‘All political lives end in failure’, wrote Enoch Powell – but few have ended as abruptly and disastrously as this one. For the last 10 years, David Cameron has dominated the British political arena with his trademark blend of ‘compassionate conservatism’ and hard-nosed austerity policies. When he returned the Tories to office with an unexpected majority in May 2015, he looked set to go down in history as one of the more effective Conservative Prime Ministers – on a par with Benjamin Disraeli and Stanley Baldwin, if not Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. Now he is gone, tarnished by a defeat which will diminish and perhaps destroy the United Kingdom, and the parallels are with Lord North, Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden. Indeed, the Suez debacle is beginning to look like small beer in comparison. 

Perhaps the fairer parallel, though, is with Edward Heath – ironically the man who took Britain into the EEC. Both Heath and Cameron were self-styled Tory modernizers who benefited from voters’ disaffection with immigration and Labour’s economic (mis)management. (It is often forgotten that the Conservatives’ victory in 2010 was based on a small swing among ABC1 voters and a very large one among C2DEs*, who continued to move towards the Tories in 2015.) Both boxed themselves in with ill-considered pledges which they had no means of keeping – to ‘cut prices at a stroke’ and reduce net immigration below 100,000 – and ended up calling unnecessary polls in which they lost control of the ballot question. February 1974, the high-point of trade union militancy in Britain, was the last time the ‘traditional’ working class turned out en masse to evict a sitting PM. Last Thursday, they did it again. 

The ‘left behind’ character of the Leave vote should not be overstated. Polling by the Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft suggests that well over half of Leave voters are ABC1s; two-thirds own their homes, in most cases without a mortgage; and about one-third work full time, whilst another third are pensioners. The correlation between having no formal qualifications and voting for Brexit is partly a function of age. Leave won emphatically in Sevenoaks and Spelthorne as well as Dudley and Doncaster, and many of its voters have benefited from recent government policies: rising housing wealth, low inflation, and the pensions ‘triple lock’. With much of the media intent on portraying the vote as a revolt of the dispossessed, this cannot be stressed strongly enough.

Even so, it is clear that the dramatic increase in turnout in parts of post-industrial Britain – northern England, the Midlands, and South Wales – was decisive in providing Leave with its margin of victory. In the north-east, for instance, turnout rose by about 10 per cent compared with the 2015 election. Though the cultural disconnect between Labour’s national leadership and its traditional heartlands has been evident since at least the 1960s, the party has been sheltered by inherited loyalties, the toxicity of the Thatcher governments, and the electoral system.

Now those props seem to be disappearing fast. In particular, UKIP and the Leave campaign have managed to reach parts of the working-class electorate which the Conservatives never could, sounding populist notes on Europe and immigration without being seen as the ‘bosses’ party’.

Clearly the scale of post-2004 immigration from Eastern Europe is central to this revolt, but as Will Davies has shrewdly pointed out its roots go back much further. The whole political economy of the industrial working class – geared around the values of production, patriotism, manual work, and masculinity – has become marginalized in Britain’s political life as manufacturing employment has declined and parties have focussed their energies on floating voters in marginal seats.

Only about one in 10 Labour MPs now have backgrounds in manual work. It is true that Tony Blair did very well among working-class voters in 1997, and that some of New Labour’s policies – notably on crime and anti-social behaviour – were geared towards their concerns. On economic policy, however, the party lost its nerve. Though Gordon Brown talked incessantly about the importance of work, the producerist policies he had developed under Neil Kinnock and John Smith gave way to an aggressive determination to be ‘business-friendly’ and let markets work their magic. Sterling remained high and immigration restrictions were relaxed to help keep inflation down. Although there was substantial redistribution to the post-industrial north, in the form of expanded public-sector employment and tax credits for low-paid workers, this was mostly stealthy and unheralded (and often benefited younger women). No amount of income support could replace the dignity of a skilled male wage, won through hard work and trade union bargaining, or the larger culture of working-class solidarity that went with it.

After years of fragmentation at the edges, the class-based party system formed in the 1920s is on the verge of collapse. It is hard to see how any Labour leader can hold together an electoral coalition which is irrevocably split not just on EU membership but on deeper questions of culture and identity. If recession hits, metropolitan liberals may not be willing to bail out the older and poorer voters who have helped get Britain into this mess. Likewise, the Conservatives’ alliance with business is likely to be put under strain by tighter immigration controls. Even the much diminished Liberal Democrats are not immune: though most of their eight seats voted to remain in the EU, voters in their former south-west heartland largely backed Leave. And, of course, there are already demands for referenda in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom itself seems to be entering its death throes.

Where do we go from here? I think a second referendum on the principle of membership is a non-starter, but that does not mean Brexit is inevitable. In particular, there is clearly no appetite within government for triggering Article 50, nor is there a majority for exit in either House of Parliament. Parliament should certainly assert its right to control the negotiation process, but the remainers would probably be wise to allow the Conservative Leavers to form a government, keep them on a short leash and force them to take responsibility for their actions. If, as seems likely, the government negotiates membership of the European Economic Area – keeping Britain in the single market but at the price of accepting continued EU immigration – there is bound to be pressure to hold a referendum on the deal itself. Either EEA membership or a reversion to the status quo would offer a way out of this economic and constitutional limbo. But I suspect that the political forces unleashed by this referendum will not be put back into their box so easily.

*ABC1= middle classes; C2De = skilled working class, working class and non-workers