Early morning on the quay at the mouth of the Wear in Sunderland and two middle-aged men wearing flak jackets descend on a dwindling band of seafarers. Their nets lie idle, as the quotas for fish have been used up or sold off. Half the fishing boats here won’t be used to fish again. The trade has been forced into other catches. The “quota cops”, with their body-mounted cameras recording everything, oblige the men to account for the crabs and lobsters caught in pots deposited on the sea bed just outside the harbour. As the crustaceans are counted into a leather-bound register, the exasperated fishermen complain of harassment. These may be the men from the British government ministry, but in post-Brexit Britain, perception is everything. In the eyes of Arthur Mole, the inspectors are as much a product of Brussels as a fruit beer or a sprout. The EU is to blame. “We’ve been like this for 30 years now. On a downward decline. Now we can see a future,” he says.
Taking back control can rarely appear so tangible as in the interaction between Brexit-supporting fishermen and the quota police. For Mole, it is the mere possibility of accountability from anyone on the same island.
He takes me on a tour of the harbour, past the old shipyards where his school friends used to build the red blood cells of the world trade system – giant ships and carriers. He points out where the old Wearmouth coal mine went out six miles underneath the North Sea. These are echoes of a time when this city had a specific role in Britain and its economy. With that position came lifelong employment and job certainty. I ask if he thinks leaving the EU might bring back the shipyards and the pits: “We’d like to think so.” He says he knows not one person among the 39% who voted remain. Even in Sunderland, remain and leave inhabit different worlds. He points to the old fishing marina, where some houses now cost £300,000. “An ordinary working person from Sunderland doesn’t have the money for them. Certainly not normal people, not from this area anyway. Maybe Nissan workers can.”
Mole is one of 82,934 Mackems who voted to leave the EU seven weeks ago. The political tumult unleashed by the decision has been put on hold by the summer holidays, but will soon return. The largest people’s mandate ever in British politics will now be given effect by the political system, with the cabinet, the Commons, the Lords and perhaps the supreme court having some say. “Brexit means Brexit” is the diplomatic tautology deployed by the new prime minister as others debate its definition. Many claims are now being made about what the leave mandate actually represents. The decisions made on how to leave could be as consequential as the decision to leave itself. Summer in Sunderland, the totemic leave town, might help clear some things up.
The city provided the moment that announced Brexit to the world – the declaration at Sunderland showing 61% of this Labour heartland voting out. Sterling immediately dropped through the floor. One Irish paper christened the city “the town that broke the pound”. Sunderland had long been politically notable for just one thing – the rapidity of the council’s ability to count a completely predictable general election result for Labour. In swing terms, the only thing that changed was the margin of the Labour victory. Nothing had altered, in terms of political representation, for a half a century. Within the confines of our electoral system, large swaths of the UK – cities such as Sunderland – did not matter politically. That changed on 23 June, and spectacularly so.
Three themes come up repeatedly among leave voters. The promise to save the NHS, migration and trust in Boris Johnson. I meet a former social worker, Shirley Bain, who says that her family’s personal reliance on the NHS meant she was very influenced by the promises to divert EU funding. “It hit home with me because I’m using the NHS quite a lot at the minute. My son is really, really poorly in hospital and has been in and out since May.
“He’s had a liver transplant and it went wrong, stuff like that – and where would I have been if I’d had to pay upfront for that? I know I’ve paid with my taxes because I’ve worked all my life. I just think that some of the money we are putting into the EU for other things could be put back into our own NHS.”
Shirley invites me to a community centre where she volunteers, which recently had its funding for youth services cut. The £350m a week could also help reopen them, she says.
Fellow volunteer Peta McDowall, a remain voter, suggests to her the figure was a lie. Peta considers herself a product of Europe – her parents arrived during the Spanish civil war and she attended university in Europe.
“I don’t think it was about politics. I think the people who are in Brexit are idiots. I’m sorry, I don’t mean you, Shirley, I mean the head people. When I found out who was our minister for world affairs [Boris Johnson], it’s a joke.” Shirley seems genuinely worried that the £350m number might not be true. She resolves to charter a bus with Peta from the north-east to meet the new foreign secretary. “I would go mad if this money doesn’t go into the NHS, I will go mad. I want to be assured that this money – because that’s why I voted to come out,” says Shirley.
At the Colliery Tavern, which until the early 1990s would throng with miners coming back up from the coalface, and now serves Sunderland’s Stadium of Light, the landlord John Snaith, a leave voter, says it was a protest. “Voters voted because we’ve been neglected so long. They thought this is a chance for them to hear our voice,” he says. His wife, Theresa, says that council cutbacks played a big part. John is a rare thing in this city – a Conservative. But on this occasion, his vote mattered.
On the night, when the presumption had been that remain would win, Conservative cabinet ministers started to report a similar phenomenon. “Labour” wards in Tory safe seats, where no party would bother to visit during a general election, were seeing massive turnout. Overall, 2.8m more votes were cast on 23 June than at the general election last year. Turnout spiked particularly in strongly leave areas. In the north-east, Hartlepool (70% leave) saw turnout up by 9%, as did Sunderland. Middlesborough (66% leave) saw turnout up by 12%.
