I went travelling in Remainia. My aim was to write about St Albans in Hertfordshire, a city just north of London where voters and the local MP are out of sync on the wedge issue of the day. In 2016 the people of St Albans voted heavily to remain in the EU – among cities, St Albans was behind only Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford, Brighton and Glasgow in the rankings of pro-EU vote share. But its Conservative MP, Anne Main, is strongly pro-Brexit, and I was curious to see which way people are likely to jump come the next, surely imminent election.
By chance, in between visits to St Albans, business took me to other Remainian strongholds. After Bath, Edinburgh and St Albans in one week, I began to feel like a character in an implausible dystopian novel from the early 2000s. ‘It is the year 2019, and Britain is divided into two nations, Remainia and Leaveland,’ the blurb might run. ‘Remainia is a thriving country of young, highly educated people of a myriad ethnicities, the streets bustling with shops, cafés and restaurants. Leaveland is a country of the old, the white and the nostalgic, of ruined factories and boarded-up shops. Rushing along the network of high-speed rail corridors that enable Remainians to move from point to point around their country without touching Leaveland, a middle-aged Remainian writer confronts the possibility that unification of the two nations is not Remainia’s greatest hope, but its greatest fear.’
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