Clacton-on-Sea is a funny old place. To reach it one has to drive through the smart commuter villages of the Tendring peninsula, the farthest extremity of north-east Essex, between Colchester and the North Sea. These villages have more than their share of big houses with big cars in the drive, grand late medieval churches and thriving agriculture. On the coast itself, just to the north of Clacton, is Frinton-on-Sea, a place so genteel that it only acquired a pub a few years ago, and when a fish and chip shop eventually opened there it was — presumably to reassure the locals — called The Nice Fish and Chip Shop. In the heart of the constituency Farage now seeks to win, it has a predominantly elderly profile: “Harwich for the Continent” the famous poster at Liverpool Street station used to read, referring to the port just outside the constituency. “And Frinton for the incontinent,” read the graffito.
Clacton, by contrast, has never been for the Continent. On the evening of Friday, 21 March 1969, Enoch Powell, the Godfather of Brexit, chose the even then mildly down-at-heel Essex seaside resort to make his first speech about why Britain should stay out of the Common Market. Powell had been sacked from the Conservative front bench 11 months earlier for making his “Rivers of Blood” speech about the dangers of mass immigration. Able at last to break free on other issues with which he disagreed with Ted Heath, he had joined Michael Foot to try to stop reform of the House of Lords (they succeeded), had railed against Heath’s naïve belief in a prices and incomes policy, continued to goad the party about its weakness on mass migration, but now fired an arrow closer than any other to Heath’s heart: rejecting his passion for British integration into a united Europe.
Powell announced “a unilateral declaration of independence”: he said “we do not need to be tied up with anybody… We are not a drowning man clutching at a rope or screaming for someone to throw him a lifebelt.” That mindset was the foundation stone of an ideology that finally bore fruit on 23 June 2016, 18 years after Powell’s death, when the British people decided they had enough of the European Union. Around 70% of the Clacton constituency’s inhabitants voted for Brexit; and it is the only place ever to elect a UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell, which it did at the 2015 election.
Some of Powell’s other warnings to the people of Clacton, and the United Kingdom, about the consequences of chucking in their lot with the European movement were welded into that ideology too. He said the Common Market “depended upon a series of complex, bureaucratic institutions not easy to reconcile with our own very different system of administration under parliamentary control”. He sought “a Europe of nations, of sovereign nations, the only Europe to which Britain, so long as she herself remains a nation, could belong”. His followers agreed. He sought the retention of sovereignty; once his advice was ignored, and Britain joined the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973, he sought its reclamation. So did those influenced by him who survived him: including Nigel Farage.
Over the years since Powell spoke, Clacton has simply ossified, and then regressed. The town has the highest proportion of economically inactive people in the United Kingdom: most seats have economic activity of 80% of people, Clacton has 51%. Its crime rate is higher and its disposable income per head far lower than those smart villages just a few miles away. Its public services are dismal. There is rough sleeping and the modern companion of poverty, drug abuse (with its attendant despair and desolation), infects the place. Jaywick, on the southern fringes, is regularly referred to as one of the most deprived areas in the country, and a visiting UN representative in 2018 was shocked by its “extreme poverty”. The incumbent MP, Giles Watling, admitted last autumn to The Guardian that he faced “an uphill battle”, not least because he is a Remainer.
If he thought that before Farage, whose public profile dwarfs Watling’s, changed his mind and decided to stand, one can only speculate how he feels now. He managed to secure a £20m levelling-up grant for the town, but that will butter few proverbial parsnips with an incipiently shirty electorate. With its shabby amusement arcades and general air of a place the 21st century has passed by, Clacton will require far more than money to put it right.
The cynical might suggest that Farage had been studying the vox pops that reveal numerous Clactonians as feeling betrayed by Brexit and seized his advantage. He too feels betrayed by it, as he said at his launch. Certainly, if there is any seat he can win, it is this one. It is not just because the place voted for Brexit, but because Farage has a direct line to the people who live there.
Even though he comes from Kent, he does indeed speak fluent Essex — as, in his more professorial way, did Enoch Powell 55 years ago. He knows how to press the buttons of promising to enforce borders, deregulate businesses, and improve public services by ramping up prosperity. The speeches he made last week, before re-designating himself as leader of Reform, covered all these topics, and will slot straight into his campaign on this strangely deprived part of the Essex coast.
When Powell spoke at Clacton, it was by chance: the local Conservative had invited him, and his long and unsuccessful campaign to become leader had reached the point where he decided to focus on Europe. Farage, by contrast, has chosen the place deliberately. As an ex-City boy he may have more in common with the people flaunting their wealth in the satellite villages, but he knows how to speak to the people of Clacton directly: as, doubtless, he will be doing any moment, in the local boozer.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/