Too much learning is a dangerous thing

It is often said that the left does not understand human nature. Yet it is difficult to think of anything as antithetical to Homo sapiens as the notion, popularised by free marketeers during the 1980s, that people would willingly evacuate those parts of Britain where ‘market forces’ had decreed that collieries and steelworks were no longer profitable. People did not ‘get on their bikes’ — in Norman Tebbit’s notorious phrase — once industry was shut down; instead they grew resentful at a world they felt had little respect for their lives or communities.

We often refer to these people as ‘left behind’ — or as the journalist and author David Goodhart calls them, ‘Somewheres’. Shortly after the Brexit referendum of 2016, Goodhart wrote another book which popularised that term, along with ‘Anywheres’ — a division which (he argued) had replaced class antagonisms as the main political dividing line in contemporary Britain.