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Rethinking impact in political sociology: the Northern Exposure project on disaffection and hope in the North of England after Brexit
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Abstract
The conversation discusses what an ethnographic or anthropological approach can bring to political sociology on the causes and consequences of Brexit in the UK, particularly in questioning the simplifications of dominant public opinion research. It points to the lack of awareness of post-colonial approaches to race and multiculturalism in such mainstream understandings, outlining the alternative perspectives found in Northern Exposure’s study of four large towns and small cities in the North of England. The discussion goes on to explore the innovative co-productive approach to impact developed by the project, whose output included local community engagement, videoed policy debates, and a full-length documentary film alongside conventional academic writing. The project Principal Investigator argues for a more critical constructivist epistemology in our understanding of UK politics during the era of Brexit, COVID and after.
Keywords
BrexitEnglandpublic opinionimpactepistemologyAdrian Favell FBA talks to Fiona Williams FBA about the interdisciplinary research project for which he was Principal Investigator (PI), called Northern Exposure: Race, Nation and Disaffection in ‘Ordinary’ Towns and Cities after Brexit. The project was funded by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council), as part of its ‘Governance after Brexit’ programme, and was based at the University of Leeds from 2019 to 2022. The project was particularly innovative in its methodology and also how it disseminated its findings. Northern Exposure sets out to interrogate the idea that the Brexit vote represented a popular revolt by so-called ‘left-behind’ working classes in the post-industrial North of England; a revolt widely understood to be driven by widespread political disaffection linked to race relations, multiculturalism and immigration.
Rethinking Brexit in the North of England
FW: Adrian, would you like to elaborate the conceptualisation of what you wanted to interrogate?
AF: Northern Exposure came about at a fortunate conjuncture at the ESRC when, for a particular round of funding, they were interested in more grounded sociological and anthropological approaches to Brexit, to examine more closely what exactly had happened. We took this opportunity, also unusually, to focus on a particular region in the UK, rather than a general national question.1 We were interested in the assumptions that were out there about a divided Britain, about a particular conception of ‘the North’ as differentiated from the South of England. Obviously, this means starting out from the objective inequalities between the North and the South, and how they produce a certain sort of politics, but also how they reinforce a lexicon of assumptions—even clichés—about the North, that have then been reproduced in the dominant British politics of the period. These are all the ideas about the ‘left behind’, the ‘red wall’, the ‘broken heartlands’, the ‘somewheres and nowheres’, and ultimately the ‘levelling up’ that is needed to respond to a ubiquitous angry ‘Northern white working class’. These are the mythical ‘White English’ said to be fuelling the change and breakdown effectively of the British electoral system, particularly around the polarising figure of Nigel Farage. Not exactly to just simply debunk these concepts, but to dig deeper into them, to understand them in a better way and interrogate whether or not any of them could really be sustained by what might be found on the ground.
We also wanted to look at the conception and human geography of the North, obviously located in a post-industrial history, and not necessarily focused on the major cities that are on a different trajectory. So it was very important that we chose a range of large towns or smaller cities across the North that would capture this phenomenon. They also happen to be the places that were allegedly the most Brexit-y; that had produced the shock results in Brexit. In our study, these towns and cities were Preston in Lancashire, Wakefield and Halifax in Yorkshire, and Middlesbrough in the North East: all places with a post-industrial heritage, historically important, but now marginalised locations with divided politics and a particular tension that had arisen with Brexit and after.
There is probably some familiarity with these places: as famous old football or rugby league towns, representing a range of industrial diversity across shipping, textiles, coal mining and steel production. One of the things that is assumed, of course, in ideas about the North is that they are longstanding Labour Party bastions, full of a white working class. That aspect is present, but they are also actually also places of great racial and ethnic diversity, indeed places that might be thought of as ‘superdiverse’, in different ways—something related to but distinct from the well-known conceptions of Vertovec (2007)—with both older Black and Asian British communities and newer mobile and migrant arrivals, as well as being highly diversified populations in socio-economic and cultural terms. It is easy to forget there are also middle classes and affluence in the North, just as it is to forget that the ‘working class’ in these places is very largely non-white, often migrant origin, and often female, young or socio-economically marginal. Yet, typically, the notions of superdiversity advanced to capture this have been very much based on London, or possibly in a more historical sense, in terms of British race relations research, on Birmingham or other big cities. It usually doesn’t get applied to these smaller places, assumed to be more homogenous ‘heartlands’.
So what we eventually focused on, to get at the underlying social and race dynamics linked to the political developments in these places, was a kind of local community studies. In each case, we worked with the local authorities to map the towns and cities and identify neighbourhoods where we would then interview people. So we would look at certain groups living in the location that would be thought of as White British working class, but also particularly Asian British (essentially Pakistani British) populations across the four locations, Black British in these places—both older West Indian and newer African origin groups—as well as new migrant populations—typically Polish residents—and asylum seekers, where present.
In summary, then, this is local place-based ethnography and interviews-based research, working both with local authorities to plot social and political change in these locations, but also getting people to talk more broadly about their personal histories against the backdrop of post-industrial history. Our basic working hypothesis is an idea that the Brexit vote, if it reflects anything clearly, reflects difficulties that Britain—the North of England, notably—has experienced in dealing with post-industrial change, going back to the ‘80s or even earlier. So this is a story of a post-Thatcher Britain that has never really dealt with these changes particularly effectively, that has gotten worse in recent decades; where austerity has led to a quite profound marginalisation in the North of England. This was certainly mobilised by a political movement driving Brexit, but mobilised in a way that has also constructed and fed into, in some sense, simplified polarisations that have then driven the politics further onwards. That politics can then be traced through, from Brexit through the COVID period, through to the ultimate victory of Boris Johnson in 2019, as well as the curious victory of Keir Starmer in 2024, while underlining the continued presence of Nigel Farage as a sort of determining factor in British politics.
