London Review of Books:
Letters ? Vol 39 No. 20 19 October 2017 How not to do trade deals
11 October 2017
Letter by Swati Dhingra and Nikhil Datta
Martin Sanderson points out that manufacturing accounts for only a small share of the UK workforce, and reasons that it is hardly right to say blue-collar British workers determined the referendum result (Letters, 5 October). We agree that the share is small – about 10 per cent – but the term is used to refer collectively to people in the regions of the UK that have suffered from the decline in manufacturing over the past thirty years, before which manufacturing accounted for 30 per cent of the workforce. Regions that relied directly or indirectly on manufacturing (including those dependent on tourism, for example), have experienced low and stagnating real wages. The work of our colleagues at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics shows that people in these lagging regions were more likely to vote to leave the EU.
Related articles
‘How Not to Do Trade deals’, Swati Dhingra and Nikhil Datta, London Review of Books - Vol.39 No.18 September 2017
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n18/swati-dhingra/how-not-to-do-trade-deals
‘Who voted Leave: the characteristics of individuals mattered, but so did those of local areas’, Monica Langella and Alan Manning, LSE British Politics and Policy blog, July 6, 2016
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/explaining-the-vote-for-brexit/