available to, working-class people over the last forty years. This has important implications for the EU referendum: Brexit was part of a series of historical processes and changes in which working-class political subjectivities have developed over time and across space. This thesis takes a spatial, biographical and historical approach to trace the lineage of EU referendum voting justifications offered by twenty-eight working-class participants from a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds and age groups. Existing explanations of Brexit offer valuable insights but provide only a partial account of the referendum result and shoehorn people’s subjectivities and experiences into narrower conceptual frameworks than is required. They can be broadly grouped into four clusters: ‘left behind’ explanations; explanations privileging class-based exploitation and marginalisation; explanations focusing on race, nation and ethnicity; and sovereignty. The complementarity of these themes has tended to be overlooked. This thesis synthesises a broader range of processes and developments (economic, political, socio-cultural, symbolic and spatial), which leads to a more nuanced and historicised account of voting justifications. This project uses in-depth, semi-structured interviews to gain proximity to the lives of working-class residents living in two low-income neighbourhoods in Selby and Sheffield. It shows how voting justifications are complex, multi-layered and spatially sensitive, zigzagging across themes and different foci, and defying reductive, singular theoretical frameworks. What seems to unite some sections of the working-class is that those who feel like they have nothing to lose (economically, politically and symbolically) were more willing to take the ‘risk’ of voting for the unknown and change rather than the status quo.