"10 days ago, we felt the political ground shift beneath our feet." "Most MPs wanted to remain." "Most voters didn't." "That's more than 17 million people whose views were dismissed as "plain idiotic" by many Remainers." "I think it's a disaster." "Leavers everywhere say they'd never been heard before." "So tonight, Panorama really listens to those who dared to disagree with their political leaders." "We'll hear of their hopes for the future..." "Perhaps now we're independent again, probably, industry will start to come back." "Just stop everybody from coming in now." "This is our country now." "Enough is enough." "..and ask why they chose Leave." "I just want my country back, that's all." "I want Englishness." "Finally, people might actually start listening to the British people." " RADIO:" " This is BBC 5 Live." " RADIO:" " 5 Live Daily with Adrian Chiles." "And today, you join us on 5 Live Daily at West Bromwich bus station, right in the heart of England, so to speak..." "'I've come back to my home patch the week after the vote.'" "I was born and raised here in the West Midlands, where the majority, in some areas, a really big majority, voted Leave." "But I now live in London, which was firmly for Remain." "And where the general view seems to be that it was in places like this that the thick, the uneducated, voted for Brexit." "Well, I'm not having that." "I grew up around here." "It just doesn't sound right to me." "First stop on my journey, Tipton, between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, where jobs are seriously thin on the ground." " What's this estate called?" " Tibbington estate." "And how long have you been here?" " All my life." " Really?" " Yeah." " Were you born on here, then?" " Yeah." " I like it on here." " Do you?" "We all know each other, if you get what I mean." "So we look after each other." "John Butler loves living in this close community." "And I had a house there at number 42, and then the house where you've been today, I live there now." "John and his partner have got six kids and they rent their three-bedroom house." "He wants a council house, but can't get one." "He's been a soldier and a steelworker, now he's neither." "He's out of work, on benefits and says the Jobcentre is no help." "They'll say, "Here's a £200-a-week job"." "And obviously, I've refused it." "What's that good to me?" "I said, "My rent's £634 a month"." "I said, "You earn £200 a week, that's £800 a month." ""Once I've paid that and my council tax, my money's gone."" ""I've got six kids." "Where am I going to get money from to feed them?"" "John says Polish families get housing ahead of him, and that his £14-an-hour job in the steel industry came to an end when immigrants started doing the work for less than half that." "I done four years to get to that." "I was a grinder, a flattener," "I used the forklifts, overhead cranes, then he let me go on to the Provo cutting and learnt me how to use them." "And then you got them coming in straightaway and doing that job, taking that job away from me." "So, you seemed to have an influx of Polish workers who took your job?" "Yeah." "Polish, Romanians." "And they all take the jobs." " But they were just undercutting you?" " Yeah, that's what it is." "What would you like to do about immigration - stop people coming in?" "Close the gates." "No more now." "There's enough." "We want jobs back." "This is our country now." "Enough is enough." "John's pinned an awful lot of his hopes on the Leave vote." "I hope it's best for my kids, when they get older and they get jobs." "Because at the moment, there's no future for my kids." "If the gates were closed, as you put it, do you think their future would be brighter?" "Yes." "Because all that money they've been spending could go on apprenticeships." "I don't want my kids working in a factory." "I want them to go to university and have an education, not like me." "We want to see changes." "We want more jobs, more help for poorer people, not rich." "So, do you think voting Leave will help that?" "I hope so." "I think it will." "But not straightaway." "It's going to take time." "There's a sale on in West Bromwich market." "Did you vote for Leave or Remain?" " Out." " Out." "So you voted out, OK." " Out." " Out." " Out?" "The fabric-buying community are definitely split along the lines of West Bromwich itself." "They're about 65/35 for Leave, I reckon." "This area has a large and generally long-established immigrant population." "Hello, mate." "How you doing?" "LOW CHATTER" "Koolee Grewal, a burger van owner, was born in Wolverhampton." "His grandparents came from India in the '50s." "The family I was born into was, like, a modern British family." "We used to speak to our parents in English, we obviously ate English kind of food." "My mum would make shepherd's pies, my mum would..." "She wasn't so much into the traditional cooking." "We had, you know, like, obviously, we had a Ford Cortina, we had other cars at the time." "Um...you know, we'd go out, we'd go to Dudley Zoo." "He says there's a difference between the new wave of immigrants and the one that brought his family here." "My grandparents came over to England from the Commonwealth to help better themselves, but also to build a country." "And people who are now coming from the EU," "I don't see that as the same." "And our resources are getting smaller and they're basically just putting added pressure on to that." "Like John, down the road in Tipton," "Koolee lays the blame for low wages and scarce jobs squarely at the door of EU migrants." "There's been times, a number of times, where I've been working with an agency or working on a contract, the contract's ended, they haven't renewed it because they don't want