Your regular reminder: Brexit isn’t the fault of working-class northerners

The people to blame for Brexit are in government, not working class northern England

It’s been three years, a general election, several Brexit ministers and a number of tensely-agreed extensions since the Brexit vote and still, a few myths persist.

Namely, this idea that Brexit is a project primarily of the northern working class, and therefore that they (we) are to blame for it all. As an organisation made up almost exclusively of northern, working-class people, we find this pretty irritating.

A few things have aided in popularising this misconception. There’s a particular type of vox-pop interview that we’ve become all too familiar with, carried out countless times before, during and since the referendum. Invariably they take place in somewhere like Rochdale or Doncaster and typically feature a white, middle-aged or older man. Usually, they say something sort-of incorrect and vaguely racist as justification for their vote to leave. The most famous example is in Barnsley — which is a genuinely great place, with loads of brilliant people, as if it should need to be said — and features a man telling us that it was “all about immigration” and stopping Muslims.