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Wigan’s Road to ‘Brexit’: Anger, Loss and Class Resentments

An English flag outside a house in a suburb of Wigan, a gritty northern English town where 64 percent of the population voted for “Brexit.”Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

WIGAN, England — After jobs as a garbage man, a bakery worker and now a packer at a canned food factory, Colin Hewlett, like most people in Wigan, a gritty northern English town, takes great pride in his working-class credentials. He plays snooker and drinks pints at the Working Men’s Club across the road from his red brick rowhouse, and at every election that he can remember, he has voted, like his father before him, for the Labour Party.

The governing Conservative Party, which last won a parliamentary election in Wigan in 1910, is “for rich sods and second raters on the make,” he explained.

On June 23, however, Mr. Hewlett broke with the habits of a lifetime and bucked the Labour Party line. Ignoring its stand that the European Union is good for Britain, he voted to bolt from the European bloc, along with 64 percent of the population in a town that, according to Will Patterson, a local Green Party activist, would normally “vote for a cow if Labour put one up for election.”

The overwhelming vote here in favor of “Brexit” — much higher than the 52 percent who voted to leave nationwide — delivered a stinging rebuke not only to the Labour Party leadership in London but also to the party’s local politicians. They hold 65 of the 75 seats on the Borough Council and campaigned, albeit with little zeal, for the Remain camp.

The Conservative Party, whose leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, also campaigned for Britain to stay in Europe, got kicked in the teeth, too, as did President Obama and legions of other prominent figures in Britain and abroad who urged voters like Mr. Hewlett not to rock the boat.

But rocking the boat, no matter what the risks, was precisely what he and millions of other Britons — who, regardless of their real economic situation, see themselves as members of a downtrodden “working class” — wanted to do. To them, it was a last, desperate effort to restore a lost world of secure jobs and communities that was far harsher in reality than it is in recollection.

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Colin Hewlett voted for Brexit, saying, “I don’t like people telling us what to do from miles away.”Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Their votes were stark evidence of how working-class resentments, driven by feelings of being ignored and left unmoored in a rapidly changing world, are feeding nationalism and other efforts to reclaim a sense of identity, upending ideological assumptions and straining ties to political parties and other institutions.

Indeed, the well-documented demise of traditional working-class jobs in Wigan and the rest of Britain has not ended people’s attachment to the idea that they belong to a put-upon proletariat. A survey of social attitudes released last week by NatCen Social Research, a British research group, found that while only 25 percent of Britons had jobs that involved routine or manual labor, the traditional markers of working-class membership, 60 percent of British people viewed themselves as working class.

This disconnect between the jobs people hold and their class allegiance is a phenomenon that the researchers called “working class of the mind.” It helps explain that while only a small minority of Britons share the real insecurity and poverty of workers like Mr. Hewlett, many others feel they are getting a raw deal — and want to stick it to those in power, whether in Brussels or London.

“I don’t think a lot will change. But we have to give it a chance,” said Mr. Hewlett, 61, sitting next to his wife, who has Alzheimer’s disease, in a cluttered front room, its faded walls plastered with photographs of their six children and 14 grandchildren. Life, he said, has “gone to the dogs,” and meddling from outside is to blame. “I don’t like people telling us what to do from miles away.”

In just three years, Mr. Hewlett explained, his take-home pay had crashed from more than $665 a week to just $318. Worse, he added, is that his previously secure full-time employment contract has morphed into a “zero hours contract,” under which his employer decides how much he works and how much it pays him depending on what it needs on any particular day.

“It is basically slave labor,” Mr. Hewlett said. He complained that an influx of eager workers from poorer, formerly communist parts of the European Union meant that employers now had no incentive to offer a fixed contract or more than the minimum wage for menial work.

The real number of immigrants living and working in Wigan is tiny, with only 2.9 percent of the population born outside Britain, compared with a nationwide figure of 11.5 percent, the Office of National Statistics says. Only 1.7 percent of those living in Wigan were born in European Union countries other than Britain. The unemployment rate, the local council says, is only 5 percent, slightly below the national level and half the rate in European countries that use the euro.

But this has not stopped even some of Wigan’s immigrants from complaining about there being too many foreigners, particularly Poles, in the area.

Abdul Rao, a longtime immigrant from Pakistan with three children born in Wigan, said he had voted for Brexit because he did not want new immigrants spoiling his children’s job prospects.

Justyna Kolenda, a Polish immigrant who works in a clothing store, complained that too many Poles and other newcomers did not speak English and mixed only with one another. “There should be more controls,” she said, strolling with her English boyfriend down a pretty shopping street bedecked with British flags in memory of the bloody 1916 Battle of the Somme.

Free-market advocates hail so-called labor flexibility, ensured by zero hour contracts and other devices, as one of the main reasons for Britain’s robust economy compared with the sluggish or shrinking economies of the Continent. Yet, for workers like Mr. Hewlett, who has no special skills and is not in a position to acquire any, this flexibility is a curse — and one of the reasons that poorer, less-educated Britons voted heavily to quit the European Union.

That the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels played no role in shaping Britain’s labor market — that was done by elected policy makers in London as Britain fought to retain its competitiveness amid the pressures of globalization — did nothing to dent a widespread view here in Wigan: that leaving the European Union might somehow jolt the country onto another track, preferably one that recovers the lost security and sense of belonging of the past.

