Tulips
The Remainers I know are almost all what I would call social liberals - they are working-class or middle-class, are politically left-of-centre or centrists and oppose much of what we call neoliberalism. They, like myself, voted Remain to protect Britain not only from xenophobes and misogynists but also from the right-wing laisses-faire evangelicals who believe that the market should rule every aspect of our lives.
The truth is that the UK has been the strongest proponent of neoliberalism in Europe. The reason the EU will probably not get TTIP has more to do with the French drawing a line in the sand wrt the proposed liberalisation of the beef market as it does any other factor. Trump may kill TTIP, but it was pretty much already dead because Europe (as a whole) did not want it. But either way, neoliberalism is gone... good news!
But... but neoliberalism is only one expression of free-market evangelisms. We may have less neoliberalism as a result of Brexit, but we will have more privatisation, more liberalisation of the workforce and fewer State regulations. The EU, with its strong focus on equality, human rights, workers rights and consumer rights, is a defence against the free marketeers. Everyone was up in arms about the NHS being sold off to American corporations if TTIP came along, but can we honestly say that the NHS is not under greater threat now, post-Brexit result, than it has been at any other time in its existence?
If Brexit was about rejecting our current state of cripplingly unfair economic liberalism, the Tories would not be riding so high in the polls. The Tories brought us Austerity, they brought us privatisation, and they have consistently fought against Europe imposing rights upon the British people. I agree that many middle-class Remainers DID vote to protect neoliberalism. However, my counter-argument is that just as many middle-class Leavers voted against neoliberalism in support of British economic liberalism. Many Leave voters chose a different version of the same problem Brexit is allegedly a rejection of.
As for New Labour... yes, you are right about their embracing of neoliberalism. The only reason they stayed in power for so long was because they managed to win the right-of-centre voters over with their neoliberal economic position. The Third Way was an attempt to unify social liberalism with neoliberalism, but it failed because neoliberalism is fundamentally flawed as a hypothesis (and also because Blair started to backtrack on the "liberal" bit of social liberal). New Labour brought the country to the centre-ground by making social liberalism attractive to a right-of-centre England. To say New Labour missed their chance to fix the problem is easy, but had they attempted to do so before the Credit Crunch, they would have been kicked out of power.
Yes, the EU has also followed this Third Way to a significant degree, but that means the EU also worked hard to establish a major social liberal element to its political philosophy. What is happening now is that the social liberal baby is being thrown out with the neoliberal bathwater. Rather than fix social liberalism by scaling back on neoliberalism, which is what I expect the EU to do over the next few decades (providing the right-wingers are held at bay), Brexit has killed social liberalism in England.
In Scotland it is alive and well. I would go so far as to suggest that the real damage done by New Labour (to England) was in simultaneously alienating and liberating Scotland. This drove the SNP's success and freed England up from the significant left-of-centre Labour counterweight that Scotland traditionally provided to the middle-England right-wing sentiment.
But to answer the original question, the right-wingers in England have been unshackled from the moderating forces of Scottish centre-left voters and EU centre-left societal (if not economic) ideals. We are back to Thatcher's Britain. I would also suggest that a large percentage of Labour voters from the working class only ever voted Labour because it's what Unionised working-class people were supposed to do. Without the Unions to enforce a left-wing political ideology, lots of working-class English voters have reverted to their default political stance, which is right-wing. The Left is a minority position, the centre-ground has been largely marginalised post New Labour and post-Brexit and the right-wing are empowered. Except in Scotland.
A brief aside - Trump is no surprise whatsoever. The US, like England, is right-wing in its nature. The difference between Trump and what went before is that Trump has no manners, no slyness to him and no respect for the "proper" way of doing politics. He's not actually that much worse than George W Bush (who was awful), a fact which seems to have been forgotten in all the recent kerfuffle. The US lurch to the right has been a long time coming. Actually, there was Reagan too, who, with Thatcher, started the whole economic ultra-liberalism ball rolling. So, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that what we've seen in Anglo-Saxon politics is a brief interregnum of social liberalism (riding on the coat-tails of neoliberalism) in the generally right-wing, post-seventies political landscape.