In the Brexit referendum, in 2016, there were few places in Britain where the margin in favor of leaving the E.U. was as wide as in Hartlepool, a coastal town in the northeast of the country where sixty-nine per cent of voters favored breaking with the European Union. Hartlepool, which has a population of about ninety thousand people, almost all of them white and of British descent, has an ancient history. At the highest point of the oldest part of town, on a promontory known as the Headland, sits the Church of Saint Hilda, a handsome building erected in the twelfth century on the ruins of a Saxon monastery. The church honors Saint Hild, a seventh-century noblewoman and abbess cited for her wisdom and learning by the Venerable Bede, England’s first great historian, and the author of the “Ecclesiastical History of the English People.”
Hartlepool’s fortunes have risen and fallen over the centuries that followed, like the tide that beats against its fortified sea walls. After its Saxon heyday, the settlement on the Headland declined, only to be revived under the Normans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when it became a lively trading port. The town languished again in the fourteenth century, beset, like the rest of the country, by civil unrest that followed the Black Death, which eliminated up to half of Britain’s population. In the sixteenth century, prosperity gradually returned, and, by the Georgian period, the town was home to wealthy merchants and a thriving shipbuilding industry. In the nineteenth century, the coming of the railways further boosted Hartlepool’s fortunes, and its port grew, exporting coal from mines in the region: the town, which is about two hundred and fifty miles north of London, and only about eighty miles south of the Scottish border, flourished for the better part of a century. By the latter decades of the twentieth century, Hartlepool, like many other towns in the northeast of England, saw the dwindling of its manufacturing base, and the shuttering of traditional industries. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher went to Teesside (an area named for the River Tees, which meets the North Sea just south of Hartlepool) for what became known as her “walk in the wilderness.” The photographs showed her picking her way in pumps through the weed-grown forecourts of disused factories, handbag in hand—an emblem of the region’s demoralization.
There has been considerable regeneration in the town: in the nineties, a new marina was built, and an award-winning maritime museum celebrates the glory years of two centuries ago. More recently, a pleasant pedestrianized plaza was constructed around the Hartlepool Art Gallery, and the town’s old post office has been refurbished as a loft-like, light-filled hub for startups in the creative industries. Still, the energy of renewal is not felt everywhere. Heavy industry and the factories that, in early generations, guaranteed school-leavers a job, have continued to decline. Under the Conservative government’s policy of economic austerity, which was imposed in 2010 after the global financial crisis, local-government spending has been cut by a third. Last week, the government released a report titled “English Indices of Deprivation,” measuring access to employment, levels of income, standards of health and education, and the incidence of crime, among other factors. Of three hundred and seventeen local authorities across the country, Hartlepool ranked fifth in terms of income deprivation, with twenty-three per cent of its population—and twenty-eight per cent of its children—living in households with inadequate income. It ranked fourth in employment deprivation: eighteen per cent of its population has insufficient work.
Hartlepool has long been a reliably Labour-voting town, but, earlier this month, the town’s local council earned national headlines when ten of its members, mostly elected as Independents, defected to join the Brexit Party, forming a majority coalition with three members of the Conservative Party. The move took place within the crucible of small-town politics, with all the predictable personal rivalries and score-settling such a context implies. But it had a larger import, too, as an exemplar of what such cross-party pro-Brexit alliances might accomplish at a national level. The incumbent Labour M.P. for Hartlepool, Mike Hill, voted to remain in the E.U. in the referendum, though he has said he wants to honor the wishes of his constituents by securing a good exit deal. In the past year, Hill has voted repeatedly against the Brexit deal offered by Theresa May; he was among those M.P.s who voted earlier this month to pass a law aimed at preventing the possibility of exiting the E.U. without a deal at all on October 31st. Hill is currently suspended from his party, pending investigation into sexual-harassment charges. (Hill has said that he “completely rejects” the allegations.) When the expected general election is called, the Brexit Party will be fielding as its candidate for Hartlepool a local businessman named Ken Hodcroft, who is also the former chairman of the Hartlepool United football club. The Brexit Party was formed earlier this year, by Nigel Farage, the former leader of the right-wing, Euroskeptic UKIP, on the close to single-issue platform of leaving the E.U. without a deal. If the Party is to gain any representation in Parliament, Hartlepool is the kind of place where it is most likely to succeed.
A few days after news broke of the mass defection, Shane Moore, the Hartlepool council leader and one of the newly minted Brexit Party councillors, happened to be in London for an official engagement at the House of Lords. I caught up with him at the café of the National Gallery, on Trafalgar Square: he had studied art in high school and tries to spend a few hours at the museum whenever he comes down south on business. Moore, who is thirty-seven, is tall and slim, with a close-shaven head and geeky glasses. We both ordered English breakfast tea, and he explained his decision to join the Brexit Party. “There was an awful lot of frustration locally from residents about everything that is going on down here,” he said. “And there is an awful lot of resentment with our local Labour M.P. Hartlepool was an almost seventy per cent Leave town, and people are just angry.”