Superdiversity and multiculturalism in the North
We can come on to Keir Starmer later. But just to go inside that idea of superdiversity, one of the things that crops up quite a lot in the project, is the relationships within that superdiversity. You talk a lot about multiculturalism and we know that multiculturalism has had a lot of twists and turns since the ‘70s, with different groups, with different ideas, about what it means, opposing it, supporting it, and so on. So in your project, what was in your mind when you were thinking about multiculturalism?
We certainly still take the concept of multiculturalism very seriously. Obviously, one has to acknowledge that multiculturalism is now identified with debates in the 1990s; that it has gone out of fashion and been discredited both by politicians and critical academics. But we think multiculturalism as a term still has a particular use. However, we are not multicultural nationalists—we position ourselves differently to the Bristol school, led by our BA colleague Tariq Modood, for instance—which is one strand of work that still defends multiculturalism.2 Rather, we embrace a certain idea of multiculturalism that was quite common, I think, still in the 1990s. That is, the connection with the work of Stuart Hall and others that emphasises the post-colonial, diasporic, hybrid and even post-national nature of diversity found in the UK. I also think superdiversity can be seen as a problematic term, so we use it to flag what we’re doing, but maintain some distance from it.
For us, a more radical multiculturalism can be found in the report on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, the Parekh Report, published in the early days of New Labour in 2000 (Parekh et al. 2000)—at least those parts most influenced by Stuart Hall. We directly locate our research in a sort of lineage from that reflection on what was in effect the growing post-national diversity of Britain in the late 1990s, looking forward into the 21st century, and offering a kind of inquiry that poses a narrative in terms of: ‘What went wrong with that vision?’ I mean, something really precious got lost with the failure of the Parekh Report to be taken on board by New Labour at that point. After the Report was discredited, the Labour Party gold cold feet and turned to a more neo-nationalist conception of Britain—at the same time that Britain was diversifying at an incredibly fast rate, with new migrations from around Europe and the world. As I’ve written about extensively in earlier work (Favell 2008), this was not all Eastern European by any means, but a kind of regional European migration to Britain of mixed types, as well as lots of new asylum seekers and global migrations from many new sources. So the old patterns of Black and Asian British, the solid visions of multiculturalism that were built around their political and social inclusion and exclusion, needed to be extended to encompass a new, more Europeanised, more globalised and more hybrid society that was emerging in the 1990s and 2000s.
The reflection in the Parekh Report was the most sophisticated one of the time, but it got basically crushed and rejected. There is an interesting politics around the defeat of the Parekh Report as a proposition politically that is worth reflecting on. And we do explicitly think that Brexit is related specifically to that breakdown of the multicultural vision in 2000, when you trace it all the way through to what happens fifteen, twenty years later in Britain. I narrate this in my article ‘Crossing the race line’ about Brexit (Favell 2020).
So we still want to work with a multiculturalism that emphasises the vision and voices coming from a particular marginalised region of Britain, that are very much out of sync with the vision that’s coming out of London and the South East, and both Labour and Conservative governments during the period. One thing we aligned with was Scotland. We talked quite a bit with the Scottish Government during the research about the Scottish conception of multiculturalism that is closer perhaps to peripheral Northern conceptions of it; again, in a way that sets itself apart from the neo-nationalist management of migration, race, diversity and so on, that was coming out of the British centre during those decades.
Paul Gilroy talks about conviviality, in that sort of everyday sense, you know, of how people relate to each other. Is that what you were looking at?
Yes. We don’t make that much use of the term ‘conviviality’, which also faces criticism, but yes, we would want to be located in the stream of thinking linked to Paul Gilroy (that is, Gilroy 2005). If there is a difference to it, it’s that we are also—given the diverse background of the researchers in the project—very interested in making sure that conviviality spans the entire range of diversity that is found in Britain today; a diversity which also includes recent European migrations and new asylum seekers, as well as the traditional Black British and Asian British points of view that have constituted and founded, in a way, the power and strength of British diversity, its conviviality in Gilroy’s sense. We do want to point out it can be found in the North as well; the North isn’t just a place of alienation and despair, it can also be read in terms of hope and as an alternative vision for Britain, not just a source of political disaffection and anger ruining everything for the cosmopolitan London and the South East, which I think has been part of the simplified analysis of Brexit.
The political sociology of Brexit
That’s very interesting. Just looking again at that context of multiculturalism and its roll back, the eclipse of the Parekh Report during New Labour, and then what happened subsequently. I’m interested as well in whether you think that that’s affected academic work? Because again, you place your arguments for this project in terms of a critique of how mainstream political sociology is examining these questions.
Yes, there are perhaps two strands that I’d like to emphasise in answering this. One of them, is my own view on the evolution of British work on race, diversity, immigration and so on. I’ve always had a particular external view of the UK—in part, because of my long career working abroad—that is, of someone who has tried to always look at Britain comparatively, and think carefully about what we might learn by putting Britain alongside its European neighbours or the USA or whatever, albeit often in quite asymmetric ways. This means, while I am sympathetic to the critical British sociology of race and migration, I do tend to see it as very particular to its situated national political origins.
