London isn't on the coast. What you're looking at here is not coasts vs non-coasts even if American maps might make it look that way. It's cities vs everywhere else. It just so happens that in America most of the biggest/best known cities are on the coasts.
In Britain, at least, I'm not even sure it's cities vs everywhere else. The large cities of the Midlands and North (Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle) went for Brexit much more than anyone expected. It's more a case of new economy vs old economy. That's not really a surprise is it? People in places that benefit from globalization vote in favour of globalization; people in places that have seen manufacturing or rural jobs vanish in the face of globalization are reacting against these changes. In this light, both Brexit and Trump, which both promise quick fixes, are not really a surprise. Unfortunately there are no quick fixes - as technology increases, so must specialization. There's no going back - that ship has sailed.
I suspect what we're seeing here isn't actually even cities vs everywhere else. I suspect this correlation is obfuscating the real connecting variable which is age.
Young people live in cities. As they get married, buy houses and have children they move out into the suburbs.
Young people tend to vote left wing and be more supportive of the 'elite'. Older people tend to be more conservative and, apparently, more willing to give the 'elite' a good kicking.
I'm fairly left wing and I couldn't care less about the 'elite' (as long as they pay taxes at a rate that is fair given their net worth like everyone else).
This "if you are left you support the elite" thing at least in the UK was a way of conjoining the left and the elite into a single entity so that you could say to Joe Bloggs "these people don't care about you" and it needs addressing by the left.
The lefts biggest problem (here) is they simply aren't addressing the concerns of their traditional voting block at all, they seem to be more concerned about in-fighting and political correctness, I'm all for political correctness but you can only focus on so many issues and some issues are simply more important (particularly if you want to win elections and if you aren't focused on that you are a debate society not a political party).
A simple reading of what the left has traditionally stood for should make it obvious that the left and the 'elites' are opposed purely on simple economic grounds, We want them to pay more taxes, they don't want to pay more taxes (which is to be expected, who does?).
Frankly the biggest issue in regards to politics in the UK is the media (and I don't just mean the majority of the print media that is hilariously and obviously biased towards whatever Murdoch wants) but the media as a whole, the drop in revenue from the move to internet news has meant that they have to sell click bait and "agendas" to get traffic so we end up with these horrible echo chambers of bias-confirmation.
Frankly I think we are heading into a really dark period of politics here and I don't see any way to stop it.
I completely agree with your assessment that the media selling "agendas" is the problem. Not just traditional media, but social media too. Dialogue and democracy aren't attractive anymore, we've been basically coerced into fear and put into boxes.
From my point of view, the lefts biggest problem is that the "left" of today is pretty much the center. I find it extremely hard to take any left-of-center (think Bernie Sanders) position today. Anyone not in the center or in the right and you'll have both the liberal (as in economically liberal) and the conservative media against you. I don't live in the US/UK, but I live in an increasingly anti-leftist country. I can't even complain that Uber eroding worker's rights without being called a commie here. I honestly feared for my life one time when I was wearing a red t-shirt and accidentally bumped into a right-wing rally when I was visiting another town.
But the thing is, it doesn't take a lot of empathy to see that a lot of conservatives are feeling the same way: they complain that the media has a liberal-bias, they complain about not having the right to speak (because of political correctness), they complain about persecution because of their religion, they had their jobs taken away and the establishment (which they perceive as being completely on the left) failed them... they have liberal media against them. I can completely sympathize with all that.
Funny thing is that from reading comments of Trump voters, I feel as if the more radical left and Trump voters have a lot of fears in common: automation taking jobs, globalism taking jobs, elites raking it, the center-left liberals being too worried about what they call "political correctness" but saying fuck-off to workers, religious and rural people... Not to mention I can totally sympathize with how they crave for more radicalism in politics, just like I, as a leftist, do.
As I wrote that last paragraph, I wondered if what we're actually witnessing is the end of that brand of centrist/moderate liberalism. I'm biased but I think that the demise of liberalism will be that cause "dark times ahead", unless we find a viable left to strike a balance with the current right.