to pay what they've been paying me." "It's come to a point where I have not got enough money to pay my rent." "And when he was facing homelessness and no council housing was available, again, like John, he felt there were many migrants ahead of him in the queue." "Some of the Eastern Europeans who were coming in at that time, they had more priority than I did." "I was standing in the queue and they said," ""Sorry, there's nothing we can do for you"." "These guys who've just come in with nothing from another country, yes, by all means, help them, but I was basically waiting for someone to do something and I never had nothing." "Every Leave voter I speak to raises levels of immigration very early in the conversation." "But there's another really important factor - democracy." "Many Leavers feel as if they've had a meaningful vote for the first time." "I was born here, in Quinton, where Birmingham meets the Black Country." "This is home to Katie Oliver, who moved to the area from Wiltshire." "Hi, I'm Adrian, Katie." "How you doing?" " You all right?" "Nice to see you." " And you, and you." "Katie's had a run of seriously rotten luck." "She's grieving for her son, who was stillborn in January." "She had an accident while working in a care home and is now on disability benefits." "Um...it's a chronic pain condition, where it affects all your muscles, your joints and your bones, causes chronic fatigue." "And to top it all, her flat's just flooded." "She has been cheered by the Leave vote." "For the first time, she feels engaged in politics." "My vote counted." "I never felt that anything I've ever said would have counted." "I'd never thought anybody would listen." "And I'm really proud that finally, we've been listened to." "And I'm, like, well, now it's time that we all come together and sort this out." "If you don't mind me saying, it's interesting that you really care about having democratic control of the EU, but you've had democratic control all your life in this country, but yet you haven't voted in general elections." "So you're passionate about democracy and being able to exercise your vote, yet you haven't voted in a general election." " Well, that's changing." " Right, OK." "That's changing." "That is definitely changing." "Katie resents the suggestion that her Leave vote means she's racist in some way." "It's just annoying me that we have this very, very small number of people that are racist, and they're making people like me look awful." "Because it's got nothing to do with race." "I mean, immigration is what makes the world go around." "It's not a bad thing, it's a good thing." " To me, that's how the world should work." " So, what's the issue, then?" "The issue is that I feel like this country is falling apart." "I voted Leave because I don't feel like the government are putting enough back into the community, into our councils." "The housing situation." "I feel like we're... we're helping everybody else, yet we're forgetting here." "So, there's just too much of it, basically?" "We can't cope with what we've got now?" "Exactly." "Deal with what's already here first." "That's..." "You can't..." "You're adding more and more to the pot and eventually..." "You know, it's overflowing." "You can't keep adding..." "It's the same as cooking, you can't keep adding ingredients and expect the pot to stay the same." "It's going to overflow eventually." "While the Leavers explain their thinking to me, some of the Remainers around here are in despair." "I've invited a handful of them to a favourite pub of mine in Hockley, near the centre of Birmingham." "Personally, as a young person," "I think a lot of opportunities have been taken away from us." "And, you know, that was..." "You could tell young people wanted to stay in the EU." "70-odd percent of us voted to Remain." "I actually do think that it was..." "That the vote that was based on naivety." "I think that the public liked the rhetoric used in the Leave campaign a lot more than what was coming from the Remain campaign." "It's always more satisfying to do something that looks like action, rather than to just sit back and let things stay as they are." "I sincerely think it's a massive protest vote." "I think it's a huge protest vote." "Those communities that have suffered the industrialisation and have been hollowed out, to use that term..." " Post-industrialisation." " ..won't find a solution to their problems through Brexit, basically." "There'll be a weakened economy, the country will split up, we'll be disunited." " Go on, Sophie, your biggest fear?" " Um...a lack of..." " Worst-case scenario." " A lack of opportunities" " that are going to be present if we do leave." " Mm." "Well, we are leaving, I've got to tell you." "Just the lack of opportunities for the younger population as we are getting into jobs, leaving university, trying to progress." "It's going to become very limited for us." "Research tells us the better off you are, the more likely you would have been to vote Remain." "But you don't have to look very far to find exceptions to that rule." "We certainly don't want to be carrying excess stock into the summer when the school holidays occur." "One of them is Peter Shirley, owner of Midland Food Group in Willenhall." "He set it up in 1976 and it's grown and grown." "He now has 230 workers and business is good." "He's seen and reaped the benefits of the single market." "But he thinks everything will be just fine when we're out." "And he'll definitely not miss the red tape." "The EU, what's got on your nerves about it, from a practical business point of view?" "From a practical business point of view, I think it was the completely unrealistic regulation that came through." " Such as?" " That ended