Just under 20,000 of those new voters were in Sunderland. One of them, Melanie Jordison, a travel agent, was in the Colliery. “It was something very real. A choice to stay or leave – and both had impacts, whereas in general elections there is no impact, so I thought it a good opportunity to make Britain great again,” she says. She is expecting cheaper food, gas and oil, and wants to close down the borders “a little bit” because “far too many immigrants [are] coming in taking our resources. We can’t afford to feed our own.”
The main story on the leave side has been of a left-behind Britain of ignored white middle-class voters who wanted control over borders back and were inured to David Cameron’s “Project Fear” economic scaremongering. On the remain side, Sunderland became the symbol of a Labour heartland encouraged to shoot itself in the foot, with a gun handed to them by Conservative cabinet ministers and loaded with lies.
Politics defies simple narratives most of the time, and spectacularly so right now. I meet leavers completely relaxed about immigration. Car workers who voted out. Fishing industry workers who voted remain.
If politics was done solely by numbers, there should have been no contest in the north-east. The region is the most dependent on EU funding of any English region – from the new aquatics centre on the old colliery site, to the university near the old shipyards, and the very fish quay building from where the fisherman lament the EU. The leave campaign promised the funding will be maintained, saying it is merely rerouted UK taxpayer funds, but the dependence will move to Westminster to continue this funding.
On the signature issue of the Leave campaign – immigration – the north-east is the region with the smallest proportion of non-British residents: 3%. Figures from 2014 estimated there to be 40,000 European Union migrants and 42,000 non-EU migrants in the region, out of a total population of 2.5 million.
If you concentrate on a place such as Sunderland, the migration crisis is rather stark. At the last census, Sunderland had the fastest rate of depopulation of any UK city. Since the 1980s, 8% of its population has gone. The success of the university in attracting international students has helped stabilise the decline in recent years, but its business model is built on increasing the net migration numbers that the government found so difficult to defend.
At the very least, it is difficult to see how places such as Sunderland will be greatly affected by less EU migration, when the numbers are very small by the standards of a British city. On the other hand, any risk to the terms of trade between the UK and the remaining EU will hit the north-east first: in per-capita terms, it does more trade with the EU than any other English region. The north-east appears to be shouldering a disproportionate amount of the economic risk of a badly negotiated Brexit.
But politics is not done by numbers these days, still less by experts. For starters, there was little perception of any risk to the Nissan plant. Back at the fishing quay, the trader buying all the crabs and lobsters, Alan McLaughlan, asserts: “That Nissan plant is never, ever going to leave Sunderland. They’ll never, ever get a workforce like they’ve got in Sunderland, never ever.” But perhaps the best example of this are the workers in local supply chains for the industry who voted to leave. James Thoroughgood, a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, voted out despite job concerns, because the EU “needs to be transparent”. Before the vote, David Cameron had told me directly that Brexit could cause job losses at Nissan and that it would be a “self-inflicted wound”. Thoroughgood says such warnings were ignored: “If you’ve got nothing at all, and you are offered to stay where we are because we don’t know what is around the corner, people with nothing will go around the corner every time. What have they got to lose? I think there are lot of people in this area like that.”
Vote Leave felt sufficiently confident that it even put Nissan’s logo on its leaflets, despite the threat of court action. But the risk is apparent. The history of the plant is difficult to escape. It only exists because Margaret Thatcher went to Japan in 1982 and visited the Nissan chiefs, personally assuring them of access for their cars to an embryonic British invention – Europe’s single market. She then went into battle for Nissan against French and Italian attempts to block tariff-free exports of the Sunderland-produced Nissan Bluebird. She helped establish the Nissan as a European car, designed for export into Europe and getting around strict quotas for Japanese imports in the face of French opposition.
One of the most influential businessmen in the city’s history will only talk to me off the record. He is flabbergasted that the government’s Brexit team is even contemplating leaving the single market. They have to if they want full immigration controls. And yet the impact of that extra border control will probably be mainly felt in London and the bigger cities – and, mainly, those places did not vote for it.
He points me to a song about the Jarrow Crusade march for jobs, down the road. “If they don’t give you a decent job, then with my blessing, burn them down.” That was a song from the Geordie side of the Newcastle/Sunderland divide. “The ‘them’ here is ‘London Town’, and that’s what they’ve done with the leave vote,” he tells me.
The common thread among everyone I spoke to was that this was a revolt against London, or perhaps, more specifically, the rest of the country becoming like London. Apart from that, the reasons and rationales were many and varied, and not always consistent – from hospital funding to cutting migration and reopening the pits and the yards. The Mackem mandate is mixed, whatever claims individual politicians will make for leave. Theresa May has more flexibility in defining Brexit than many, including she, might realise. But the cry from Wearside is about much more than the European Union.
Faisal Islam is Sky News’s political editor. Out and Proud: Where Brexit Leaves Us Now is on Sky News at 9pm on Wednesday 10 August.
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