I think your observation that the "harder left" and "harder right" have a lot in common is a valid one, I suspect a lot of people who would have voted for Sanders voted for Trump.
In a way I think the values of "left" and "right" don't really apply like they did (if they ever did) anymore.
On some issues I hold views that the left would call me a right for and the right would call me a left for (e.g. Some things the the state runs should be private, some things that are private the state should run, not all defense spending is bad, fairer taxes can mean higher taxes on the rich, regressive taxes hit the poorer harder, religion has zero place in the bedroom or in reproductive rights, equal rights does not mean positive discrimination, the right to free speech doesn't mean the right to no consequences, single payer healthcare is not the devil (I'm British, the NHS is one of the better things we did), a social safety net is part of the social contract, immigration is broadly a good thing and rarely a very bad thing etc etc), corporations should pay their taxes and those found to be avoiding them should be punished in a way that actually makes it easier for them to just pay, we need to spend a lot on infrastructure (our national audit office found that there is between a 3 to 1 and 7 to 1 RoI on infrastructure spending).
I'm all over the spectrum when it comes to left/right, what I don't like (near universally) is the crop of politicians on either side of the old left/right.
What I'd really like is a party that addresses the tough issues with evidence led policy and the honesty to say "That's a tough problem, We don't have a total solution but we are going to try <foo> because we think it'll work better than <bar> because <fizz>".
There isn't enough nuance in politics anymore, everything is absolutist "This good, you bad", I want smart, articulate thinking politicians who are thinking about the big problems (where the problems aren't how do I benefit myself).
The actual city centres buck the trend, as you point out, by attracting young, mobile, educated, affluent people who are more likely to be open minded and engage easily with people from other backgrounds.
But get out of the cities in the north of England and you find a place not dissimilar to America's Rust Belt: forcibly de-industrialised, full of lingering resentment. When I go back to my hometown in the north it sometimes feels as though time has stood still since the 1980s, and the steelworkers and miners who Thatcher put out of work now have children and grandchildren who have been brought up feeling hard done by, apathetic and with few aspirations, despite having access to free education, welfare and healthcare that other countries would kill for.
This is the white working class problem incarnate.
> despite having access to free education, welfare and healthcare
That's the rub. I think they'd prefer to work. There are few places left in the modern world to find meaning. Supporting one's self through productive work used to be a great one. Living off the largesse of the state is demoralizing.
The jobs their looking for are not coming back, and its not just trade and immigration, but technology as well. While poverty can be mitigated through the welfare state, it isn't an ideal solution in the long term.
> That's the rub. I think they'd prefer to work. There are few places left in the modern world to find meaning.
Yes. That's why I'm critical of Universal Income. I believe that UI would only push those people further down, making them completely unnecessary, without purpose at all, their tasks in society being relegated to merely being a consumer.
I'm totally in favor of having free education, welfare and healthcare, though. I do think we need a balance here.
The pr(o|e)mise of UI is that, since you no longer need to sit at a desk retyping TPS reports in order to put food on the table, you are freed to raise horses, or sell homemade candles and jellies, or study poetry, or teach gardening, or sail off to the Canary Islands and research birds, or even do freelance accountancy if that suits you. Or just devote all your time to raising your kids.
In other words, to pick your own purpose: to be able to contribute to society (and the economy) in a way that you actually might enjoy instead of whatever stupid job you can manage to find where you live.
I don't know that this vision of every mom-and-pop becoming an entrepreneur would actually work out that way -- few things work out the way they sound on paper -- but it sounds better than people getting so upset they just want to burn it all down.
> Young people tend to vote left wing and be more supportive of the 'elite'.
I think we need to unpack that a bit more and deal with this "left wing elite" myth.
If I remember rightly, people have been digging for correlating variables and found that the best one for Brexit is .. support for the death penalty. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36803544
tbh the "support for the death penalty" correlation is pretty consistent with the view of young social liberals vs older social conservatives. It's a pretty good proxy variable for those groups.
