Nigel Farage: Can he win in Britain's most deprived place?
Nigel Farage is standing for Reform in Clacton, but can the right-wing populist win in the most deprived place in the constituency and the country, Jaywick?
BY MICHAEL HAVIS
GOOGLE “Britain’s most deprived place” and odds are it’ll give you the name Jaywick.
For months now I’ve been thinking of coming here for a vox-pop. At one point, data showed that almost 50% of this seaside village was unemployed. White, working class Londoners gradually squeezed out of their city found their way here. Now they live in little chalets, making ends meet.
I would’ve come eventually, but this week events caught up with me. Nigel Farage, perhaps Britain’s most famous right winger (and certainly the best known outside the Tory party) dramatically entered the election race at the helm of his own party, Reform. And he’s standing for Parliament in Clacton, the constituency of which Jaywick is a part.
Farage, an anti-immigrant, anti-woke, pro-Trump populist, has tried and failed to get elected to Parliament seven times in six different constituencies. Why should Clacton be any different?
Because Clacton has history when it comes to voting to the right of the Conservatives. In 2014, its Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, defected to Nigel Farage’s former party, UKIP. He then triggered a by-election and was re-elected under this new affiliation. In the 2015 general election, the last one that Farage contested as a candidate, Clacton was the only seat his party won, with Carswell being re-elected. Farage himself had lost to the Conservatives in the Kent constituency of South Thanet, in a contest so murky that a Tory party official was later jailed for election spending offences.
It was a brutal outcome for a party that had scooped roughly 3.9 million votes, especially considering the SNP won 56 seats with their 1.45 million votes. But the crucial thing for us is this: one of Farage’s team won in Clacton, in a year when the Conservatives were not just competitive, but won the general election with a small majority.
This year, the Tories are a mess, over 20 points behind Labour in the polls, and their leader, Rishi Sunak, is making unforced errors all over. The latest is particularly bad: he ducked out of D-Day commemorations early so he could shoot a TV interview doubling down on some dodgy claims he’s been making about his Labour rivals. Disrespecting the troops during an election? The troops who liberated Europe from the Nazis? So you can go on TV and lie? Political suicide.
So if Team Farage can carry Clacton in a tough year like 2015, surely they can in 2024 when the Tories are collapsing? I think they can, but what do the voters think? I went to Jaywick to find out.
The village was pretty much dead when I arrived, but I managed to snag an interview with one lady just getting out of her car. She was voting for Reform and Farage. She’d planned to vote Reform anyway, but now Nigel was in the race she was certain. Another lady who declined to appear on camera said she’d vote Farage too, and was angry at the way he’d been treated by the other candidates on the previous night’s TV debates.
Up on the beachfront, things were a little livelier. I found people out walking their dogs or taking a morning stroll. The first bloke I spoke to, who planned to vote Reform, had mixed views on the Tory party’s legacy in Jaywick. They’d spent £5 million on a new commercial/business centre down the beach, the Sunspot, but why didn’t they spend it on new housing?
The Sunspot came up a few times; some people were positive about it, others were just pissed off the money wasn’t better spent, namely on housing. Knowing how often Tory-leaning voters object to new housing being built, I found myself wondering if there was anything that the government could’ve spent that £5 milllion on without annoying someone.
The next person I spoke to, a lady out with her husband, was undecided. She was concerned about immigrants and the state of the NHS, and was thinking about voting for Farage. I told her that he had advocated for an insurance-based healthcare system during the debate the previous night, which she took to mean an American-style system — a terrifying prospect for many British voters. She maintained that she was undecided.
One chap I spoke to, a former Tory voter, said he had worked for three Conservative MPs and that he wouldn’t vote for them now. Asked who, he said one cabinet minister, one disgraced former cabinet minister, and one MP. He went on to say parties like Reform always want to cut benefits, and that voting for them in Jaywick was like “Turkeys voting for Christmas”. He was leaning towards Labour. If any of you know what MPs he’s referring to, let me know.
Another guy I spoke to, this time off camera, had some star power in his family. He himself had been a singer who used to perform at London’s Kentucky Club, run by the Kray twins. His son was a household name from a British soap opera, and he had the photos to prove it. He and his wife had left the East End of London some decades before, and he said he regretted their exile from the city, because they were so far removed from family. It had been okay when the grandkids were small, he said, because they would visit and enjoy the beach, but they were all grown now. He was concerned about immigration and crime. He said if he voted — and he might not — it would be for Mr Farage and Reform.
A nice chap I spoke to in his mobility scooter had converted to the Tory brand at just about the least likely time in modern history. He said he had been Labour all his life, even in 2019 under Jeremy Corbyn, and had originally been a shop steward in a diesel works in Britain’s industrial north. But he was impressed by what the Conservatives had done for Jaywick, and thought he might break the habit of a lifetime. It takes all sorts!
And then there was the husband and wife couple who were going different directions in July. She was staying with team blue, concerned that Reform were cannibalising the right-wing vote and handing Labour a bigger victory. Her husband, convinced that Labour had already won it, was happy to go with Reform. This is one major problem with the Conservative attack that “a vote for Reform is a vote for Labour” — a lot of voters already think that the Tories have blown it, so voting Conservative to keep Labour out seems pointless; why not vote according to conscience? The lady added that she too would vote Reform if she thought Farage could win big enough to form a government.
And the last chap I spoke to, who was out walking with his wife and their dogs, was another Reform voter. He was clear: it’s not about Reform winning this election and forming the next government, Labour would do that. Rather, he believed that — with a heavy Conservative defeat — Mr Farage offered the chance for a new right to rise from the ashes of the old, so that the next election would not pit Labour against the Tories, but against Reform, or something like it.
Many will disagree with the views espoused by the people I spoke to for this episode; many others will share them. But whatever you think of these people, they have something that many others lack: a community. On several occasions, people I was interviewing on the street greeted (and were greeted by) their friends and neighbours. Many of the people you see on camera were known to each other. I could walk down the main street of my hometown and on nine days out of 10, not see a single soul I recognise, but here people constantly passed familiar faces.
I’ve now filmed in 14 different constituencies recording these vox-pops, but in none of them have I detected a sense of community quite like here. That old crooner who sang for the Krays lamented the fact that there wasn’t that sense of community in the East End anymore.
Anyway, if you’ve been counting, that’s two for the Tories, one for Labour, six for Reform, and one undecided but leaning towards Reform. There was also a lorry driver I briefly spoke to who was going Reform, but he was from outside the constituency. It’s just a snapshot of this particular village at this particular time of day, but it doesn’t bode well for the Conservatives keeping this seat. My guess? Reform GAIN.