There is a particular kind of English liberal who only seems to remember that Cornwall exists when they want to go on holiday or need someone to blame for Brexit. Scroll any comments section under a Cornish post about Brexit, poverty, fishing, housing, or devolution and you will find them. Their smug certainty that they are on the right side of history is immediately evident, and they express abject delight that other people are paying the price.

“Cornwall voted Leave, what did they expect?” “Turkeys voting for Christmas!” “Serves them right!”

What they really mean is this: ‘People who do not think like me deserve to suffer.’

This lazy and boring attitude relies on cruelty framed as savvy realism. Strip it back and what’s revealed is the same old class contempt that England has always reserved for the former industrial heartlands – plundering their resources and deriding their ‘ignorance’.

Ten years on: what the fuck was Brexit?

I am not ‘Cornish’ – I grew up in Leicester as a working-class white guy. I was raised around migrants from all over the world, like Pakistani shop owners, Polish builders, Irish labourers, and Somali cab drivers. At school I had fewer white English friends than friends of colour, which was normal life and something I am grateful for.

When the EU referendum was presented to the public, I was eighteen and it was my first vote. I was politically engaged, left wing, a Corbyn supporter to the core. I despised Farage and Johnson and the entire gaggle of grifters and billionaires, wrapping themselves in the flag whilst shuffling their money offshore or betting against the pound. I knew exactly what kind of people they were, and yet the decision was not straightforward.

Not because I believed the racist lies, but because as an anti-capitalist I had grown suspicious of exactly the kind of institution the EU typified: a vast trading bloc designed primarily to smooth the movement of capital. An organisation without democracy (something even its defenders quietly acknowledge) and one with a horrific record in its treatment of migrants. For me, the EU’s very orientation meant that people were left to drown in the Mediterranean whilst politicians talked about asylum quotas and deterrence.

At the time, I had been working since the age of sixteen in the gig economy. In bars and restaurants I was waiting tables and pulling pints. The owners and the kitchen staff were Romanian, Lithuanian, Algerian, and I myself am Irish. Freedom of movement was not an abstract concept to me, but the very reason those workplaces functioned and friendships formed.

That is why I voted Remain.

The ‘Remain’ Campaign: demanding gratitude and lecturing the poor.

But it was impossible not to notice something else running alongside the official Remain campaign. Something uglier that would prove far more consequential than any leaflet or statistic or celebrity endorsement. Contempt.

Remain’s biggest advocates, figures like Tony Blair and his consigliere Alastair Campbell, their successors Cameron and Osborne – even writers like Polly Toynbee and the Guardian commentariat – had already devastated working-class communities through their policies and arguments. They were now re-emerging to explain, in the most patronising fashion, why those same communities were wrong to feel angry. The predictions about leaving were technically correct, but too often delivered by those who had spent decades overseeing the gutting of entire regions by austerity and deindustrialisation.

Their message was not just that leaving the EU would make the country poorer, but that those who disagreed were ignorant, racist or plain stupid. If the poor could not see how much better off they were, that was a moral failing or gap in their education. And what’s more, they demanded gratitude. This enlightened notion was, of course, incredibly convenient, as it completely absolved them of political culpability.

In communities to the north or the west of London, it is difficult to make a coherent argument that people were “better off”. Over the preceding forty years, jobs had vanished, with the industries that fed their parents and grandparents being closed and replaced with nothing. All facilities and provisions, from housing to youth centres, were disappearing too. In post-industrial Cornwall and Wales, entire towns were turned into seasonal holiday parks for people who would never send their children to the local school. And when they didn’t get their way, London’s liberal class rounded on these communities in the most grotesque way.

Cornwall’s rough deal.

Cornwall is one of the poorest regions in western Europe, thanks to wealth extraction and mismanagement from Westminster. It was a recipient of significant EU funding precisely because of that fact, to the tune of £43 million per year until the UK’s exit. Cornwall also voted Leave by 56.5 percent, which was not the highest Leave vote across the UK – not even close. And yet Cornwall’s choice to leave has been held up as an example of collective stupidity ever since.

Cornish people are branded racist, or backward, or thick. Their suffering is framed as self inflicted by smug commentators openly celebrating funding losses and industry collapse as a kind of cosmic justice. This trend continues almost a decade on, with many of those who voted ‘Leave’ having died, and young Cornish people being unfairly tarred with the same brush.

The irony is that Cornwall has consistently resisted the far-right more effectively than many wealthier English regions. Reform performs worse here than in large swathes of middle England, and anti-fascist mobilisation routinely outnumbers racist protests. But these facts do not fit the story so they are ignored.

I am now a business owner in the food and beverage industry and I am acutely aware of the damage Brexit has done. The multibillion pound “black hole” Rachel Reeves now talks about did not appear from nowhere. It is the cost of collapsing export markets, broken supply chains and lost growth.

Cornish fishermen cannot sell their catch. Hospitality is crippled by labour shortages. Entire supply chains are backed up by paperwork and red tape. And now that hole is being filled with higher beer duty, rising business rates and increased national insurance, all of which land hardest on food and beverage businesses operating on tight margins. This crisis is real and it is devastating.

But I do not blame the 52 percent for this mess.

I do not blame people who were desperate enough to gamble. People whose lives had already been made miserable by the same political class now lecturing them about responsibility. God forbid they were duped into believing things could be different. That was hope, misdirected and exploited.

I prefer to talk politics with a ‘Leave’-voting impoverished person from Cornwall over a smug ‘told-you-so’ marketing bro from London any day of the week. Because one was trying to survive. The other is just enjoying being right.

If English liberals want to understand why Brexit happened, they should start by looking in the mirror. To recognise that sneering is not persuasion and contempt is not politics. You cannot lecture people into gratitude, nor can you shame people into class solidarity. Cornwall is a place full of people who deserve dignity, investment and self determination, not moral scolding from those whose lives will never be shaped by the consequences.

Pushing people away.

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it is not that working class communities are stupid. It is that when you stop listening to people and start talking down to them, someone else will step in and pretend to care.

Yes, Brexit was a mistake. Yes, Nigel Farage is a neo-fascist grifter who has made a career out of laundering racism into respectability and turning other people’s insecurity into his own income stream. None of that is in dispute.

But no, Brexit was not a simple referendum where one side was virtuous and the other morally deficient or uneducated. Each campaign was saturated with a fair amount of lies and bad-faith promises. One sold nationalist fantasy and scapegoats, the other sold an economic status quo that had already failed millions, wrapped in the language of immovable expertise. One weaponised racism. The other weaponised class contempt.

Was racism present in the ‘Leave’ vote? Of course it was. There is racism in almost all aspects of British politics. But it does not follow that everyone who voted Leave was racist, stupid or beyond redemption. And the liberal consensus that has come after has achieved nothing except hardening resentment and driving people further away from the very politics ‘Remain’ voters claim to care about. The smug certainty of English liberalism did not stop Farage, it helped create the conditions in which he thrived.

Image Via: Creative Commons.