It's more complicated than that!: Unpacking 'Left Behind Britain' and some other spatial tropes following the UK's 2016 EU referendum



Nurse, Alexander ORCID: 0000-0003-0325-4420 and Sykes, Olivier ORCID: 0000-0002-2634-2629
(2019) It's more complicated than that!: Unpacking 'Left Behind Britain' and some other spatial tropes following the UK's 2016 EU referendum. LOCAL ECONOMY, 34 (6). pp. 589-606.

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Abstract

<jats:p> In the aftermath of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, a number of dominant narratives and spatial imaginaries of ‘Brexit’ have come to the fore including the notion of a revolt of a ‘Left Behind Britain’, and of a generational splintering manifested in different political attitudes. Informed by this context, this paper considers some of these issues at the micro-scale, using voting data from two contiguous local authority districts within the same city region. It presents data from wards that have similar socio-economic conditions and which are highly ranked in the Index of Multiple Deprivation but which voted differently in the referendum. The data reinforce the arguments of those who have claimed that the phenomenon of Brexit is powerfully contextual and that general socio-economic analyses of its causes do not fully explain why some areas and populations voted to leave the EU and others with comparable profiles voted to remain. With poorer regions predicted to be the biggest economic losers of ‘Brexit’, an understanding of such issues is of material consequence and might inform progressive responses to such populist phenomena. </jats:p>

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Brexit, European Union, Left Behind Britain, Liverpool City Region, Referendum
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 19 Sep 2019 13:46
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 00:26
DOI: 10.1177/0269094219881356
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3055193