"The Distant People Who Rule Them Simply Do Not Give a Damn"

"That Brexit will do little to restrain those winners, and will instead injure the people of Barnsley, Grimsby and Sheffield, is almost certainly true. That it will result in yet another triumph of the hated Tories seems highly likely. That it will conclude in outright disaster like the miners’ strike of 30 years ago is also very possible.
"But it is not hard to understand. Just as in America, a certain chunk of the British ruling clique now traces its legitimacy to its globalist enlightenment and an intimate familiarity with the thinking of the new-economy god. They meet every year at Davos; they conjecture about the nature of creativity and how innovation will save the world; and in happier times they swooned for the idea that Britain's great national virtue was its coolness. And it is bullshit, all of it."

In The Guardian, Thomas Frank "visited the industrial heartlands of northern England" in the run-up to Britain's parliamentary election.