The Brassed Off village that voted Out

After its colliery closed, millions in Government and EU funding was spent regenerating the mining village of Grimethorpe. Businesses came, says Andrew Norfolk in The Times, but locals complain that they aren’t getting the jobs that were created

He barely raises his head to explain, almost apologetically, that “you just feel let down by how things have happened around here”. Asked why he voted Leave, there is a brief glance up to make eye contact. The gaze is one of defiance, tinged with a hint of despair. “Why not? We’ve tried everything else.”

The former miner lives in a South Yorkshire village that our nation left behind. In the EU referendum, it hit back. To spend a day in Grimethorpe was to begin to understand why so many people in Labour’s northern heartlands chose Brexit. And why UKIP is licking its lips.

A few locals said that they voted Out to kick the Tories; to stick a finger up to “the rich and the elite”. Others wanted to “take back our island”. Some seemingly yearned to rewind history, to return to a past that no longer exists. Overwhelmingly, however, the voters of Grimethorpe went to their local polling stations – in numbers unprecedented in recent years – to signal anger, confusion, bitterness and fear about a single, dominant issue. In this almost all-white village of about 4,500 people, five miles from Barnsley, June’s referendum was all about immigration.

More specifically – although residents young and old tended to put it rather more bluntly – their votes were their verdict on the impact of EU freedom of movement rules on English communities where, according to one Labour MP, “a lot of my people have never even been to London”. For an explanation, one need look no further than the former site of Grimethorpe colliery. On its grave stands a giant industrial park whose two biggest companies employ hundreds of recent arrivals from Eastern Europe. They came to the UK because jobs in Grimethorpe were advertised in Poland and Romania.