Whatever happens with Brexit, local people need to take back control of their destinies

In deindustrialised Mansfield and Pendle, the Leave vote was overwhelming; yet two years on from the referendum, people on all sides are disappointed and bored with the endless negotiations

At a busy road junction in Mansfield, there stands a statue of a handsome coalminer intended to remind the viewer of the town’s proud industrial past.

According to the Labour candidate for Mansfield, herself the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners, the sculptor got it wrong. The pick he holds doesn’t tally with the clothes. He’s wearing the clothes of someone who goes deep into the pit but the pick is for chiselling coal near the surface.

Brexit perhaps represents a similar misrepresentation of the past.

In deindustrialised places like Mansfield and Pendle, the Leave vote was overwhelming. Yet two years on from the referendum, people on all sides are disappointed and bored with the endless Brexit negotiations. The chaos in Westminster betokens huge uncertainty and seems to lack any concern for concrete local issues – a mood shared by both remainers and leavers.

Mansfield, in the Midlands, used to be a leading coalmining and textile area. Pendle in Lancashire was known for its productive cotton mills. Pendle remains the home to Rolls-Royce aerospace and still has one of the highest levels of manufacturing in the UK. Both have relatively low levels of immigration.

Pendle is home to a large South Asian community though – people who came to work in the mills in the 1960s and 1970s. Mansfield meanwhile has a more recent East European community – workers who came to do the low-paid zero contract jobs in online retail (Sports Direct has taken advantage of cheap land in the area).

Two reports from the London School of Economics were launched in both towns last week at meetings attended by local businesses, councillors, journalists and people in education – including leavers and remainers. The aim of the exercise was not to debate the pros and cons of Brexit but to listen to opinions on all sides about the impact of Brexit on their local community.

In both places there was a widespread view that the high Leave vote was not really about immigration even though immigration dominated the referendum debate. Immigration was a “proxy” or a “red herring” (in the words used by participants) – the real motivation was the sense of abandonment and neglect, of being “left behind”; the feeling that successive governments, both Labour and Conservative, have not been willing to do anything for the areas hardest hit by the decline in mining and manufacturing.

There was broad agreement with the main conclusions of the LSE reports that these areas will be worse off as a consequence of Brexit, whether “hard” or “soft”. Indeed, Brexit will not solve any of the fundamental structural problems experienced by the towns.

One big issue raised by Brexit is the skill shortage both at high and low levels, with jobs currently filled by Europeans. There are shortages of skilled workers in new tech businesses and in the care and public sector (health, education and care). Young people who get university degrees tend to leave Mansfield and Pendle. Years of neglect and lack of funding for skills training and apprenticeships have left a big gap. At the same time, other sectors that rely on low paid low skilled workers such as agriculture (fruit-picking for example) and online retail will also be badly hit by the reduction in immigration.

A second issue is trade. Most local businesses rely on imports from Europe. While some argued that Brexit won’t make much difference, others told us their businesses had already suffered from Brexit. The cost of imports has already increased because of the fall in the value of the pound and some have found European partners are reluctant to continue working together because of uncertainty about the future.

And a third issue is EU funding. This includes regional, structural and research funding as well as funding for tourism and heritage and regeneration and for specific functions like “digital business growth” – no one knows whether it will be replicated at the national level despite promises.

While everyone agreed on the diagnosis, those who still favoured Brexit argued that they would be able to cope. “We’ll be poorer but we are resilient,” said one person from Pendle. What everyone stressed at this point was the need to end uncertainty. Both leavers and remainers are appalled by the political mess in Westminster. They are scared and anxious about what will happen.

Both Pendle and Mansfield are Conservative marginal seats. Mansfield, in a shock vote, was won by the Conservatives in 2017 having been a Labour seat since 1923. In both places, Labour Party members are largely Remain, more so in Pendle than in Mansfield, and both places have significant Momentum groups.

Those we spoke to feared if Labour supported a reversal of Brexit the party would lose support. Nevertheless, in Mansfield we were told that traditional Labour supporters were fed up with Brexit and wanted to talk about other issues. A Remain position “won’t help us much round here” said one member of the Pendle Labour Party, “but I think the Labour Party should stand for something”.

The Brexit vote has drawn attention to the devastation caused by years of decline and austerity. It is not possible to return to the proud industrial past even if it was never exactly the good life that the Leavers, at least, remember. If there were to be a second referendum, any Remain campaign would have to emphasise the ways in which both national and European policies need to be transformed to focus on the real consequences of deindustrialisation.

What is needed now is political renewal in areas like Pendle and Mansfield and this might be a way of saving the face of the “we’ll get by, it’s what we do” attitude of many Leavers. Whatever happens in terms of Brexit, there seemed to be a view that it was time for local people to take control. In Mansfield, the successor to the coal miner needs to be invented.

Mary Kaldor is a professor of global governance at the London School of Economics