But perhaps more significant, in my own commentary and critique on academic work that really drives the project, is what I see as the lack of awareness of sophisticated thinking on race, migration, diversity and so on, amongst the dominant public opinion scholarship: political scientists, generally, who have dominated our understanding of British politics in the last twenty years. I mean the kind of mainstream analysis and highly visible media punditry of academic scholarship that has provided the most influential commentary on Brexit and immigration politics in public debates. A lot of this in fact can be found in the UK in a Changing Europe platform of the ESRC, that we were also part of.3 In this there is little or no trace of the influence of, say, Stuart Hall or Paul Gilroy, or even figures like Bhikhu Parekh and Tariq Modood: post-colonial thinkers who might have once shaped progressive political understandings of British politics as the legacy of Empire and imperial notions of the nation.
Now when Brexit is interpreted in terms of in terms of race, migration and diversity, it is by scholars whose work is not really at all anchored in the post-colonial British sociology of race and migration. My reading (Favell 2020) points to the problematic way that this mainstream public opinion scholarship has come to negative conclusions about the impact, for example, of what they see as the naive, multicultural, ‘Corbynite’, metropolitan visions of British diversity, as well as the way it has supposedly fuelled the polarisation of Britain, between the cities and the rural regions, or the North and the South, or big cities and smaller places. These are the standard polarisation narratives about a divided Britain—and how the political solution now is seen as a return to ‘centrist’ good sense on diversity and immigration, that is, in historical terms, very nationalist, integrationist, even ‘colonial’, in my view. One dimension of this was to quite violently snuff out the alternative vision offered by Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, aided and abetted by the trumped-up charges of antisemitism that have been routinely made against post-colonial views in the UK. The anti-multicultural, neo-nationalist understanding of Britain was then mobilised very effectively by Boris Johnson in his great victory of 2019, smashing the ‘red wall’ and seizing the heartlands of the North. And it has been effectively continued by Keir Starmer, albeit now in a new political configuration that still depends on the continued presence of Nigel Farage and Farage-ist understandings—of what the English working class ‘up there’ allegedly think, want and do.
Those visions, I think, have missed completely the understanding that we try to bring to the debate about Brexit with this work. Our critique of the British public opinion scholarship. to me was a more important academic location for this work, than what we might have to say as such about the critical sociology of race and immigration. It certainly has not made me popular among British political scientists!
Of course, a lot of social sciences and humanities have recently reassessed the way in which they also, from the ‘90s, began to leave the questions of race and ethnicity behind. You know, they had become add-on subjects again rather than being integrated into the curriculum. So I wonder how far this kind of move to what is sometimes called ‘the post-racial’ was also something you wanted to interrogate in your work?
Yes. The critique of ‘post-race’ thinking is at the heart of my recent work, such as the book The Integration Nation (Favell 2022). The political sociology I am referring to indeed reflects a post-racial kind of understanding of British political trends. So even the most scholarly impressive studies of Brexit such as Maria Sobolewska and Rob Ford’s (2020) work Brexitland (see Favell 2021) confirms the commonly accepted wisdom that it was the negative effects of too much EU free movement and metropolitan multiculturalism, and a revolt of the provinces against urban diversity, that drives Brexit and the rise of Johnson. Corbyn is also explicitly blamed by them for embracing a post-colonial vision of the nation. The alternative they propose is a return to ideas of national integration, with borders and immigration under control, celebrating a kind of post-racial Britain, even while race and racism clearly have been mobilised to bring about the Brexit result.
Instead, we put race right up front in the title and design of the project to emphasise, I think, a need that political sociology needs to bring race back in, in an attempt to correct something that was largely missing in understandings of Brexit. One of our early outputs on inequality in the North (Barbulescu et al. 2019) was even attacked quite strongly from a post-racial point of view by the journalist Kenan Malik when it was reported in The Guardian, for insisting on a race and class perspective on the North (Malik 2019). In contrast, we are concerned with exposing the dangers of a post-racial neo-nationalism, that offers of kind of whitewashed vision of race and nation—usually touted as ‘integration’—to solve the alleged polarisation over mischaracterised ‘immigration’ and diversity in Britain. I’d see Sivamohan Valluvan’s (2019) recent work on race and nation as very close to our kind of thinking here. We’ve engaged in interesting debates with him as part of the online work we did with Northern Exposure.
Rethinking impact
Yes, I can see that. Shall we move on to talk about your methodology? Because, as I mentioned before, it’s quite innovative in terms of both your fieldwork and also how you then created the possibilities for dissemination of your work. If you can talk us through the co-production model that you used?
We wanted to build a project that was based around oral history interviews in the various localities. We produced around 150 oral history interviews, long biographical conversations conducted by the team. That’s an extraordinary archive, I think, of voices from the North during the era of Brexit and COVID. We focused on older people: again to interrogate the cliché that it was old people that caused Brexit, old, angry, white people, you know, lining up in a particular sort of way. But to get to this, we obviously wanted to do something that was very place-sensitive. Having selected the locations, we wanted to map them in a way that would enable us to do a small-n design study in a way that would really work, to really get at these interesting individual stories, but with a very strong contextualisation.