up being ignored." "Here's a prime example." "We received, um..." "Huh!" "..a directive saying that we'd got to assess the amount of packaging that would be used in a year." " An estimate of it?" " An estimate, oh, yeah, yeah." "Now, if you could guess that, you're a magician." "OK, well..." "OK, look, it's annoying, but why don't you just get the e-mail, make up some numbers, send it back?" "I mean, what's the problem?" "I think that's what people did, but it makes it irrelevant." "What's the point of having information that's totally useless?" "That was the impracticality of the European Union showed to a tee." "It's like close-up magic to me, how this all comes together." "Yeah." "It's magic to us, as well." "Never mind the bureaucratic irritants, a more important factor in his Leave vote was what he sees as the flaws in the whole project." "I felt it was in the interests of my country that we got out of the European Union." "It was a common market, it's now a political union." "I'm a graduate of Cambridge University." "I studied history." "One thing you find when you study history is political empires of the European Union type don't last." "There are far too many different countries in it." "This is where the, er...mix is cooked." "Yeah." "The pie filling..." "'And before long, as in all these conversations, 'we turned to concerns about the level of immigration.'" "Often, it's classified as racism." "It's not that." "It's when somebody can't get a child into school, or somebody can't get a doctor's appointment." "And they feel that there are too many people coming in." "There's nothing wrong with immigration." "We've got 20 Polish staff." "They're great!" "They've come over here, they've got a flat, they've got a car, they're marrying, they're having children." "They're part of our society." "And they're OK." "There's nothing wrong with them at all." "It's just that our services have not been built up to cope with that." "It's no use allowing 330,000 people in a year without building more schools, more roads." "Getting life adjusted to the number of people who are coming in." "There's a lot being said about many Leave voters regretting where they put their cross." "But I'm not finding much evidence of that." "Least of all from Peter." "I think we should take this opportunity now to stand back and look at the sort of society we've got." "We should be one nation and work together." "But I happen to feel that that one nation is Great Britain." "I don't feel it's part of the European Union." "If anyone has their finger on the pulse of a community, it's a decent pub landlord." "At this pub in Tividale, near Dudley, Ryan Morris is that man." "Plenty of time." "When you walk down the road and your arm's aching from waving to people because everybody knows your name and everybody knows your story, that's a good thing." "Like being a local celebrity, yeah." "Apart from an England goal, is there anything else I can get you?" "He says the referendum was all anyone talked about for months." "And, as ever, immigration levels were a big concern." "People will tell you that immigration isn't a problem and it's the investment in local services, but if you can't get your child into a school, that will have an effect on the mentality." " When do I start going like that?" " That's quarter-line pulls." "So each one is..." "'Ryan sees the whole thing in terms of haves and have-nots.'" "If you live in a sort of leafy town where you don't have the same sort of social problems and the same sort of housing problems and school problems and your house is as big as you need it to be" "and your life's brilliant, why would you want the economic uncertainty?" "Why would you want change?" "Where's your reason?" "THEY GROAN" "He says politicians' rhetoric just generally goes down badly in these parts." "Around here, I think it was more a..." "You know, sort of two fingers up at the establishment." "I think there's an arrogance within the sort of intellectual elite to say, "We were right." "Even though you won, you are still in the wrong." ""You don't understand the severity of what you've done."" "It would be like, sort of turkeys voting for Christmas." "It's not..." "Huh!" "It's turkeys stopping the production line." "'Again, I get the sense that the referendum 'has really engaged people in politics for the first time.'" "I think there was a swelling of movement, especially in the last week, week and a half." "There was a snowball effect and more and more people sort of got involved." "Thursday morning, my phone was going off," ""What should I do?" "Where should I be voting?"" "You know, just asking sort of general questions." "The desire to, "get my country back"" "is something I hear from many Leave voters." "Jim Ferry says it with as much passion as anyone." "Originally from the North East, he's lived in Erdington, North Birmingham, for years." "Once, being British was an identity." "I mean, I come from Erdington, and it's like Little Poland." "I've got nothing against Poles, nothing against any of the Eastern Europeans that come over, but they're here purely for money." "They're not here for the social aspects of life." "They don't contribute towards the community spirit and it's breaking the community apart." "The politicians are just totally out of touch." "Do you want to open them up, see what you've won?" "To me, it was a no-brainer, leaving the European Union." "Purely and simply from a community point of view." "The sense of maybe getting the community back, stopping the influx of people who are no more interested in England than just making a few bob." "It's all about money." "This notion of regaining a lost sense of community is really hard to pin down." "Jim takes me for a