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Wigan Pier, a place where coal was loaded onto barges that was made infamous by George Orwell’s book “The Road to Wigan Pier.”Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Mr. Patterson, the Green Party activist, recalled how he had struggled in vain during the referendum campaign to convince Wigan voters that their interests were aligned with those of “workers in Stuttgart and Gdansk,” and that they needed to make common cause with them against right-wing governments across Europe pushing austerity and pro-business labor policies.

When he put this argument forward at a debate in Wigan, he recalled, a woman jumped to her feet and shouted: “I am not interested in Stuttgart. I am only interested in Wigan.”

Britain’s feeling of remoteness from Europe is often attributed to its self-image as what Shakespeare called “this sceptered isle.” But the country is not just one island — or two when Northern Ireland is included — but a host of largely self-contained islets, each with its own history, its own accent and its own proud sense of splendid isolation.

“Wigan is a very insular society. When the chips are down, the population here is very loyal to itself,” said David Molyneux, the Labour Party’s deputy leader of the Borough Council. After years of deep cuts in funding from London, which has slashed the local budget by 40 percent since 2010, Wigan voted not so much to grab decision-making power back from Brussels, but from London.

Local pride, particularly strong in a town that resents George Orwell for portraying it as a sinkhole of misery in “The Road to Wigan Pier,” sometimes swerves toward xenophobia, though overt racism is mostly limited to a tiny far-right fringe.

Yet, in many ways, Britain’s referendum result was less a revolt against the European Union than against political and economic forces that are blurring not only boundaries between countries but also smaller, narrower frontiers that once clearly defined who was and was not “local,” and who belongs where in that most enduring feature of British life, the class hierarchy.

Mark Bradley, the leader of the Wigan branch of the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, the driving force behind the Brexit campaign, complained that the area’s Labour Party member of Parliament, Lisa Nandy, was out of touch with her constituents and their desire to leave Europe because she “is not even from Wigan.” She grew up in Bury, a town barely 15 miles away.

“She is definitely not local,” Mr. Bradley said.

Owen Jones, a columnist for the left-wing newspaper The Guardian, described the shocking referendum result as being “above all else a working-class revolt,” a cry for help by the downtrodden whose travails and desperation Orwell chronicled 80 years ago.

When Orwell visited Wigan, however, the working class existed as a clear socioeconomic category defined by backbreaking work for near-starvation wages in coal mines and factories. Today, the mines and cotton mills are all gone, extinguished by forces set in motion long before Britain joined the European Economic Community, the predecessor to the European Union, in 1973, or reaffirmed its membership in a 1975 referendum.

Mr. Molyneux, the deputy council chief, said the area had changed markedly for the better since 1975, with large areas of slums and derelict factories cleared away. But, he added, “memories are clouded of what life was really like,” and many people hark back to a lost, albeit mostly imaginary, era of secure, tightknit communities built around coal mines and manufacturing.

Mr. Bradley, of UKIP, lamented the decline of locally owned pubs, shops and other businesses in the face of competition from corporate chains. “There is a longing for a better time,” he said.

Like a phantom limb, the lost era still twitches, with fading, rose-tinted memories kept alive in places like the Leigh Miners Welfare Institute, a bar and social club on the edge of the borough.

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Raymond Gorton, right, an 81-year-old former coal miner, playing bowls with his brother Marcus at a miners club in Leigh, England. Mr. Gorton voted to leave the European Union because he did not like the idea of “taking orders from outsiders.”Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Taking a break from a game of bowls on the club’s manicured bowling green, Raymond Gorton, an 81-year-old former coal miner, showed off a mangled finger smashed by a mine accident in the 1950s and recalled how he had almost been killed in a 1965 accident that shattered his neck. All the same, he had fond memories of the camaraderie of a lost world that revolved around the pit.

Forced to give up mining decades ago because of his injuries, Mr. Gorton said he still wakes each morning at 5, a routine left from his time on the early shift at the Wood End Pit. “It is very hard to break old habits,” he said.

He, too, voted to leave the European Union, not because it had interfered with his life in any concrete way but because he did not like the idea of “taking orders from outsiders.” He had also been impressed by the claim — entirely false — put forward by Brexit campaigners that leaving would save Britain 350 million pounds a week that could be better spent on the National Health Service.

He volunteered that he did not mind immigrants, noting that he got on well with two Polish families living on his street, but nonetheless thought that “we need to start thinking more about our own people.”

Clinching the argument for Brexit was the memory of his father, who he said had served with the Royal Air Force and been killed by the Germans in 1940. Britain, he said, should not be part of a European bloc dominated by Germany.

But it is not just German power that bothers him. He is more uneasy over a local imbalance of power that has left his own hometown, Leigh, controlled by the Borough Council in Wigan after the merging of several districts in 1974. That amalgamation, which had nothing to do with Brussels, has left many in Leigh resentful of Wigan, which is only five miles away but which they see as an alien and bullying force.

“We feel pushed around,” Mr. Gorton said.

A correction was made on 
July 5, 2016

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of a Polish immigrant who works in a Wigan clothing store. She is Justyna Kolenda, not Justyana.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Class Anger Fuels Town’s Pro-‘Brexit’ Defiance. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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