The assumption that leave voters are disenfranchised poor?

[TrueBlueYorkshire]

AIBU to be annoyed at the rhetoric used in the mainstream press that somehow leave voters are the disenfranchised poor from midland and northern areas.

If you look at the demographics areas i would actually say the opposite, Scotland, Northern Ireland and London contain a much larger population of asset poor people. While the rest of the country including the South and North outside of London who voted leave are asset owning, local community minded people. They voted leave to protect their communities.

I hold a commonwealth and British passport and voted remain for business reasons, but am very sympathetic with leave voters. Most of my family and friends in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are completely sympathetic with leave voters too.

I find these threads weird - totally dissociated from reality.

Unless you think polls are totally wrong, then we know quite a lot about which groups of people were most likely to vote leave or remain.

That doesn't mean all members of those groups voted in a particular way.

My ILs are part of the "most likely to vote leave" demographic - left school at 15, live in a post-industrial North Midlands town (where the largest local employer was prominent in the leave campaign), are over 70. But they were both strong remain voters. That doesn't mean that the statistics are wrong: most socioeconomic groups were split on this, so it's not difficult to find people who "buck the trend".

Mistigri

I agree. Its almost like people don't want their vote associated with disenfranchised poor or that referring to the disenfranchised poor voting leave suggests less legitimacy for the leave vote. Many disenfranchised poor had perfectly valid reasons for voting leave based on their circumstances.
Unless people think disenfranchised poor = bigot
(there are plenty enfranchised wealthy bigots too!)

For me, the vote was an indication of how fragmented British society is becoming with whole areas of the country out of step with others with neither side fully understanding where the other group are coming from. Perhaps we all need to stop looking at the vote through the lens of our own experiences and try to understand what is concerning people who voted the opposite way.

What a snobby thread. 'Leave voters were not the disenfranchised poor'. Do you have a problem sitting alongside them OP?

I think the problem is with the "disenfranchised poor" vote, is that huge numbers ( not all) of people of this demographic have reported that the voted the way they did as a protest vote or to do with national government decisions or on the anti establishment ticket. NOT to do with the issue at hand which was should we leave the EU.

This is the reason why people are so interested in it. The vote was swung by people who haven't voted in general elections for years, the quote from Sunderland was: "People who haven't voted since the days of Thatcher." and people who were in this group said that one of the reasons that they voted the way they did was because they felt they were not being listened to. Well do you know why they don't get listened to? Cause they didn't fucking vote since the days of Thatcher! These are the people who don't engage in politics as a rule and its great that they engaged this time BUT if they voted because the feel that the government doesn't do anything for them, or as a protest vote it wasn't the time to do so.

As I've repeatedly said, I'm from the North East and I really don't get the "We don't get anything" moan. I think a lot of the problem is that they make comparison with London. The North East in its entirety has about 2.2 million people in it and that's from the Scottish Border down to the Cleveland border with North Yorkshire. Even its most built up area has less than 10% of the population of London. Its a far larger area with far fewer people but the comparison is always made about "what London gets".

For me, the vote was an indication of how fragmented British society is becoming with whole areas of the country out of step with others with neither side fully understanding where the other group are coming from.

IMO the fragmentation is significantly worse since 24th June. I'm old and can't think of a time when the country was so divided.

I live in the "Home Counties." The majority around here (over 60%) voted out and they certainly weren't disenfranchised, and they certainly did understand (most work in the City!) It's an area where they has been immigration over the past 15 years, but it is still predominantly white British, or third generation immigrants. I can only assume that people were motivated by concerns other than the economy in the medium term.

I'm in the same position as you twofingers, and agree with you about division in the country. However, I do think that social media has a part to play in this. It provides an echo chamber for whatever beliefs one has (either Leave or Remain) and provides a voice for those beliefs.
In the past the divisions were possibly there, but had no way of being articulated or confirmed.

