The Professor Will See You Now: Chips
4 min read
In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: chips
Did you know that none of the motorway service stations along the M4 are in Conservative-held constituencies? From Pont Abraham in Carmarthenshire to Heston in West London (“Only a fool would stop at Heston,” as Nessa says in Gavin & Stacey), all 11 service stations are in either Labour or Lib Dem seats. You might well respond that I need to get out more, but it was getting out more that got me here in the first place, as I sat the other day having a break at Leigh Delamere, wondering both what constituency I was in and how it ever became legal to charge that much for a cup of coffee.
In a similar vein, a switched-on Labour MP once told me that Ukip, as it then was, did well in places where you could get good fish and chips. A new research paper published in the journal Geoforum has attempted to test something similar, examining the relationship between the prevalence of fish and chip shops in an area and voting patterns in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
A switched-on Labour MP once told me that Ukip, as it then was, did well in places where you could get good fish and chips
What’s not to love about research in which someone has written “no study has examined the relationship between Brexit and fish and chips”?
The researchers downloaded a database of restaurants from yell.com, where there are, just like Heinz, 57 varieties. The paper contains some fascinating maps, including one of London which shows Italian restaurants predominate in the centre, surrounded by a ring of constituencies where takeaways dominate, and then an outer ring of seats where Indian restaurants are the most common, a bit like the M25 circling London. (Three of the four service stations on the M25 are in Conservative-held constituencies, in case you were wondering.)
But chippies rule elsewhere outside of the capital – along various bits of the south coast, around Cardiff, on the edges of the central belt in Scotland, and the researchers identify a ‘fish and chip wall’ of English constituencies, a contiguous area running from Southport to Scarborough to Whitby, where the chip shop is king.
In Yorkshire and Humber, the region where they are most common, the chip shop makes up a fifth of restaurants – and the Brexit share of the vote was 58 per cent. In London, where chippies make up under eight per cent of restaurants, the Brexit share was 40 per cent. A more sophisticated analysis finds that the relationship holds at constituency level: the greater the preponderance of chip shops, the higher the Brexit vote.
A secondary analysis finds that the Brexit vote goes down as restaurants become more diverse. Ditto for a separate test for Japanese restaurants: more sushi, less leave. The authors’ surnames are Pickering and Tanaka, which may have influenced their choices of cuisines to test.
What’s interesting here, though, is that the chip shop effect remains, even after controlling for other demographics. Restaurants are, the authors write, “behavioural proxies, reflecting broader cultural and political contexts”. We are what we eat.
If cuisine isn’t your thing, another new research paper, just published in Political Studies, examines the effects of social mobility on the Brexit vote. Living in an area on the up, compared to one that wasn’t, was associated with an almost seven percentage points difference in the leave vote in 2016. This effect held regardless of one’s own social mobility. As the researchers write: “Individuals see how neighbours, colleagues, family members and friends, who tend to live in close vicinity, fare.”
Further reading: S Pickering and S Tanaka, A taste for deprivation? Fish, chips and leaving the European Union, Geoforum (2025); A McNeil and P Sturgis, Does Local Area Social Mobility Affect Political Alienation? Political Studies (2024)
