John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.
PARIS — There is a striking similarity between the seismic shift in British politics that enthroned Boris Johnson last week and the Yellow Jacket rebellion that tried to depose President Emmanuel Macron in France last winter.
I live in France and have spent the last year chronicling the rise, decline and mutations of the Yellow Jacket movement.
I was also born in Stoke-on-Trent in North Staffordshire, a struggling ex-industrial city that has just returned three Conservative MPs for the first time in its history. I spent a week in my hometown during the campaign talking to local people and trying to work out why the city has become the most enthusiastically pro-Brexit city in Britain.
In Stoke and in provincial France, I found the same sense of betrayal; the same sense of being abandoned; the same mourning for local sources of energy, wealth and pride; the same contempt for mainstream politics of both right and left.
Smaller municipalities — once proud industrial centers in their own right — have been reduced, at best, to struggling satellites of the big cities.
It’s a dangerous sentiment, in both the U.K. and France. Left unaddressed, it’s likely to lead to more of the disruption we’ve seen in the two countries in recent years.
Much commentary in Britain has focused on a North-South divide — the capture of dozens of once solidly Labour seats in the industrial North and Midlands by Johnson’s promises to “get Brexit done” and “unleash Britain’s potential.”
If you study the new electoral map of the U.K., you will see that this characterization is misleading. The great new divide is not really “North versus South.” It’s “City versus Town” or “Metropolis versus Periphery.”
In the great northern and Midlands cities — Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham — the Labour vote in 2019, like the anti-Brexit vote in 2016, held up pretty well. It’s in large or small industrial towns that constituencies fell to Johnson’s Tories in their droves.
In large towns the vote was 47.6 percent Conservative and 28.7 percent Labour | Lindsey Parnaby – WPA Pool/Getty Images
Ian Warren of Centre For Towns, a nonpartisan research group, calculates that English “cities” broke for Labour last Thursday, with 49 percent of voters choosing the center-left party and only 29.4 percent casting their ballot for the Conservatives.
In large towns the vote was 47.6 percent Conservative and 28.7 percent Labour. In medium towns, it was 44.5 percent Conservative versus 38.8 percent Labour.
Strike it up to economics. The northern and Midlands cities have, for the most part, found a new 21st century identity as thriving hubs for services and new high-tech industries.
Smaller municipalities — Bolton, Oldham, Wigan, Rotherham, Barnsley, Walsall, once proud industrial centers in their own right — have been reduced, at best, to struggling satellites of the big cities.
There are, to be sure, the usual caveats. Yes, part of the northern and Midlands working class did vote against Corbyn’s lugubrious, metropolitan Socialism. Yes, some of them did vote for Johnson’s simplistic-optimistic nationalism and populism.
Stoke Central, with less than 50 percent, had the lowest turnout of any constituency in the U.K.
But not all. In the bigger cities, not a single Labour seat fell.
At a glance, Stoke-on-Trent seems like the exception to this rule. But a closer look reveals that the argument holds: Stoke is less of a true city than a collection of struggling towns. Once the world’s premier producer of ceramics (although we used to call them pots), Stoke has failed (so far) to create a thriving, post-20th century economy or identity.
The old, ugly, purposeful Stoke I knew in the 1960s and 1970s has been replaced by a cleaner, ugly, purposeless Stoke. Loss of the old identity and pride is blamed on many forces: London, the politicians, the EU, but also on Labour, the tribe that was supposed to protect them.
Arguably the Conservatives, starting with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s high-value-sterling, anti-industrial policies in the 1980s, did more to destroy the old Stoke-on-Trent than Labour did. Ditto the mining towns of the North East or Yorkshire. Why then vote for the Tories?
Many Stokies didn’t. Stoke Central, with less than 50 percent, had the lowest turnout of any constituency in the U.K. There was a biggish vote in both Stoke Central and Stoke North for the Brexit Party.
A woman walks past Roslyn Works IN Stoke | Anthony Devlin/Getty Images
But many people clearly did vote Conservative for the first time. My conversations suggest several motivations. Many people were viscerally anti-EU. They resented the Poles and Romanians now living in North Staffs. They also associated the EU with the new post-1970s world that had destroyed the old Stoke.
The City versus Town divide exists in other countries. It partly (though not wholly) underpins support for Donald Trump in the United States. But the phenomenon is especially apparent in France.
There are 10 or so thriving French metropolitan areas, where most of the country’s innovation and job-creation occurs. The Yellow Jacket rebellion began last October in the struggling towns between them or in the hard-scrabble blue-collar and lower-middle-class suburbs on their outskirts.
Since then the protests have evolved or mutated into a largely hard-left movement, supported by the kind of metropolitan anti-capitalists who adore Labour’s Corbyn. The anger and feelings of loss and betrayal in rural and large town France remain.
In both places — provincial France and post-industrial small and large town England — there is a sense of fractured or wounded identity.
The problem is the sheer quantity of struggling places. Their self-generated sources of energy, wealth and pride have died, never to return.
In France as well as Britain much could be done to help places like Stoke enter the 21st century.
Will Johnson do these things? I doubt it. Most of his promised transport policies and other investment in the North and Midlands will help the handful of successful cities but not all of the suffering northern towns.
The problem is the sheer quantity of struggling places. Their self-generated sources of energy, wealth and pride have died, never to return. Some can perhaps be helped from the outside. Not all.
In England, nothing about Brexit will help them; rather the opposite. Similarly, in France, Macron’s reforms are working in the metro areas — but not in the Yellow Jacket heartlands.
France is, potentially, as vulnerable as England to a populist-nationalist-anti-EU messiah — a French Johnson or a French Matteo Salvini (although probably not Marine Le Pen in 2022).
In the meantime, the prospects for those on the periphery in both countries remain as bleak as ever.