Nigel Farage thinks leave-voting Clacton will welcome his

In the Essex seaside town synonymous with Brexit, locals tell me their focus is reversing decline, not protest against the EU

Tim Burrows is a writer and author of The Invention of Essex

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-millenium 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.”

Tim Burrows is a writer and author of The Invention of Essex

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