Graun finds Workington Man in Workington

Workington Man has become one of those amateur ideal-types that various thinktanks, pollsters and journalists love. Last time it was Worcester Woman. Anyway the Graun/Obs eventually realized Workington was an actual place, not the setting for a Victorian novel, managed to locate it on a map, and sent a reporter, probably by taxi. The daring person managed to speak to a few locals, or at least those they assumed to be locals (wearing flat hats and exercising whippets?). Naturally, the few polite enough to answer silly questions were assumed to be typical. 

To be fair (for a change), the reporter did make an attempt to look up the profile identified by the thinktank and try to check off a few similarities instead of filling in with their own prejudices triggered by the word 'Warrington'. This is what they (the reporter, avoiding a gendered pronoun, as we must wherever women are concerned) found:

“Politics? You mean Brexit and all that? I’m sick of it, absolutely sick to death. Let them do what they want, I don’t give a shit any more, excuse my language. I’m sick of listening to them, no one gives you a straight yes or no. I know I should vote, but sod that. I can’t be bothered any more,” [The punter] comes from a “whole family” of Labour voters, and he voted Labour in every election until two years ago, when he switched to Ukip. He left school at 16 for a job in the local steelworks, which lasted three years until the plant closed in 1975. Then he was a swimming pool attendant, and later played in a band until the gigs dried up. Now he just about gets by

There may be hints of a social class identity, rapidly denied by the Labour Party:

The sitting Labour MP, Sue Hayman, who is defending a majority of 3,925, dismissed the Workington Man epithet. “It’s extremely old fashioned to try to put people into narrow, cliched categories,” she told the Observer

Good support there for creative thinktanks in general. Workington Man so closely fits the classic Islingtonite profile of the Leave voter, that it makes anyone sceptical suspect that the ideological profile might have somehow influenced the categorisation, not just the data alone:

[the town's] once muscular industrial base of shipbuilding, coal and steel has long gone, and in recent years traditional identities have fractured....It is Britain’s least [ethnically?] diverse constituency, said Hayman [local MP] , and has a population ageing at twice the average national rate [blimey -- is it the water?] ...Unlike almost 60% of her constituents, Hayman voted Remain in 2016

The reporter remains professionally sceptical about opinion polls, but on this occasion they might agree with her:

a Survation poll for the Daily Mail ...found that [Tories]  were on course to win by more than 4,000 votes, with a 10-point swing from Labour.... of the dozen or so [sic] Workington Men approached by the Observer last week, none said they intended to vote Labour.