(I doubt many Leave voters even realised they needed to vote leave the EU to allow for the possibility of peacetime death penalties; it certainly wasn't a campaign issue!)
Yes, but what I should have expressed more clearly is that it's a better predictive variable than mere age.
Not the death penalty specifically, but anti-ECHR campaigning has been going on for years. (Yes, I know that's not quite the same as the EU). And I do feel that there is a big, vague punitive component to both Brexit and Trumpism.
Ok, my mistake, I live in those areas and have never heard it used in a derogative manner - I'll check it out though and change if needed.
I would have said suburbs but that wasn't quite right as there are decent sized towns and cities encompassed in the area I am talking about but whom OP was using to claim that Newcastle voted leave when it didn't - it was the surrounding towns and cities that did.
OK. IN this case it might be just my ear - I'm not a native English speaker - but I've recognized the tendency of urbanites to dismiss suburban areas as "hinterland" or something similar. At their peril.
Scotland also isn't cosmopolitan, certainly not on the scale of London. It hasn't had anything close to the scale of immigration that other parts of the UK have had. It has deep seated issues with sectarianism rather than race.
There are parallels with Brexit, though I don't think many of the underlying causes are the same. I very much agree that those who play identity politics and deal in absolutes - "you must agree with me or you are an X" - are being burned an electorate who have heard that line a few times too often.
The election in France with Marine La Pen does have the potential for another Trump like upset - the next one to watch.
Remember that the UK is 80% white and London is 50% white; it's really striking how and probably relevant that the nonwhite population of the UK is concentrated in a few metropolitan areas.
But remember that "white" and "foreign" are not the same thing! Edinburgh has a substantial Polish community. I have coworkers from Ukraine and Romania.
"How cosmopolitan is Scotland, really" is a complex question. It's official policy of the very popular SNP, and there's little toehold for UKIP or xenophobic politics. I think they've quite successfully attached the free-floating blame to Westminster. While in the rest of the country blaming foreigners is more popular.
Having different press (including separate editions of the Mail and Sun) probably also makes a difference. Brexit is very much a long-term press project.
Edit: I didn't mean to imply that it's not a problem now - but it's no means as big a problem as it used to be (and I have direct experience through family members of horrific bigotry towards and to Catholics in Scotland).
Funny thing about the "people still get knifed at Old Firm games" comment itself is that it raises something that isn't really a problem so much anymore (Rangers/Celtic hadn't met in four years until September, where there was one arrest out of ~60,000 fans) and misses the stuff that really is an issue - areas which are still deeply segregated + gang violence split along these lines, provocative/offensive songs, flags and banners used by both sides at the football
But as you said - it's nothing like what our grandparents' generation would have experienced, or what went on in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
I remember having a rather surreal experience a few years back, sitting at a bar on the Meadows during the festival with the Lady Boys of Bangkok on one side and an Orange Walk on the other.
I'd have said it went all the way back to the Civil War and the Jacobite insurgencies. Certainly NI's sectarianism is explicit about the Battle of the Boyne 1688.
It definitely is big cities versus rural areas rather than coast vs not coast.
It just so happens that most big cities are on or closer to the coast (or along large rivers in earlier history). It made travel and trade much easier.
If the London city-state's boundaries are determined by the Brexit vote, remember that Hillingdon (Heathrow), Uttlesford (Stanstead), Crawley (Gatwick) all voted to leave. Only Newham (London City Airport) was majority Remain.
Instead of correlating voting trends with coast vs non-coasts, it's more correct to correlate them with newbies vs non-newbies. Newbies just happen to gather on places with more opportunities and these places often happen near the coast.
Simplifying: non-newbies feel that newbies are hurting them more than helping.
That's right, it's town vs country. Election maps that drill into districts will show you the same in any country. Basically anywhere with a sports team (they play in cities) tends to be "leftie" and everywhere else not.
