The truth about Labour leavers: they feel locked out of politics

A few weeks ago I met a couple of the stereotypes who could decide which way this country turns tomorrow. And guess what – they were nothing like you’d expect. You know the caricature I mean: the working-class Brexiter. The exact people the two big parties are battling over in the very last hours before the polls close. The mythical group pundits say stands at the heart of what Sky News bills as “the Brexit Election”.

And yet I cannot think of any other demographic treated more superficially and transactionally than the four million-odd Labour voters who voted leave in 2016. Superficial is the Attenborough-esque spot on the news in which a intrepid TV crew treks to a post-industrial town and lurks in drizzle outside a branch of Sports Direct, ready to pounce upon exotic passersby and prod them into a few barks about Europe and “getting on with it”.

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Transactional is the way Westminster types (both red and blue) worry about whether their party sounds sufficiently “leave-y”; or how Boris Johnson will don pristine workwear and plough a JCB through a polystyrene wall. Because that’s what the proles want, isn’t it? Sod what they need.

At the very root is condescension, from all sides. You know how it goes: “Oh, these idiots who don’t know what they voted for!” Which is where a conversation I had just before this election comes in.

I was visiting a lunch club run by a local volunteer in one of the poorest parts of Colchester, Essex, at the start of school half-term. Inside a scout hut, about 45 kids and their parents were getting a free cooked meal to ease the cost of holiday eating. Over chips, Gary and Rebecca were telling me how they regularly live off one meal a day. More happily, they remembered a rare summer holiday, a long weekend when they took their children 30 miles down the road to the seaside. Their borrowed caravan couldn’t fit everyone, so Gary slept on the ground outside.

Yeah, they voted Brexit – not out of hatred of immigrants but because, as Rebecca said: “It’s not right that we give all the money to Europe, not when we have so many people going without in this country.”

Shopworker Gary pointed into the scout hut: babbling boys and girls were filling their plates to the brim, while their parents enjoyed the luxury of not having to starve today.

Did they really think that Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg would send any of those EU millions to this housing estate, to them and the other families relying on holiday handouts? “ ’Course not,” said Gary, shrugging. And the same went for everyone I asked that lunchtime.

In one of the country’s biggest leave-voting regions, most people in this room had voted for the promises of Brexit, and yet had zero faith in them. They would believe the lying £350m bus, but not its fibbing, blond frontman. They accepted how bad things were, but they didn’t imagine for a minute that politicians would make it better.

This is part of a far more complex, contradictory picture than you are normally given of working-class leave voters, and without it you can’t understand the forces shaping this election. I have spent years talking to such voters, whether in Colchester or north-east Derbyshire or Newbiggin or Blaenau Gwent. Different places, different histories, different politics. But there are a few common themes, particularly over Brexit and the political class. You rarely hear them on the Today programme or read them in the newspapers – yet, unless they get a proper ventilation, the decade-long crisis that Britain is mired in will stretch on for many more years.

First, the EU is almost always a proxy for anger at things happening right here at home. You kicked out at Brussels in rage at the waiting time for your mum’s hip replacement, the number of pupils crammed into your daughter’s classroom, the way you, your family and neighbours always have more month than money. Deep down, the political class knows as much. Take this passage from one of this year’s manifestos: “Too many communities feel let down. Violent crime and antisocial behaviour are ignored amid a backdrop of boarded-up department stores, shops and pubs.” Not Labour, but Conservative. It’s just that no one expects Johnson’s mob to do a thing about it.

Second, while the political class define ancient history as what happened last week, voters remember that they have been waterboarded by crisis after crisis. Take Gary, who knew where this Brexit dividend would end up: “It’s going to go to their mates in the City of London.” His remains perhaps the only reference I’ve heard to the financial sector in this entire election, yet it is being fought in the shadow of the 2008 crash and the cuts to the public realm and to our living standards that have followed.

Remember that figure of £1.2 trillion? It was splashed across obedient newspapers as the Tory calculation of the cost of Labour’s spending splurge. It was also the amount the International Monetary Fund calculated that the UK stuck behind the finance sector immediately after the crash, in bailouts and loans and guarantees on City trading. Without so much as a by your leave the bankers were thrown a lifeline now deemed unaffordable for our public services.

In 2008, good-hearted progressives were full of resolutions about “don’t let a good crisis go to waste”. Well, over the past decade we’ve had our fill of good crises: banking, MPs’ expenses, phone hacking. And the main message from all this has been that Britain’s key institutions are both unreformed and essentially unreformable.

How do voters respond to that, especially those who have done least well out of the past decade? They tune out. Earlier this year I went door-knocking round a Northumberland housing estate with Jamie Driscoll, Labour North of Tyne mayor, and in what is called Labour’s heartland the most common response was: “I don’t follow politics”, followed by the slamming of a door. One canvasser remarked: “Policy doesn’t matter here. They’ve forgotten what government can do.” If there’s one statement Labour should take to heart after this election, it’s that.

A month before the 2016 referendum I was in Pontypool. This south Wales market town used to be lovely. You could see that. But, as one local flatly remarked: “It’s dead now because they took what they wanted. Thatcher smashed the unions. There used to be coal mines. Boosh! ‘We’re out of here.’ They’ve moved on.” When the culture of Labourism got destroyed, so did the attendant affiliation to the Labour party. The Westminster lot were all “liars” and London was a leech, always hungry for more.

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This is what decades of distrust produces. Not magical thinking or unstinting belief in posh-boy fairytales, but a deep and sullen resentment. A nihilism that neither party nor any other democratic institution can even get their hands around, let alone find a response to.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist