This story starts in two seaside towns. Clacton-on-Sea, October 2014, scene of the first upset in a run of events in British politics. Conservative MP Douglas Carswell resigned his party and his seat to stand for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and won re-election with the biggest increase in the share of the vote for any party in any by-election in history. Two years later, Hartlepool, 300 miles up the coast, delivered another political shockwave, but this time, of much greater magnitude. Against all expectations, in June 2016, Britons voted to leave the European Union.

The day after the EU referendum I was sitting in similarly shocked company with colleagues at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation headquarters in York. No one could quite believe it. York had voted solidly to remain in the EU, but it was only one of two places in the whole of North Yorkshire that did not vote to leave. Staff in Hartlepool reported that locals were celebrating. In the subsequent days after the result, the national media descended on places like Hartlepool to discover what had been going on. How could they have misunderstood the mood of the voters so badly? Writer Caitlin Moran calls this the ‘Attenboroughisation’1 of places outside the immediate purview of the London-based media, journalists reporting on these distant ‘others’ like observers with long-range lenses.

As a result of the referendum the media suddenly became interested in people on lower incomes and those living in parts of the country less well known to them, like Hartlepool and Clacton, because they had turned out to vote against the ‘established’ view. The referendum result brought into focus the profound disconnection to politics that so many people on low to middle incomes feel. The subsequent characterisation of places ‘left behind’ by economic globalisation conjured up images of forgotten coastal towns in contrast to the rapid progress of metropolitan cities. Yet this disconnection is not just about places like Hartlepool and Clacton; it is about everywhere. Understanding the political implications of the changing nature of social class in Britain is the start of knowing what can be done about it.