So once more unto the breach, Nigel. Where else but Clacton, a place that has, like Essex itself, become a byword for the leave vote. The seaside town that last year BBC Question Time visited to mark the seventh anniversary of the 2016 EU referendum. Clacton didn’t top the table – Boston in Lincolnshire had the highest leave vote – but it has become synonymous with the project after Ukip’s most successful MP, Douglas Carswell, proclaimed Clacton was the “deliverer of Brexit”.
Brexit is often offered up as a kind of direct and potent message from something politicians like to call “the people”, a guttural demand from the id of the body politic. But, over years of talking to people in Essex, I have less often heard people speak about it in those terms than got the reply: “I’m not really that into politics.” In a sense, Brexit was proof of the apathy of British democracy, but also voters’ innate knowledge that something was wrong in the UK.
In Essex, I think, it is possible to see the roots of such apathy in the geography itself. Just get on a bus from affluent suburbia, passing souped-up cars on lit-up driveways in front of houses perfected by a thousand improvements, into a decaying urban centre, with empty lots affected by the high rents demanded by absentee landlords. The downside of the Thatcher boom is that its effects seemed to prove her maxim that there was no such thing as society. Brexit then fed off the disappointment many people have felt in their material surroundings ever since.
The hypercapitalist defenders of the politics that foreshadowed this period of creeping inertia found easy targets of blame, from immigrants to the EU. Essex has always been a blank canvas to project new political ideas on to, from the formation of the new towns to the rise of right to buy. The architects of Brexit, such as Farage, utilised the apathy of post-millennium politics to project promises and conjure fears in a fit of political carnivalesque. Brexit got people pumped up in a way they didn’t so much during first-past-the-post elections. This was win or lose, all or nothing. Fight night, but with consequences.
Clacton is a typically Essex kind of place, as it grew out of nothing in the 19th century thanks to the Victorian miracle of the railway and is full of former citizens of London who moved away in hope of a better life, or, more prosaically, out of economic necessity. That is still the case today. Last year I talked to Peter Hoare, who works in World Food Aid, an independent charity shop that started in Harwich, the historic port town. He said he grew up around Leytonstone and Walthamstow in east London but followed other family members to Clacton after feeling isolated once they had all moved away. “I looked at the rents in London and looked at the rents in Clacton and thought: I’ll move to Clacton, just see how it goes. And I’ve been here 15 years.”
Clacton has an amazingly generous nature, he said, while showing me the abundant donations in his shop. But he said he found it “hard to correlate the people I know and the people I see every day with the impression of Clacton”. He said Clacton, like most places with a high leave vote, voted for Brexit because it has an older demographic (the median age is 50 against a UK average of 39). “The majority of the voters, not just in Clacton but across the country, are older people who are thinking back to what Great Britain was postwar,” he said. He was shocked at how white the town was when he first moved there from London, and didn’t shy away from the fact immigration was an issue. But most potent was the sense that, since Partygate, his customers had had enough of being told what to do while politicians did something else. Carswell was a respected and very active MP locally – Hoare says he thought Brexit was popular here thanks more to him than to Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson – but the local MP today, the Conservative former actor Giles Watling, is a distant and ineffective politician.
In a sidestreet fish and chip shop during the same trip I met Jean, who had just finished a night shift at a local care home. She had come to Clacton after being fed up with her flat in Barking, buying a place in Jaywick, the ad hoc development overlooking the North Sea that has often come top of UK deprivation charts. The 61-year-old moved when she could no longer afford London, she said as her chicken pie and chips arrived, but she loved it here. She never locked her doors in Jaywick, and if you needed to borrow some sugar even late at night it wasn’t a problem. She was eating before going home to catch some afternoon sleep before another shift rolled around at midnight. How did she feel about Clacton’s association with the EU referendum? “I never wanted us to leave,” she said. She thought it was a con job. “Just look at the cost of living, the food prices. It’s all increased by 100%. You can’t blame it on Putin.”
The political class still hasn’t reconciled with these places labelled “left behind” after the shock of the 2016 vote. That Clacton, a town of working-class heritage in a place where there are very few well-paid working-class jobs, would vote differently to more economically vibrant urban centres is obvious. Wholesale renewal is required, an attentiveness to the civic and the local without the buzzwords of “pride” and, even less so, “levelling up”. If those with the power to change things started to really interrogate what is needed not just in Clacton but around a country falling apart at the seams, then we might just get somewhere. Until then – enter Farage.
Tim Burrows is a writer and author of The Invention of Essex
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