Yes, everything he says is true. These coastal holiday resorts around the British coast had their heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the arrival of the cheap flights and package deal holidays from the 1960s on was slowly the death knell of the British holiday resort. They are even sadder in winter when the skies are grey. I think O’Brien is right that these forgotten towns became a breeding ground for resentment, and a direct analogy to the rust belt towns of America is valid. We have our own version of the rust belt in the UK too in northern towns where the mining and manufacturing industries once fuelled the great industrial revolution, and they too were a breeding ground where Brexiteers made sense to out of work citizens. Brexit will not fix any of this of course, but the chance to give the establishment and the so-called metropolitan elite a bloody nose overran any other instinct when they went to the polling booths and voted in 2016.