The privilege of the elite fuelled the anger of the leave voters

In the days after we have voted to leave Europe I am still searching in my mind, as are millions like me, to work out what went wrong.

This does, I think, have something to do with children and family, because it has to do with education which is one of the main factors that fuelled the anger and resentment that led the overwhelming number of white working-class Brexiteers to utter the shout of anger that they did.

The Brexit vote was at least partially fuelled by a resentment about elites, particularly the private and London metropolitan school elite who have reaped disproportionately the benefits of globalisation through their entry into key jobs at the higher end of society while their lifestyles have been subsidised by cheap global labour at the other end of the social spectrum.

Yes, the immigrants got the blame from the Brexiteers – but that’s perhaps because the Labour party and Conservative party alike have chosen to put class to one side in politics and concentrate instead on matters of identity, so long as that identity isn’t one of Englishness, which is what, oddly enough, most English people consider to be important.

Thus the discourse has not been about lifting working-class people into the elites. The language has been about lifting people from other disadvantaged groups – based around ethnicity, gender and sexuality, which are much more comfortable for politicians to talk about as they don’t require the redistribution of wealth, only a change in attitude, which doesn’t require the raising of taxes.

In a large number of white English working-class areas, the chances of joining these elites have crumbled. At the same time, the mantra that is recited in our schools and through society generally is “you can do or be anything you want if you work hard enough”. This is a lie we tell our children, and a huge one.

Yes, the world has changed massively, and university is no longer reserved for the privileged few. But nevertheless, according to all the statistics, social mobility has receded a long way from the high watermark it was at when I left school in the 1970s. This is one of the reasons the working class, in their inchoate rage, decided to leave the European Union. Because whatever the facts of the matter, they felt abandoned.

Some two decades ago, I received a heartbreaking letter from one of my fellow pupils at the working-class school I attended. This chap was genuinely one of the funniest, cleverest people I have ever known. We often hung out together kicking cans on the streets on the outer fringes of west London – although we never talked about what we were “going to do” when we left school. The letter he sent me said something like this: “We never really had a chance, did we? But you did it – and you’re doing it for us all. We’re proud of you.” He finished by mentioning that he was now working in a carpet warehouse somewhere.

That was the fate of many of my working-class contemporaries from schooldays. If professional success was beyond the imagination of most of the children of my generation, I can’t imagine how it is nowadays for some teenager in Bradford, Wigan or Clacton. Most of them have no bloody chance, to tell the truth, and the more we utter that modern trope “you can be whatever you want” the more we lie to them and the more they, and their parents, look for someone to blame. In the case of last week, this turned out to be the European Union and the Westminster elites.

My four daughters were all in tears on Friday. They did not understand why the English had voted so comprehensively against a continent that they consider themselves to be a natural part of. The answer has to be because most children haven’t been as lucky as them. And someone, somewhere, has to pay. Sadly, it’s going to be them – and their generation generally.

@timlottwriter