We also faced the challenge, which is a big challenge for any ESRC-funded research, to do ‘impact’ in a particular way. For a start, we didn’t want to do impact at all if it meant those ‘pathways’ addressing impact to the national Government of the time. We wanted to do work that was anti-governmental; that was about the North and for the North, focusing only on impact on and from the North. And that led us to wanting to work, therefore, with local authorities who, once you get to talk with them and know them, position themselves very consciously as alternative loci of politics vis-à-vis the dominant national politics of London and the South East.
Through discussions with a research officer at Wakefield District, Paul Hayes, who’s now working at the University of Leeds, he pointed out to us that impact had to mean something different. In the standard model, you have to bring on board your project stakeholders, who have to be listed as bringing further resources to your project, often in cash terms or at least in kind. We think this model is completely wrong in the sense that it is the University which has the project and the funding and the resources. These local authorities have long faced steep austerity conditions, they have had their research operations completely gutted, they no longer have the means of understanding their own local neighbourhoods and urban environments; but they still have people who want to do that and they still need knowledge and information.
What we understood then when we were talking to Paul and to other people like him in these different authorities, was that they needed us to do research for them or with them. And so that’s how the co-productive relation really worked. It worked very well with Wakefield District Council who gave us access to all kinds of things we wouldn’t have had otherwise. What it immediately does is opens doors to sources of information and data that you can’t necessarily get access to publicly. And, secondly, it gave us access to local authority workers and their connections on the ground, who knew these places really well. So we spent a lot of time working with them initially before starting the interviews, driving around places, meeting people; meeting stakeholders, gatekeepers and in-between third sector type actors in community organisations. And I think this gave us a particularly rich and strong understanding of the localities, which then enabled us to target things much more effectively and find people.
And the other thing I think that we did that was really innovative is the way we ran the Advisory Board, which in the end saw local authority people and our community connections becoming members along with academics. So we had these monthly meetings, bringing together very different people in an academic environment, almost like a public forum for sharing information, where the academics and local authority people were sharing analysis and perspectives in a co-productive environment that doesn’t typically happen in policy research, I think. And somehow, even during COVID, because all of us had to go online, it worked really well, perhaps then because we didn’t have to bring everybody to Leeds, for a meeting. Zoom works really well for this when you are connecting disparate localities. It became an ongoing kind of discussion, sharing information about what was going on at local authority level and then the academics feeding into this kind of analysis and diagnosis of local governance issues. I think this was extremely effective, although the output is not some final check list of recommendations, but what happened to some extent in those meetings along the way. One other recent academic work that perhaps also achieved similar things is Hannah Jones’s study on diversity politics in Hackney Council (Jones 2015).
For me it was an extremely rich personal experience of working with people in local authorities who are really doing heroic work in a sense. I mean, they’re doing work under extremely difficult conditions, materially and politically. But they are trying to put into practice policy ideas and new thinking that reflects academic research, particularly the sort of regional economic research that has been made at Northern universities, and also research on diversity, race and migration into places that are still among the most deprived areas in Britain. Some of the locations in each of the four towns and cities that we studied have quite shockingly deprived conditions. There is very poor infrastructure, facing the full roster of social problems or whatever that trouble the country, and, not surprisingly, they are also places where there’s political disaffection, radical right mobilisation, real race-based tensions, and all of the other things that go with this.
We were generally welcomed very openly by most of the people in the authorities and most of the people that we got in touch with in the third sector. You know, there’s a lot of public–private constructions that are a legacy of Thatcherism and the New Labour eras, often quite dysfunctional, third sector things; there’s the ‘big community’ stuff, a plethora of those sort of organisations working under difficult conditions, but also working according to templates that have been imposed upon them by central government, with funding requirements and all the official bureaucratic management of resources. They’re often the people that had the closest relations to community leaders and centres and would introduce us to the people they thought were the kind of key local people. These things built up in a rich way.
All those things come out in the two policy videos that you made, as well as the film from the project, which I now want to move on to. First of all, I just want to quote from one of the articles that you wrote with Andrew Wallace (Wallace & Favell 2023). You say when you analyse the findings of the study, ‘amid these dislocations and risks, we find delicate, differentiated and predominantly informal infrastructures of community governments and intervention attempting to build alliances and resolve tensions’.
Having watched the two policy videos and the film, these really well encapsulate exactly what you’re saying there and also the effects of using this kind of co-productive research model. You have two panels discussing the research titled ‘Levelling Up and Inequalities in the North’ (Parts One and Two). The first panel focuses on the tensions of the policy work within local authorities, and the second panel looks at the successes and the difficulties in community activism and community organising, particularly in terms of race or diversity. But in a way, what’s even more important is how revealing the panels are in describing what you’ve just been talking about; the deep difficulties that local authority policymakers are facing with the effects of austerity and really, central government incompetence, I think, across the region. How this has affected their capacity to do their work and also, as far as the local community organisations are concerned, the kind of tensions in local activist commitments to keep their communities together.
I also want to mention the film. That’s made by Lucy Kaye, an award-winning filmmaker. It’s a feature-length documentary, about an hour, called From Where We Stand, in which a portrait of the North is woven from a series of people in the various communities talking about their lives and locations.4 It’s a very absorbing, very moving, very poignant film. What struck me about these two videos and the film is that they’re not just giving bullet point policy recommendations for action to the problems that you found. Instead they place in front of us, in a sensitive way, the real life crises and contradictions that people face and how key local players are attempting to resolve these. So instead of being given a list, we’re led to try and understand, to reflect on and, I think, want to talk about what’s going on there. Can you tell us more about how these were part of the project and constituted a different way of doing impact?