Before signing up with the Brexit Party, Moore was an Independent, though he was elected to the council in 2016 as a member of UKIP, which was led at the time by Farage. Moore grew up in the district he represents, the Headland and Harbour Ward; he first won his seat by a margin of two votes. “My mum and my dad, that’s what I put it down to,” he told me. He left UKIP in January, 2018, when the Party’s xenophobia had become increasingly explicit. His grandmother was an immigrant from Germany, who came to the U.K. after the Second World War, and he does not consider himself a nationalist. “I have no desire to stoke division or hatred with anybody—life’s too short,” he said. Post-Brexit, he said, he would like Britain to be a more global, outward-looking country. “Brexiteers often get accused of being Little Englanders, but we’re not—at least, I’m not,” he went on. “The E.U. is a very protectionist, inward-looking market, but actually our place is in the world, and we need to look outward, and I think that is where our destiny lies. Of course, we also need to work with our European neighbors and partners, because we are not going to be able to up anchor and move the British Isles.”
Moore said that he had appreciated being beholden to no one as an Independent representative on the council, and had hesitated to sign on with the Brexit Party—the platform of which, beyond arguing for a clean break with the E.U., he struggled to recollect, when asked what else the Party stood for. In part, he explained, he had initially joined the ruling coalition in order to get some traction on local issues that he cares about: there are plans to build a playground on the Headland, a development that his five-year-old daughter is particularly excited about. But he had also joined the Brexit Party out of a sense of strategic necessity. “The Remain-backing parties, like the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, and the Labour Party, are now coming together to form almost a Remain alliance, and will do everything they can to block Brexit happening, so it was felt that we could send a clear message that the Brexit Party and the Conservative Party should just swallow their pride and work together,” he explained. In fact, the Labour Party has not unambiguously declared it will campaign for Remain in a general election, to the frustration of many of its members. But skepticism about the true motives of Westminster politicians prevails on both sides of the Brexit divide. Moore’s perspective on the strategy of Prime Minister Boris Johnson—that, though Johnson insists that he is ready to leave the E.U. without a deal on October 31st, he won’t ultimately go through with it—is the mirror image of the belief expressed around many anti-Brexit dinner tables in London: that, though Johnson talks about wanting a deal, what he really wants is to crash out without one.
Moore said that, under the circumstances, he thought it in Britain’s best interest to leave the E.U. without a deal by the October deadline—although, he added, he would like to see a transition period in which to negotiate a free-trade agreement, workers’ rights, and arrangements for foreign students at British universities. He told me that he was not fearful of shortages of food and medicine, as laid out in the government’s own Yellowhammer document. He views the report as the sort of risk assessment that any company or council needs to undertake in order to be adequately prepared. “I understand that there is a potential risk there, but the risk has been, in my opinion, mitigated,” he said. Despite warnings from the Confederation of British Industry earlier this year that the northeast would suffer disproportionately under a no-deal Brexit, Moore regards as condescending any suggestion that people in his region did not understand the possible consequences of their choice when they voted to leave. He himself comes from five generations of trawlermen, he explained, and had long heard uncles and cousins complaining about E.U. regulations over fishing. “I knew exactly what I was voting for,” he said. “David Cameron made it very clear: we have two years to negotiate a deal, and then we leave with or without a deal. The only way we can move forward on this is actually to deliver on it, get it over and done with, and rip the plaster off,” he went on, using the British term for a Band-Aid. “And then we can sit down over a cup of tea and sort out our differences after that—because, otherwise, it’s just going to continue to hurt.”
Having finished our own tea, I asked Moore to show me his favorite art work in the museum: a painting by the eighteenth-century British artist Joseph Wright, who lived and worked in Derby, in the Midlands, and who was a master of the technique of chiaroscuro, showing the play of light and shadow. We found it on the wall of a lofty gallery: “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.” Wright’s canvas depicted members of a family gathered around a table, where a frock-coated scientist demonstrated the novel use of a vacuum cylinder by extracting the air from a glass vessel, asphyxiating a cockatoo imprisoned within. Wright had shown the very different responses of the individuals around the table at the experiment. The family’s three sons were rapt, while candlelight illuminated the upturned face of the youngest child, a girl perhaps a little older than Moore’s daughter. She worriedly eyed the dying bird, and grasped the skirt of her big sister, who was shielding her own eyes in horror. “It’s quite morbid, really,” Moore remarked as we left the gallery, which was closing for the evening. “It is an odd subject, but I have just always been drawn to it. The lighting, and the depth—just everything about it. I have always loved it.”