coffee to try to explain." "So when you were growing up and going into your working life, you were in a different part of the country, you were in South Shields, but what was it about that that felt like community to you?" "Community was a sense of all being part of the same thing." "Being part of the same heritage with the same ideals and the same sort of views." "It's not a case of excluding them, it's just trying to embrace them, but to accept the fact that where they are is in a country they've got to know something about before they start taking from it." "They have to give something, as well." "They're giving something if they're working here and paying taxes and buying things, contributing to the economy, so there's an ec..." "There's an..." "There are economic contributors." "It's OK talking about money, but if you don't have a society, you don't have money." "Because the fabric of what makes us, the person, the love and the community is what makes us who we are." "Lots of people who share the same view as me, they don't get the opportunity." "You know, how often does the common man appear in front of a camera?" "People with the same views as me, but they're scared to because of political correctness." "I'm no longer as proud of being English as what I was because it doesn't mean anything any more." "Older people, the figures tell us, were most likely to vote Leave." "Hazel and Barry Priest from Tipton are two of the millions who did so." "So what I'll have to do is I'll have to have a word with them tomorrow." "Yeah." "Both now retired, Barry spent his working life in the gas industry." "Hazel was a receptionist." "I think we've missed a bit there." "They spend their time making and selling clothing and bandannas for dogs." "Their favoured mode of transport is their newly-acquired narrowboat." "To Barry and Hazel, this area, home all their lives, has changed beyond recognition over the years." "There used to be a steelworks in Oldbury, there used to be British Steel on the Dudley Road East." "And it's just changed tremendously in that respect." "A lot of the factories have gone." "Anything that is to do with making things have just disappeared." "And it's a shame because I think the country can actually produce." "We've got the workforce to do it, we just need..." "We just need the opportunity." "And I think voting out would give us that opportunity." "Because we can take control of our own destiny without being influenced by Brussels." "How's Tipton changed, then, since you were a little girl?" "Ooh, dramatically." "Um..." "I can remember when I was a little girl, this street here, right the way down here, on the right-hand side of the road, it was completely full of shops." "Completely." "And of a Saturday, it was, like, busy." "It was a busy, thriving, little town." "Nostalgic as she is, Hazel isn't one of those people who just thinks everything was better 30 years ago." "She likes her community now." "But she remains troubled by the level of immigration." "My reason for voting was because of all the immigration." "They're squeezing all the natural people, born and bred in this country, to the limits with jobs, with housing." "They get jobs, OK, fair enough, I'm not criticising, but then, instead of keeping the money in the country, they send it back to their own country." "So, how is it going to benefit Britain by them doing that?" "You take that view, and it's a perfectly reasonable view and many share it, but it hasn't personally impinged upon you." " You've got no problem yourself, in your little community." " No." " No." "I've not got any objections to people coming into the country," " it's the volume." " The volume, yeah." "That's the problem, in my opinion." "Steer it that way, the front end's coming out." "Watch yourself." "And of everyone I spoke to," "Hazel had the clearest take on why the vote went Leave's way." "At the end of the day, that river of all what's wrong, what's been forced on the British people by the EU, or whatever you want to call them, these bodies, are saying," ""You can't do this, you can't do that, you can't do this"." "And all that river has flowed into one big, massive sea of anger." "And that's why we had the Leave vote?" " That's what I think." " It's all..." " And all this is..." "It's fascinating, what you say, that image of the river." " It's all going into one." " Yeah." "And it's sort of..." "It's come to a bursting point, really, in that respect." "It can only get better, can't it, now?" " Can it?" " Yeah." " I think so." " I think so." "None of the Leavers I spoke to think it will be easy." "Of course I'm scared, because we don't know what's going to happen." "But I very much believe if we unite, we can make this work." "I really do believe that." "I really do." "I think, if anything, it's going to change the way politics are run." "I think it'll probably have a totally radical effect on politics, and that can only be good." "The Leavers have spoken." "And, in these uncertain times, only one thing's for sure." "They're expecting action." " You've invested so much hope in this vote." " Yeah." " You know, and many others have." " We have." "I just wonder how it'll feel if, in three years' time," " you're looking around and you say, "What's changed?"" " Exactly." " You'd be furious then, wouldn't you?" " Of course." "We'd all be furious." "Whoever voted out, we're all going to be angry." "I'd say my time was wasted to go down that polling station to vote because it never happened anyway." "It's ridiculous." "Ooo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!" "The people we've spoken to are demanding real change." "Which begs two questions." "Will they get it?" "And if they don't, who will they blame?"