Yes. The standard mode of academic policy research is that you produce your knowledge and you end up with the summary, with the bullet points, as you say. And that may or may not have impact on actual policymakers, the government or local governments, as an intervention in some kind of policy process. You’re meant to be able to demonstrate the exact moment at which your bullet points have entered the process. That’s a formal definition of impact. Yet we know from a lot of academic research that policymakers in fact only use the evidence that fits what they want to do. There’s much less evidence that academics can produce change through factual based knowledge. I have respect for that sort of work and the masses of governance-oriented academic research reports that attempt to influence policy this way, but we were trying to do something quite different here. You’ve described it very well. We’re trying to create a new kind of space for dialogue, first of all amongst stakeholders, including academics researching the subject, who might gain something from their own interactions.
The two videoed policy debates that we held in London were re-enactments in some sense of those kinds of monthly discussions we were having, bringing together some of the key people that we felt we could bring around a table. And they also included two influential opinion makers: Anand Menon, who has been the director of UK in a Changing Europe, and Anoosh Chakelian, a journalist for The New Statesman.
Yes, there’s a point in one of the policy videos when a community organiser in Halifax, who has been tasked with developing greater integration between different neighbourhoods that are split between mainly white neighbourhoods and mainly South Asian heritage neighbourhoods. She says, ‘You can’t tell people to integrate, you need space for them to raise their issues.’
That’s right. I think the film works in exactly the same sort of way. It’s enabling a space to have discussions and debates or think about these issues. It’s a poignant and moving film that Lucy has put together from her own take on the project. But it’s also a film that broaches very difficult questions about racism, about deprivation, about the conditions of these locations, in three of the locations that we focus on in the project. And where we’ve been able to show it to mixed audiences of different kinds in the UK, it has worked that way. It has worked to inspire discussion, debate, reflection. It has also worked well with international audiences in countries experiencing the same politics: we have shown it successfully to students at universities in France, the Netherlands and the USA.
It’s not just another film about Brexit. But it is a film that tells you a lot about Britain today, I think, in the post-Brexit and COVID era. It captures the North in all kinds of ways. And, as you say, it has a range of characters who speak to these questions in their own way and are given time and space on the film to sort of live there as real people. Lucy has a remarkable ability to get people to be themselves on film. It’s a huge amount of work to gain trust and get people to talk about themselves, their lives and their opinions in context, in a rich and meaningful way.
The videos and film—and the processes which made them—might just be seen as side products of the major project, but I think in fact they are major project deliverables. The film’s funding was also very unusual in the context of a British academic research project, in that it was done at a cost that was really quite remarkably low, given it is a professional, festival-quality film. So we were able to premiere the film at the Leeds International Film Festival in 2023. It’s not a film about sociologists doing their research, it’s not sociologists filming themselves with a commissioned filmmaker—as most funded academic films are. It’s a real documentary film, authored by the filmmaker, but one that authentically represents the project. It is the filmmaker’s vision, influenced by our research, but it’s not a simple statement of the thesis of the project, or even what we as researchers would say in our own academic work.
COVID and after
You’ve mentioned a couple of times that the research went on during COVID, and I wondered whether there was anything particular that came out of that because after all, research is always in a very particular context, its historical context, and what you learnt from your different players about that.
It made life difficult, it disrupted the project and the filmmaking to some extent. I think it meant that the project moved on from a project that was funded by and about Brexit and Brexit research into something that was much more like a portrait of Britain going through the era of COVID, Boris Johnson and all that. I think we were particularly effective with our Advisory Board discussions, as I mentioned. A lot of our best discussions were about how the local authorities were dealing with COVID, and in particular, dealing with diversity in the context of COVID, where there were all these issues around tension between communities, disproportionate effects on certain minority communities, huge difficulties in communicating with marginal populations like Roma populations—who were quite significant in some of our areas—or recent asylum seekers and migrant populations who don’t have access to English information. I think we learned quite a lot about the whole ecology of it.
COVID was a moment where the British national government actually needed the local authorities to be the coordinators because they were the only actors at the local level who could bring together the hospitals, the police, the social workers, the community organisers and so forth, and then put resources and equipment in spaces and places locally. They knew what to do, they knew where to go, they knew the right people. And this worked very well. In Halifax, Calderdale District Council, for example, had built up a certain sort of know-how and capacity through its previous responses to flooding locally, so it was able to draw on that and then build new relations through this. I think in some sense we were contributing in a small way, since we were getting access to certain neighbourhoods and people were talking to us, who wouldn’t be talking to the local authorities. So we were kind of reporting this back during the period about how and why that was very difficult for everybody. This was in some of these very marginal estates or neighbourhoods that are in Wakefield, Halifax, Preston and Middlesbrough. All of them have this kind of marginal, deprived or segregated locations.
I mean, the period during COVID has often been described, and I think of Rebecca Solnit and others, as the time when people actually did act collectively and did think collectively. I wondered, you’ve described the difficulties for the local authorities, but whether that was there as well?
Yes, I think so. But not in the way that it was being marketed by national politicians and so on, as a ‘Hooray for Britain!’ kind of thing, because there were still enormous problems around resources and the shattered capacities of local authorities because of austerity, politicised forms of community funding and the mistaken regional policies of the past. Nor did the electoral potential of political disaffection go away because of COVID. Without any doubt, in the end it also fed into the ongoing political dynamic that has taken us through this period.