I do agree about the 'echo chamber', not only on social media but in our social lives. In my case this extends to the workplace, too: I don't know a single person at work who voted anything other than remain (but university staff voting leave really would be like turkeys voting for Christmas!)

I found this analysis interesting how they show that if you use income class it doesn't correlate to how they voted. A pure guess as to wether someone left or stayed is 50% and if you use income its only 55%!

blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/personal-values-brexit-vote/

So the disenfranchised poor doesn't hold up, I'd definitely agree on the cultural basis for voting.

smallfox thats exactly what i have been saying in RL and on here and DH said the same.......that they should have voted in the elections.

The referendum was not the place for a protest vote.

Ive even had a couple of Leave voters tell me that it was a tactical vote. How the fuck can you have a tactical vote when there are only two choices.

Maybe it was actually a good place for a protest vote. A lot of people feel that it makes little difference weather they vote for Labour or the Conservatives. It's all the same middle ground stuff. This is to some extent true. (Just look, now that Labour has moved further to the left and is therefore more distinct from the Torries, it is considered unelectable.)

So there isn't much point in voting for one or the other, or throwing away one's vote on UKIP or the Greens because we have single member plurality districts.

If people really wanted to change. They are now bound to get some sort of change.

And I am really amazed how much things seem to be shaking up. Careers are suddenly in the dustbin, it may be the end of Labour, and we are about to have more women in the cabinet than ever before if rumours are to be believed. We now have a rather dour, conservative, female PM who is talking about a nationwide industrial policy and reigning in executive pay. Who would have thought it just a month ago?

(Not saying I think this is all perfect or even what anyone was looking for, but if people wanted a protest vote that would cause cataclysmic changes, this might be it.)

The stats quoted are not factual - there was nothing on the ballot paper which asked how old you were.....it's all guesswork based on exit samples. No-one that I know was asked to take part in a poll. I know many people (not me) who voted to leave, including my 30 something, reasonably well off neighbours who work in the City. Among my neighbours I would say roughly 50/50 leave/remain which is quite representative of the overall vote split in my borough.

Julius
Its not just exit polling. Look at the demographics of certain areas. I gave the example of Blaenau Gwent above where 62% of those who voted, voted leave. It is one of the most deprived areas of Wales with lower than average numbers of people with higher level qualifications.
www.blaenau-gwent.gov.uk/council/170.asp

That doesn't tell you the educational and employment background of each individual voter but it does suggest that there is a link between certain demographics and voting patterns.

Op who are these fuckwits you talk about?

I saw one of the bods who is in charge of the FT's scatter analysis data explain on some tv political prog (could have been Andrew Neil at lunchtime or some such) that the two most distinct Brexiteer clusters were (a) without a university degree and (b) did not own a passport.

Both of those 'traits' are compatible with white working class poor and comfortably off semi-rural old-school conservative club types I would have thought.

Bit of a generalisation I know but that kind of fits in with what the interesting LSE article linked by Breakingdad77 is saying down thread in that inward looking attitude rather than income was the deciding factor (if I have understood it correctly).

No surprise that your friends in Oz, NZ and SA voted "out" OP. (I have family in SA who feel the same.) Those countries have a vested interest in the UK leaving the EU.

Bit of a generalisation I know but that kind of fits in with what the interesting LSE article linked by Breakingdad77 is saying down thread in that inward looking attitude rather than income was the deciding factor (if I have understood it correctly).

Yes indeed its way more about the type of society you want rather than your basic socio-economic status. As people have noticed all parts of society have voted for leave or remain so theres something else at play.

Just observing the many 'theres a little thing called democracy - stop moaning' post on social media ties up well with peoples disposition to right wing authoritarianism.

From the article "Karen Stenner, author of the Authoritarian Dynamic, argues that people are divided between those who dislike difference – signifying a disordered identity and environment – and those who embrace it. The former abhor both ethnic and moral diversity. Many see the world as a dangerous place and wish to protect themselves from it."

