Punching down

First up, I'm going to stick my hand up and admit to rank hypocrisy. In my last post, I was somewhat unkind about Ashford, in Kent. A heavily Leave-voting place that is now aghast to find a dirty great lorry park planned for it. Chuckle, chortle, chuckle, you reap what you sow etc. In my defence, I did at the time say it was a touch churlish.

I'm now going to argue against precisely that view-point. If you wish to cast this blog aside in disgust, I shall quite understand, but I'd urge you not to do so, I don't want to be responsible for a broken phone.

The reason for this is that today Twitter is awash with people giggling at Cornwall asking for 700 million quid to replace the EU funding which is disappearing. Ha ha they cry, you won, you voted Leave, ho ho, now you want money. We told you this would happen.

And we did, but hang on a second before condemning poor old Kernow. While schadenfreude is undoubtedly a lot of fun, it's not necessarily a good look when you're talking about one of the poorest parts of Europe. The average wage in Cornwall is a paltry £14,300 (the national average is north of 25k). When most people think of Cornwall, they think of beaches, holidays, the Eden Project, surfing, picturesque villages. And fair enough, that's the image the county works hard to project, because without tourism, it has nothing. But the reality in the ground is a place of pockets of appalling deprivation amidst the beauty, artificially high house prices pricing locals out of the market and few job prospects unless you're happy only working six months of the year.

I grew up in Cornwall, and I left without a backward glance. Because while it will always be where I feel I'm "from", there was nothing there for me. I'm not saying it's impossible,  I have friends who've stayed, or returned and they're all doing just fine, thanks (and probably won't thank me for this negative portrayal of the motherland), but in my village, Boscastle, every second home was a second home. I'd never have been able to afford to buy a house there.

And it's this which, in part, caused the Leave vote. Not necessarily the Cornish themselves, though that will have been part of it, but the influx of rich people who, over the twenty years since I left, have turned the previously Lib Dem stronghold a uniform Tory blue.

There was mass consternation when Cornwall voted to Leave. Cornwall? Why? It would be nothing without the EU. As one of the EU's poorest areas, it received "Objective 1" funding, the EU rebuilt Cornwall after its native industries were stripped from it. One by one they went, tin mining first, then china clay, then farming, then fishing. All shadows of their former selves. And it's this last one, the fishing, which was one of the biggest drivers.

All remainers are well versed in the arguments, of how it's a tiny part of GDP, how it was hi-jacked by Farage. How it's actually the Government that divvies up the fish quotas, and gives the bulk to the chosen few. All true. But I dare you to say so to a fisherman's face. Because these arguments miss the point about what it means to the county.

Cornwall would, I imagine, rather not rely on tourism. You saw the photo of kids in Bodmin holding up a sign telling tourists to fuck off. A visible extrusion of a canker which is mostly hidden. It's humiliating to be reliant on the patronage of others, to look forward to a summer filled with people from the Home Counties trying to manouvre their Chelsea tractors down narrow lanes which are too small for them. It's humiliating to watch a working port slowly become transformed, one picturesque cottage make-over at a time, into a chocolate box representation of a fishing village. It sucks the soul out of it, turns it into an ersatz, Instagrammable #bestlife cliche. And it destroys infrastructure and ruins services, because the place is only inhabited half the time. That's another reason I couldn't live in Cornwall, if you don't drive, you've got no chance. When my mother was recently taken ill, the nearest hospital that could treat her was 84 miles away. You could drive there in an hour and a half, but it's four and a half hours by bus, and six hours by train.

You've doubtless tutted at stories of people buying flats next to music venues and then complaining about the noise. This is what's happened to Cornwall on a vast scale. Rich people have moved in, noted that they share the space with some oiks, and steadily, remorselessly stripped them of their identity and priced them out of their own home. But they don't live there. In winter, the place is a ghost town, with no population to sustain local shops and services. I used to like winter best of all in Cornwall, it felt like you had the place to yourself again, but I wasn't trying to run a business there.

But still, you cry, why the self-defeating vote for Leave? It makes no sense. And no, it doesn't, from the outside. But a combination of the emotive pull of fishing, the vested interests of a lot of wealthy incomers (a friend who lives locally notes sourly that the place always gets a lot busier and posher whenever there's an election) and, yes, the insularity of the Cornish themselves, delivered a Leave win. But that doesn't mean they should be laughed at. 

It's punching down, which is one of the greatest faults of the Remainers (and also a big problem on the left in general). Every crying with laughter emoji essentially says why didn't these thick povos vote the way I'd like them to? Witness the despair around the 2019 election, when Labour's Red Wall crumbled. Rather than work out why it happened, vitriol was poured over former Labour voters for being stupid bastards voting against their own best interests.

It's not helpful and it's not constructive.  If you truly want to help to build a better world, laughing at poor people getting poorer is not the way to go about it.