Call him Southend Keir. The kind of geezer who when in search of a new job – in this case the next prime minister of the UK – rolls up his sleeves and takes himself to dockside Essex. That’s where the Labour leader launched his six pledges for the next election on Thursday, in an aircraft hangar-sized rehearsal space in Purfleet, a town in Thurrock known for its 18th-century gunpowder battery. But there were no explosive pledges. Instead, there were anaesthetised assurances that if elected, Labour will, tentatively, try to make people’s lives a little bit better. Just not straight away.
The significance of Essex was not lost on the Times, which pointed out the party’s attempts “to win over the modern equivalent of Blair’s ‘Essex man’”. Simon Heffer, the Telegraph columnist, came up with the term Essex man in 1990 to describe a new kind of voter who materialised during the Thatcher era. He had sharp elbows and worked as a trader in the City of London, near to where his unionised father had worked on the docks. He may have grown up in a socially rented east London flat, but he now lived in leafier environs on the other side of the newly built M25, where he was likely to have bought a council house.
Rather than representing an uncomplicated example of working-class England, Essex man instead narrated how difficult it has become to define the working class in the 21st century. Go to the south Essex docks so popular with visiting politicians and you will no longer see hordes of dockworkers, but a handful of people operating automated machinery, while some of its urban centres have been reduced to boarded-up shops and ghost pubs. As the sociologist Dan Evans has argued, the rise of individualism following the decline of industry that characterised those years has led to a more “chaotic” sense of political identity, not just in Essex but in the country at large.
So who is Essex man today? Can he even be known? Perhaps he is most like Mick from Gavin & Stacey, retired and happy-go-lucky, an unashamed member of the petite bourgeoisie who’s paid off the mortgage and would quite like a drink now, please. Having written a book-length study of Essex, I personally don’t buy any new stereotype about it in 2024, not least because it’s now a place where housing is expensive and scarce (thanks in part to those sold council houses), and where wages are stagnating.
But if Labour is insistent on trying to capture him, what does Essex man – or at least a man from Essex – make of Starmer and his lack of suit jacket and tie? Jake Hogg is a Basildon-born working-class former Labour party member in his late 30s who works at an asbestos-testing lab. He remembers the freezing day when Starmer came to visit Basildon in February 2021 – then a tentatively lukewarm politician in a rather fetching coat and scarf, and not the comfortably lukewarm politician with no jacket we know today.
This election, Hogg says he thinks he will be undecided when he gets to the booth, but will possibly give his vote to Labour. “The Tories don’t even want to be in power,” he says. He wasn’t impressed with Starmer’s deliberate rolled-up-sleeves look. “It’s a lame attempt to appeal to the working class – but it doesn’t appeal to me. We saw it before with David Cameron. The working classes want to see some real action, not gestures.” He cites a reduction in VAT, and more funding for local services, as good examples. Top of his concerns aren’t whether Starmer does a convincing Popeye impression, but whether he can help the working class with the cost of living crisis.
In 1996, Tony Blair took tea with the good people of Basildon, declaring “Essex man and Essex woman are coming over to today’s Labour party”. He and Starmer could not be more different political performers: where Blair had an air of showbiz in step with his namesake Lionel, Keir’s tone is one of haughty disapproval, hoping to slay the Tories one “tsk” at a time. And yet there are similarities in the wider electoral picture as Starmer’s first general election as Labour leader approaches. Starmer faces, as Blair did, a Conservative party in a once-in-a-generation state of capitulation. Blair, faced with this open goal, used his charm in tandem with a desire not to frighten Thatcher-aligned voters, promising no increase in the basic or top rates of income tax (which the current leader has not committed to in writing), while Starmer promises economic stability and increased border security.
And let’s not forget Starmer will not benefit from the same economic boost New Labour did. Which makes all this macho malarkey a little depressing, a little David Brent without the lols. Where Blair was fuelled by a natural charisma, Starmer offers an uninspiring vision of competence for an electorate waking from a 14-year fever dream that started when Gordon Brown called Gillian Duffy a bigoted woman.
That sentiment was summed up to me by Dave, a friend in his 70s who lives on Canvey Island, who loosely fits the bill of the Essex self-starter of lore: he grew up in a pub near Basildon, started his own civil engineering firm and built his own house on Canvey Island, complete with swimming pool, where he still lives. When I talked to him recently, he said he is Conservative but with a socialist vein – but he wasn’t sure about Starmer: “I just see him as a frontman,” he said – a mouthpiece primed with focus-group lines. What this Essex man said about the Conservatives, however, was not printable in a civilised newspaper – which is what Starmer’s Labour is banking on.
The Invention of Essex by Tim Burrows is out now in paperback and available at guardianbookshop.com