To go back to the local authorities in the research project, Preston just does seem very impressive. In one of your videos, the policy officer gives a sort of the inside story of Preston, which I found fascinating. Preston has become emblematic of a new approach to municipalism, hasn’t it? Since 2012, when it became a living wage employer and then introduced all sorts of very progressive developments in terms of economic revival. So how does that work? Where did it come from?
We selected Preston partly for this reason. On one end of the scale you have Preston in Lancashire, this sort of poster child city for the new municipalism and a new left politics that has been quite inspirational, and there was a contrast with Middlesbrough, in the North East, which is the new Centrist-Tory-Johnsonian sort of place, very Brexit-y. Middlesbrough went through a transformation from being a long-standing old Labour heartland, a stronghold, to something with this new kind of entrepreneurial, flashy politics; local businessmen as politicians and so forth, setting up neo-liberal free enterprise zones. The Yorkshire cases are positioned in a different way; these two places are politically contrasting to the other two, as political marginals. Despite those differences and changes in political complexion, all of them have similar sorts of issues in terms of in terms of deprivation, segregation, separation of communities and, in the end, Brexit voting.
Preston was somewhat less Brexit-y, more in line with the left-leaning tendencies of Lancashire. So I am very sympathetic towards aspects of the Preston model, those aspects that were working—to create a particular socio-economically inclusive city, with a vibrant university and revived city centre. There was also a lot of celebration of their diversity politics. It was a city that did have a quite effective rainbow multiculturalism, it also has Hindi populations and a Black British community who are very present in the politics. Yet, despite these positive aspects of Preston, we observed that it was not developing a terribly effective response to marginal white disaffection in the city, nor to some of the issues around multiracial diversity, segregation and deprivation in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. So the narratives, in a sense, coming from our interviews, were not any less harsh or difficult than some of those narratives that were heard in Middlesbrough, where you would anticipate it. For example, as Roxana Barbulescu found in her work on Preston, the Black British Windrush generation in Preston are a very effective campaigning organisation, very strong on community presence, but they have not been terribly happy about their relations with the local authority. They have wanted to operate in their own space rather than one that was somehow organised for them by municipal narrative on offer. One of our regrets is the fact that Preston and this particular perspective is not in the film.
On the other hand, one of the things about Middlesbrough, is that it has for sure a couple of neighbourhoods, North Ormesby and Gresham, notably, that have a very high level deprivation, lots of real social problems, drug problems, and very high levels of disaffection and turbulent politics. But there is still a real kind of community-oriented pride with the organisations in these areas, the legacy of its older socialist past, a huge amount of pride of place still present in the city, which you see in Lucy’s film as well. Then it has a story about the Asian British, Pakistani British population in the city, which across the four locations we studied, is a really quite interesting, positive story about how the Pakistani British population there have been able to thrive in the town in economic terms, but not in terms of the usual integration model. Despite being quite separated from White British populations, the Pakistani British community has there has managed to organise itself effectively in the city, particularly around local businesses in the town centre and in social mobility out into the inner suburbs, getting their kids into the local university, Teesside, for instance. In a way, it has not reduced community tensions because there’s still a lot of segregation and opposition between communities. But it does offer a different kind of narrative to the trajectory of Pakistani British in some of the other places that we studied, places where they were much more marginal politically and in terms of local economic influence.
If I can just raise another sort of slightly different question. Looking at the videos, on the face of it, there’s a gender difference between the male officials at the councils and the mainly women who run the community organisations. Your project certainly focuses on race and class, but I wonder how this connection was also gendered?
It’s a very good question. I think it does reflect an imbalance in those videos, but not actually in the broad range of people that we worked with. There are actually some very important women leading local authority work in some of the places, and a good balance, I would say, across the localities in terms of men and women involved in the community organising.
Gender does come through very clearly in the work done by Yasmin Hussain and Paul Bagguley. It really is a remarkable set of interviews they did with Pakistani British populations across the four locations, quite elderly people from both first generation and later. In some places there might now be a third generation, even fourth. It wasn’t necessarily expected, but the interviews revealed really quite deep and difficult issues between the male and female perspectives on these personal histories. These stories go back even to the 1950s, the narration of a migration settlement, becoming British, becoming Northern, but also experiencing all kinds of intra-community issues as well as racism. The gendered stories are very powerful in that context and that reflects the environment.
There is also a critique of the Casey Report here (Casey 2016), a report which took a very strong moralising line on the ‘failed’ integration of Muslim British women in some communities. Some of the local authority figures would brandish this at us, you know, ‘Here it is, the Casey Report, all you need to know’, and that was a good signal that there was a problem here. Because this integrationist type of discourse has ended up reproducing certain conceptions about the failure of integration of certain groups for cultural reasons. There has to be other ways of looking at this and I do think Yasmin and Paul’s research will contribute to bringing a much better, nuanced view on the Pakistani British community and the difficulties it faces.