Somebody may have already said this but you have to account for the fact that some people vote not for selfish interests but for what they believe will be in the best interest of others. Those people won't fit any box.

Selfish may be the wrong word but you get my point.

I have a friend that isn't a fisherman, doesn't know any fishermen but voted leave because of what the EU did to the fishermen.

Today there is a good article in the Times Business section by Simon Nixon. The Times is behind a paywall, but I'll type out some key bits.

Clearly there was strong support for Brexit among many who were not economically disadvantaged.

A case in point is the strong support for Brexit in some quarters of the City of London. Few square miles in the world can have benefited more from globalisation. There is no polling data on how financial services industry workers voted, but while many of the big financial institutions adopted an official pro-Remain position, anecdotally it seems clear that there was strong support for Brexit in certain markets, particularly hedge funds, asset management and insurance and domestic-focused equity markets. One senior banker reckons that up to 40 per cent of participants in every meeting he attended this year were enthusiastic Brexiters.

Yet perhaps this is not so surprising. The rising tide may have lifted all boats, but it did not lift them all equally. Globalisation - and in particular the transformation of the City into Europe's financial centre as a result of the creation of the single market and the euro - brought about a revolution in the City and many of the old City elites did indeed find themselves "left behind." Until the Europeanisation of London began in earnest in the 1990s, the primary business was British firms raising capital for British companies from British institutions and wealthy families.

....

A successful City career today hinges on the ability to forge relationships with a new technocratic class of European managers, rather than a few hundred families. A smattering of Latin and Greek from a top British university is less useful than fluency in half a dozen modern European languages or an advanced degree in economics or mathematics.

Power has shifted to a new elite. Only one of the six biggest UK banks, HSBC, has a British-born chief executive...

Many City Brexiters insist that they are motivated by a desire to take back control of the UK from an interfering Brussels bureaucracy. But the strength of Brexit support in the traditional domestic capital markets points also to a desire to retake control from a new elite and reassert the political influence of domestic capital over British institutions. In this, they would appear to have broad support in the country outside London. In this respect, Brexit can be seen not so much as a revolution but a counter-revolution.

A lot of this jibes with the things City workers in my home-counties neighbourhood have been saying for the last couple of months. It's not just the poor who don't want to compete on a global field, everyone wants to be protected, including a comparatively privileged middle class. Not sure Brexit will deliver, but there you go.

i have seen this discussion of economic versus cultural reasons on another EU red thread just now. It looks to me that the pattern emerging for the majority of Leave voters is cultural / traditional kind of thing in areas outside of London specially (people must remember that places inside of greater London did vote Leave! i think this needs a proper analysis independently).
To me that is scary. To me it shows the right wing is winning finally. I hope I am wrong.

This is an interesting analysis and well worth a read by anyone genuinely interested in who voted which way: www.resolutionfoundation.org/media/blog/why-did-we-vote-to-leave-what-an-analysis-of-place-can-tell-us-about-brexit/

It's not based on exit polls, but on the voting patterns in different areas, and the demographic differences between those areas.

The main factors appear to be

• living standards
• education level
• age
• recent changes in migration levels (but NOT absolute migration levels)
• "cultural cohesion" (measured based on a previous study)
• wider national and political factors at play in Scotland, NI

Surprisingly the researchers found no "London effect" after accounting for all the factors above - London voted as you'd expect, based on its socioeconomic and demographic profile.

Very interesting. Thanks for that link.

What's this obsession with trying to compartmentalise all the leave voters as if we should fit nicely into some economist's box .

What's this obsession with trying to compartmentalise all the leave voters as if we should fit nicely into some economist's box

To understand why people voted leave?

Looking at the areas that voted leave and remain, it's quite clear that age and employment levels affected how people voted.

Also immigration levels.

Those areas with high levels of EU immigration almost always voted in, areas with low areas voted out. There are some exceptions but not that many.