Belonging.

What does it mean to be from somewhere?

Is this a question any more complicated in the mind of certain members of the alt-right, given recent events? Can Trump and his team have mistaken that large numbers of Americans do in fact still believe that as a nation built by immigrants, the USA is no country to start erecting barriers to entry based on the location of a person’s birth?

Can the airport protests at JFK, the march in Washington, the global outrage, have no impact in the minds of those now in charge of this great country?

I don’t know.

Because if the political world is a more polarised place than before, perhaps all these protests just serve to reinforce the idea that Trump was necessary to take on all these moaning liberals. Perhaps those who voted for Trump wanted exactly this. Maybe they know in their heart that the blue-collar, well-paid jobs lost in the 1980s aren’t coming back. But they wanted to see someone else kicked for a change. The presence of an external enemy creates the longed-for feeling of belonging. Who cares what it costs.

I don’t know.

Perhaps the brutal, bruising EU exit which Theresa May has mapped out is also what the folks that voted for it wanted.

For those who want Brexit, economic arguments seemingly hold little weight. Sure, the pound has lost 25 per cent of its value against the dollar. But if you don’t travel much, maybe you don’t care. Sure, the Government’s debt problem has increased by £60bn by dint of the Brexit vote, but debt has basically been rising since the crash, and the Tories have barely been punished for it. This may not be true forever, but it’s true for you, now. Who cares what it costs.

For those who voted Leave because they couldn’t stand Cameron and wanted something to change, perhaps they wanted someone else to have to squeal for once — city dwellers, foreigners, politicians. The presence of an external enemy creates the longed-for feeling of belonging. Who cares what it costs.

I don’t know.

My inbox is crammed full of people equally indignant of their own opinion, diametrically opposed to the other side. There are those that proclaim the absolute democratic requirement of me to vote for the Government’s bill awarding themselves the right to trigger article 50 and start the Brexit process. There are those that give me an alternative version of democracy. A democracy that requires reasoned debate. Facts. Consequences given due weight. And I am required by them to register protest against a Government shown to be acting beyond its powers.

In the end, the vote to trigger is the consequence of the referendum. It will happen, because there is a majority in Parliament to make it happen. It is not the votes in Parliament, but the loss of the referendum itself that was the big reveal of how disunited the UK has become. But now everyone seems to think it is not enough for their own view to prevail. The other side must lose.

The centre is barren. There is very little common ground.

*****

What does it mean to be from somewhere?

Do you have to be born there? Do you have to originate from somewhere to belong to that place?

Belonging is a tricky idea. It’s all about context, I think. Three people from Merseyside in a bar in London will feel massive affinity. Same people in Liverpool city centre will easily start a row about whether you can be considered to belong if one of them is from St Helens. Same holds for Manchester. And as I understand it, the enmity people from Stoke might feel towards someone from London is dwarfed by the greater enmity they most likely might feel to someone from one of the other small towns that makes up the great city of Stoke on Trent. It is easy then, for division to take hold. It’s there all the time, ticking away just below the surface.

Whilst the idea of the national interest floats around politics as the default answer to a divided population who wish for a radically different Britain from each other, the divisions are there all the time. The referendum created a perfect storm. General elections see parties with a range of policies that have support criss-crossing through the electorate, expecting most people to take a balanced view of the full-spectrum choice on offer. But the referendum provided a singular defining identity. It created a super-charged them and us, splitting the country down the middle, with little route back. As a result, we are now left staring at each other with menaces, waiting to pounce.

And on the winning Leave side, there is certainly the sense of justified resentment. No amount of explaining Nigel Farage’s stock broker privileged background can stop people feeling like the underdogs who won. That longed-for feeling of belonging created by giving the other side a massive kicking.

This especially a problem for Labour when those who voted Leave came almost universally from significantly less wealthy places than our supporters who voted Remain. The vote for Leave may make our country demonstrably poorer, but those who voted Leave just don’t care. The city-dwelling Remainers had it all their own way for too long. It was time to get one back.

Why? Because opportunity has knocked for cities and city dwellers in Britain, but it hasn’t for some towns. Places that used to have economic purpose, be it to run shipyards, mills or mines, no longer do. They still make nice places to live, but commuting to the nearest city is painfully slow. And the truth is, this division hasn’t just come about as people in cities have had more opportunities. 11 out of the top 12 cities that had declined the most according to a matrix of shrinking population and constrained economic growth were towns or small cities in the north of England or the midlands. It’s not just the mines and mills that have gone. It’s the people too. Realising that opportunity was somewhere else (most likely, near or in a city) they went somewhere else.

And I was one of them.

I moved from north to south of England in 1999. I had grown up listening to the visceral anger around me as all the economics served the prospects of the south. I wanted prospects. So I went to the south.

And as a result, in the end, I worried that I belonged to nowhere.

*****

What does it mean to be from somewhere?

My own life has caused me to question this. I lived in London for long enough to know that I didn’t belong there, but have spent enough time away for others to question whether I belong to my home. And now, facing a choice my country has taken that I cannot agree with, I turn it over and over in my mind. To whom do I owe my loyalty, right or wrong?

Are we locked into this division? Can nothing repair the tear?

Orwell said, “It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a Union Jack who will flinch from revolution when the moment comes”.

And he was correct. What matters now is not the referendum. It is the change that can come from it. In the end, we serve our country. Brexit must happen because that was what was voted for. But there are many unanswered questions. And what really matters is mapping out a future for Britain that implies belonging to something good.

What matters is the country we choose to build.

We cannot protest our way out of this division, we must deal with the disassociation, the dislocation and loneliness that has haunted people feeling that the country has moved on without them. I will hold up my placard against the racists. I will shout my head off if Trump is ever welcomed into the hallowed halls of the Palace of Westminster. I will march for women’s equality, and racial equality, and all the rest. But we also must build institutions, an economy, and in the end, a country that causes the heart to leap at the sight of a Union Jack.

So what about these town that feel so neglected. Consider the dry statistics: average GCSE performance is 9 per cent below the national average, with only Wigan sneaking into the top half. Real wages there have fallen since the global financial crisis. House prices in these towns have stagnated or even declined, so people here not accrued wealth relative to those in the south of England.

This is a nonsense plan for a united country. Either we win together or we will lose. It cannot stand. It cannot go on.

The question is this: what are the links in the chain between the growth of our country as a whole, and the growth of people and towns individually? Economist aggregate across people. GDP is the sum total of our efforts, but it does not see individuals. Some may lose whilst others gain, but as long as the whole number keeps growing, no one cares. This must stop. We need a new deal with a hard connection between the growth of our country and the growth of people and places within it. This will require new institutions; new functions of the state that can shape and curb the power of the market to divide us.

Building the new institutions will take time. You cannot get to universal childcare, constant education, and predictive, preventative healthcare overnight. But we have to stop wallowing in our loss: lost elections, lost referendums, lost colleagues and friends. We have to get on with the job, forget about our own hurt and move on. For the good of our country.

Here’s what it means to be from somewhere. To take pride in the efforts of that place. To understand yourself to be a cog in a bigger machine that makes something good. To belong, wholeheartedly, to that place.