In other ways, I’m not so sure that either that the political disfunction is particularly gendered or even that is particularly politically flavoured. One of the things that Andrew Wallace finds in his studies of some of the most deprived areas in Wakefield District, the Warwick Estate in Knottingley, for instance, is how the White British there do often see themselves as ‘White English’, but didn’t really reveal a clear line of opinion on Brexit, for example. It’s not so clear that these things just line up in a simplified way to support Brexit or Boris Johnson, etc. There’s plenty of disaffection, but the alleged mobilisation and polarisation that show up in electoral results and the public opinion surveys that reflect them, is not really so clearly reflected in people’s actually views, when you dig into them in a more nuanced way; that is, in the context of personal biographies, and histories of social change. And of course, this will reflect also the geographical marginalisation, effects of austerity and all the other things that we think are more significant than, say, the simple changing political complexion of people’s opinions when you ask them to tick a box, or shove a mike in their face, in one-shot vox pop or survey research.
Politics in the UK now
The project finished in 2022 and a lot has happened since then which is very relevant to the project. The election in 2024, when all your towns and cities either stayed with Labour or went back to Labour, and, of course, wider political shifts to the far right, and, as we speak, a kind of new world order emerging. So how does your research enable you to read these events?
The research ultimately is dedicated towards writing a history of this period, the era of Brexit, Covid, Johnson and Starmer. Certainly what I would like to do is write, from the point of view of the North, a very broad social history that encompasses what happened really to Britain in the 2000s through Brexit, through into the world that we’re now experiencing, which I think is entirely consistent with all of those things that happened before. That is, before the writing of this history is set in stone by what I see as the simplified mainstream political accounts.
As I’ve said, I think there are a lot of things that need questioning about these dominant understandings of Brexit and after. Part of the argument that needs to be made is the way in which a certain simplification of the dynamics producing disaffection in the North was mobilised politically, first of all, to make Brexit happen. This was essentially the contribution to political analysis of Dominic Cummings, whose understanding of how to mobilise the Brexit vote and bring Johnson to power exactly matches and mirrors the mainstream academic understanding of the subject. These understandings together made it simpler for the 52 per cent vote to mobilise enough people around issues of disaffection on a very singular day, to get the result across the line; particularly in relation to false constructions of race and migration, and of the views and experiences of the ‘left behind’ in the country.
The electoral dynamics that we’re left now with are extremely turbulent because all those voters that effectively put Johnson in power are still there. And I think those voters have been mobilised largely around the simplified dynamics of political polarisation, and of popular understandings of this, that have been contributed to by mainstream political science analysis, whose driving logic is media influence—whether on social media, in op eds, or on TV. So there’s a kind of constructivist argument in my work that one can carry through to the Starmer era. Starmer winning doesn’t mean that there’s been a restoration of the Labour heartlands or something, because it is still entirely dependent on the presence of Nigel Farage. The heartlands did get broken, but they got broken by particular elite-driven political processes that continue to be extremely poorly representative of the dynamics on the ground. The dynamics on the ground obviously could have been narrated in terms of a much more inclusive post-colonial multiculturalism, in a much more bottom-up way, and they’re not; why they’re not is because there’s a long history of marginalising that sort of way of thinking, the alternatives which continue to be present in certain local authorities, and which also appeared on the left with the movement led by Jeremy Corbyn. That alternative perspective is reflected in some of the positive aspects of voice and hope that we illustrate in the project, but it is getting submerged in the bigger national dynamic.
In terms of this far right mobilisation, what has spilt out in recent times is effectively the consequence of this same political dynamic. In the project, we focus quite a lot on hate crime, working with the organisation Stop Hate. In the run up to Northern Exposure, Roxana Barbulescu was running a thing called the Commission on Diversity in the North of England, and a key part of this research was the hate crime that emerged with Brexit, because of the attacks on minority populations, particularly Asian British populations, which is linked to the discussions about grooming and the particular stereotyping of British Muslim populations, as a sort of side product of Brexit. The police in these places, with the local authorities, were starting to get really anxious about far right mobilisations, particularly in Preston and Wakefield, and they were putting in place a certain sort of community-based dialogue approach to try and mitigate this issue being fuelled by Brexit politics and by the mobilisation of the right by the Conservative Party.
That’s what we’re now seeing in a more live and vivid riots and it’s not going away. The remarkable thing has been that the emergence of Farage, that Ford & Goodwin (2014) first charted in the early 2010s, because of the EU issue, Brexit was meant to kind of deal with that. But in the end, it has not dealt with it all, it has just added further fuel to it. Sadly, I think also the narrative about Brexit dealing with the problem of immigration is very wrong headed, because it did absolutely nothing of the sort. As migration scholars predicted, the end of free movement with Europe just led to a massive growth in immigration and much more deregulated and difficult-to-manage, precarious and exploitative migration trends that continue to add further fuel to the political problems. All in all, there’s a complex historical narrative here that needs unpacking, and I don’t think it’s yet really been fully put together. That’s what I hope the project will lead to eventually.
Questions of epistemology
So in terms of the project, are there things you think you could have done differently? Are you far enough away from it?
Yes, absolutely. We weren’t so well organised or supported for media impact, unlike our colleagues in public opinion research. We haven’t really influenced very much the UK in a Changing Europe perspective, in which we would have liked to have been much more present. Coming back to where this started, there are a number of other projects that were funded—sociological and anthropological type projects—Kathleen Tyler’s at Exeter, Jeannette Edwards in Manchester, Kathryn Davis in Sheffield—a rich array of projects that we were allied with, doing these sort of deep-dive locally based projects on Brexit, on communities, on families, on culture and identity and other things, examining the myths about left behind populations, and so on. I don’t think that collectively we’ve had the impact that this kind of work should have had. I should however acknowledge the great support we all had from Dan Wincott, the director of the Governance after Brexit programme, who shared our interdisciplinary vision.
