The Brexit Party’s tilt towards regional grievances is the latest example in Western democracies of how a sharpening divide between what the French geographer Christophe Guilluy calls the “metropole and the periphery” is rapidly being politicised.
It’s a familiar enough refrain now. On one side are those who can afford to live in the big cities; they are strongly liberal and have little interest in rebalancing the settlement. On the other, are those who are stuck in the periphery and outer regions – or who choose to live there – who have seen life sucked out of their once thriving communities. Left behind and left out, these voters know that our ‘open’ cities are actually among the most ‘closed’ places on earth. [...]
The pivot suggests that Farage and the Brexit Party have realised that their future lies not in affluent southern Tory seats but in blue-collar, left-behind Britain. “There are many seats in the country”, Farage told his supporters last week, “especially Labour-held seats, where we are the main challenger”. The Brexit Party will contest every seat at the next election and it looks like those Labour redoubts scattered along coastal England, in the Midlands, the struggling north and Wales will be key targets as a result. [...]
The problem for the Tories is that they also need to make inroads into these Leave-voting areas if they are to offset their likely losses to Labour and the Liberal Democrats in Remainia. Yet Brexit Party insiders argue that this will simply never happen because of long established political traditions: voters in these areas will never turn out in large numbers for ‘the Tories’. “If you vote Tory,” Farage declared, “you will get Corbyn and you should stand aside for the Brexit Party who can beat them in those constituencies.”
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