In the town that voted in Ukip’s first and only MP, residents say they still feel ignored by the political mainstream
n the seafront at Clacton there is a variety of nostalgias to choose from. The advertising boards for the Princes theatre offer tickets to “80s Live” while the West Cliff promotes “Sounds of the Sixties”. Tickets for the present and the future do not seem so readily available.
In a straw poll of veterans, Farage’s campaign message seemed to be getting through. Jason Stewart was in a green beret and a biker jacket studded with medals; after a long career in the Royal Marines, he “thought it was time to get out after I was blown up twice in one day in Afghanistan”. He offers a version of an argument heard all day. “The two main parties look both the same to me,” he says. “The Tories don’t care about us.
Looking back at that column a decade on, you can see in it all the faultlines that were exposed and exploited so cynically by Farage and, the roots of the crisis that threatens to destroy the Conservative party in this election . A decade on, despite everything, many people here still seem prepared to listen to Farage, because for all the government promises of levelling up, their lives have only got harder. And of course Farage, ever the chancer, has seamlessly replaced one imaginary scapegoat for all those issues – EU bureaucracy – with another: desperate asylum seekers on small boats. Clacton has a population that identifies as 96% white British.
And then, of course, you find anomalies. Barry Dawson, 75, is walking his neighbour’s chihuahuas. An “old hippy”, he moved “to the badlands” here from the East End of London, 30 years ago, did a sociology degree, brought up kids and grandkids, worked in children’s homes, never looked back. He is cheerfully scathing of the “Romford talk” of some of his friends and neighbours, and he has no truck with Farage. “I’m an old union man,” he says. “Corbyn wasn’t left enough for me.
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