Reframing the ‘Left Behind’ Race and Class in Post-Brexit Oldham James Rhodes, Stephen Ashe & Sivamohan Valluvan Published September 2019 Authors James Rhodes is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and a member of the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity at the University of Manchester. Stephen Ashe is a Research Affiliate of the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity at the University of Manchester. Sivamohan Valluvan is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Warwick. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for the funding that made this research possible. We also thank Dr Juan Galeano (Centre for Demographic Studies, Autonomous University of Barcelona) for helping us produce the tables and maps that appear in this report. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the residents of Oldham who so generously gave up their time to take part in this project. Corresponding Author Dr James Rhodes School of Social Sciences University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL Email address:
[email protected]. For more information about this project and access to other forthcoming publications and artwork produced based on our conversations with local residents, please visit: https://www.ethnicity.ac.uk. All artwork by Paul Gent:
[email protected]. 2 Introduction Over the past decade political discussion has increasingly focused on a constituency called the ‘left behind’. It was initially employed to make sense of rising anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment and the emergence of far right and right-wing populist groups such as the British National Party (BNP) and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) (Ford and Goodwin, 2014).