I think it’s to do with the fact the default for UK in a Changing Europe and other academic commentary has been to political science and economics with simple positivist methodologies. There is a real difficulty in integrating the kind of work that qualitative sociology and anthropology does, which works reflexively, and does not necessarily produce the tidy bullet point policy recommendations or simple polarising narratives that are needed in the era of social media, Twitter, or being a talking head on TV. You know, all these very instrumentalised notions of impact, what we’re continually told we should be doing in terms of disseminating our work publicly or influencing government policy.
An epistemological point I’ve been wanting to make throughout this discussion is that it isn’t just about being objective ‘scientists’ providing stylised ‘facts’ as soundbites that will correct ideological journalism or the misrepresentations that the politicians and others are putting forward. Because in fact this kind of social science is easily captured by the logic of journalism and the media, as it has been. Really, what we have to do is engage in our own sort of autonomous co-production of reality, essentially, which is the reality that we created around our project, I think, with our partners, participants, the videos, film, and I hope eventually the written academic work that comes out. It’s not going to be a set of fact-based findings and recommendations that change the world. It’s going to be a different way of looking at things.
References
BarbulescuR., FavellA., KhanO., ParaschivescuC., SamuelR. & AlbertV. (2019), ‘Class, race and inequality in Northern towns’, in Policy Brief (London, Runnymede Trust). https://www.runnymedetrust.org/publications/class-race-and-inequality-in-northern-towns
CaseyD.L. (2016), The Casey Review: A Review into Opportunity and Integration (HMSO, Department for Communities and Local Government).
FavellA. (1998), Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (London, Palgrave).
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FavellA. (2020), ‘Crossing the race line: ‘No Polish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ in Brexit Britain? or, the Great British Brexit swindle’, Research in Political Sociology, 27: 103–130. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0895-993520200000027012
FavellA. (2021), ‘Review of Brexitland: identity, diversity and the reshaping of British politics, by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(13): 2450–2452. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2020.1860245
FavellA. (2022), The Integration Nation: Immigration and Colonial Power in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge, Polity). https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2022.2150523
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1
The Northern Exposure project consisted of a large team based at the University of Leeds led by the PI Adrian Favell, with Paul Bagguley, Roxana Barbulescu, Zinovijus Ciupijus, Yasmin Hussain, Albert Varela and Andrew Wallace. See the website: https://northernexposure.leeds.ac.uk
2
The defence of a very particular British idea of ‘multicultural nationalism’ is associated with Tariq Modood and the ‘Bristol School of multiculturalism’ in which he is the leading figure. See, for example, Modood (2019). The ‘School’ offers a distinct reading of the Parekh Report, emphasising how its multiculturalism can be reconciled with a progressive and inclusive notion of the nation and national integration, and was close to the heart of New Labour thinking.
3
UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) is an academic think tank funded by UK Research and Innovation that aims to provide impartial, research-based analysis of the issues facing the UK. It is led by Anand Menon, a Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at Kings College, London. In the years since Brexit, UKICE has been a leading media platform for impact-led social science research on the consequences of Brexit.
4
See Lucy Kaye’s website on the film: https://fromwherewestand.co.uk
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a25
Published on: 12 June 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 2
Article view count: 380
Article download count: 12
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© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Favell, A. with Williams, F. (2025), ‘Rethinking impact in political sociology: the Northern Exposure project on disaffection and hope in the North of England after Brexit’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(2): a25 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a25Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—introduction Isobel Armstrong
This kaleidoscope of short pieces derives from two Fellows Engagement Week sessions (2022, 2023) in which speakers from across the British Academy—Theatre Studies, Anthropology, Modern History, History of Science, English, Philosophy, Music—gave ten-minute talks on the civic value of the arts and humanities. The British Academy’s SHAPE acronym, answering the Royal Society’s STEM formulation, understandably stresses the economic importance of arts and humanities in today’s challenging technological world (E is for Economy). The remit of this forum, however, was to remake and reclaim arguments for the civic importance of arts and humanities, recognising that accounts of the arts are often based on 19th-century arguments that no longer have force today. Three themes emerge from this forum: the importance of collaboration, the non-instrumental significance of aesthetic experience, and the centrality of language to civic life. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
10 September 2024
Language and literature in the information economy: the state of English, English and the state Regenia Gagnier
The impact of colonialism and empire and then of transport, logistics, advertising, media, cinema, radio, tourism, and the internet extended the global reach of English. With 1.13 billion speakers, one in seven in the world now has some English competence. Within this global circulation of English, we have the global teaching of English language and literature, most recently captured for Britain in a June 2023 British Academy report, the relevant findings of which are the decline in the information age and under neoliberal governments of university students reading English Literature and the rise of Creative Writing and world literatures in translation. I distinguish global from world Englishes as the hegemonic language of global trade and finance from more bottom-up Englishes mixed with other languages on the streets; discuss the state of English studies globally; and propose decolonising and denationalising the curriculum. The notion of national languages, identifying a language with national unity, is a very modern idea, only about three centuries old and arising with the formation of modern nation-states. We might use the lived histories of global and world Englishes to transcend both romantic revolutionary and far-right exclusionary nationalisms in literary and language studies in favour of more cosmopolitan, multilingual, and convivial approaches.
22 May 2024
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