When I picture the state of the British economy outside London, it’s my sister I think of first. Born a year before me in the post-industrial town of Crewe in England’s north-west, at school there was little to separate us. Both of us did well in our GCSEs, at least compared with many in our cohort, getting decent, if hardly outstanding grades. At 18, I secured my ticket out and moved to the nearest big city for university; my sister stayed at home.
Nearly 20 years later, this choice we made as naive teenagers – whether to leave or remain – still seems to hang over us, making our differences appear an ever-widening chasm. After graduating I moved to a string of big cities before ending up in London, apparently never looking back. She moved little more than a few miles down the road.
According to statistics recently released by the Office for National Statistics, our tale is hardly unique. Of those who took their GCSEs between 2008 and 2011 and went on to graduate from university, 36% were living in a different area from the one where they completed their compulsory education. This compares with 29% of non-graduates who got at least two A-level passes, or went on to study other non-university further education, from the same cohort. This graduate mobility was also far greater for those from small towns or rural areas than it was for large towns or big cities, which tended to either retain graduates or, as with places such as Manchester or London, attract many more than they produced. The more education you receive, it seems, the more likely you are to live away from your home town; the less education you have, the more likely you stay put.
But what of the places these graduates leave behind? The standard narrative is twofold: that of a brain drain, which produces a vicious cycle of poorly paid work that pushes graduates away, leaving even fewer opportunities in their wake; and of a trend towards the politics of reaction, as highly educated progressives leave small towns, leaving only less-educated conservatives to fill the void.
Both narratives have a grain of truth to them. Walk around most small or medium-sized towns outside England’s south-east and you’ll probably find empty shopping centres, derelict office blocks and precious few of the decently paid, unionised industrial jobs that once kept people afloat. But while there are, of course, push as well as pull factors determining where graduates end up, it is important to understand the direction of causality. Those who leave go in search of better-paid work; they don’t take those jobs with them when they go.
Likewise, after the general election of 2019, one of the narratives used to explain Labour’s defeat was the increasingly high concentration of young socially progressive graduates in large cities. Seats such as Manchester Gorton, with its large student population, or parts of north and east London, returned large Labour majorities. Boston and Skegness on the Lincolnshire coast, on the other hand, a constituency that the ONS data shows had some of the lowest graduate retention rates and among the lowest inward graduate migration in the country, handed a thumping majority of more than 60% to the Tories.
Was this the result of net outward migration of people with more socially progressive political tendencies? Perhaps. Downwardly mobile graduates in the big cities do make up an overwhelming section of the modern left, and these are often the same people who have moved from small towns to big cities to chase the disappearing dream of social mobility that the ONS data tracks. But more complex factors, both national and local, cultural and economic, often work to undercut the blithest theorising.
Whether more graduates remaining in their home towns would tip the scales of Britain’s political geography in the left’s favour, though, is harder to determine. Crewe and Nantwich, the constituency in which my family – my sister included – still live, also returned a Conservative MP in 2019, and swung nearly 10% from its Labour incumbent. Yet it had only a modest loss of graduates between 2012 and 2019. Crewe, the more working class of the two towns that make up the constituency, produced 830 graduates out of a total 3,600 state-school leavers. By 2019, there were 790 graduates living there, whether because they returned to the town after university or moved from elsewhere in the country.
Such brute statistical data is only the beginning, not the end, of politics. As Dan Evans recently reminded us, “class consciousness – coherent politics – never magically emerged out of the ether”. It has always been a product of the slow, patient and often difficult work of political organising.
Nor is there necessarily any link between the length of time spent in education and progressive values, just as there is none between rightwing nationalism and the working-class people who get “left behind”. The problems lie much deeper than that. As the cultural theorist Stuart Hall wrote in his celebrated essay from 1979, The Great Moving Right Show, the political appeal of Thatcherism did not “lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions – and yet is able to represent them within a logic of discourse which pulls them systematically into line with policies and class strategies of the right.”
Politics, and socialist politics most of all, contains no guarantees. But if there is to be any end to the stark reality of the British economy, with its ever-widening regional inequalities and its crumbling public infrastructure, then we must seek to address the very real problems that data like this reveals. What drives people away from small-town Britain has no necessity to it. It is the result of the country’s bloated and financialised economy that is concentrated in its big cities, London most of all, along with decades of political and social neglect of the regions. To fix it will require more than a few returning graduates.
John Merrick is a writer and editor. He is working on his first book, on the experience of class in contemporary Britain.
