A Day with Farage in Clacton

Over the weekend, I spent a day shadowing Nigel Farage with an entourage of fellow snoopers and milling busybodies. As he walked down Frinton high street, ducking into more or less every establishment he passed along the way, there was a genuine buzz, a non-confected enthusiasm. Women spilled out of Superdrug to request selfies with the man himself. Car horns were honked in solidarity. Most encouragingly of all, a sizeable number of zoomers stopped Farage to inform him of their resolve to cast a vote—for many, their first ever—in favour of Reform on July 4.

Farage was both moved and curious. “Out of interest, what makes you want to get behind me?” he would often ask. Words like ‘authentic,’ ‘patriot,’ and ‘man of the people’ tended to get thrown back. “Well, you see, in Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer I’m up against two politicians who don’t really like people,” Farage quipped to two locals, a very young man and an equally young woman, who had praised his mastery of the common touch. It was poignant to see a town with so little to shout about feeling not only noticed but galvanised.

Any visitor intent on distinguishing between a town in decline and a town that lacks the privilege even to be able to speak of better days should focus less on the people and more on the architecture. Among Britain’s overrepresented constituency of midwit Times readers, it is popular to dismiss Clacton-on-Sea—ground zero for Farage’s declared “revolt” against a cosy Westminster consensus—as a town going nowhere. Its etiolated Victorian terraces and semi-repurposed retro arcades give the lie to such scornful notions. Whatever Clacton’s destiny, unknowable even to those who hail Tory MP turned Times columnist Matthew Parris as a great sage, this is a town that finds itself adrift from somewhere.

Clacton is the definition made flesh of ‘left behind.’ Its equivalents in the United States would be post-industrial wastelands like Steubenville, Ohio, and Wheeling, West Virginia. An Essex seaside town, Clacton was a well-subscribed domestic holiday destination for middle-class English families until the advent of cheap commercial flights in the 1970s wiped out the bustling local economy. It has since sunk into a haven of economic stagnation, welfare dependency, and public ill-health.

Despite the lack of economic opportunity, Clacton’s exclusion from the disruptive currents of globalisation has had something of a time-capsule effect, reflected in what remains of the town’s character. The results can be quite charming. While very few enterprising, upwardly mobile youngsters would want to live there, Clacton boasts a singular prospect that is denied to multicultural, supposedly ‘vibrant’ and ‘dynamic’ London in the 21st century: the freedom to feel at home in England. It remains 95% white British, despite the curious decision of the Labour Party to select as their local candidate for next month’s general election a spiteful race communist with a track record of gloating about “white tears.”

In any case, the fact that a privately educated precious metals speculator turned national populist can unleash such verve in just a matter of weeks is quite remarkable—a cause for sober reflection, not idle snobbery. Of course, there are those who sneer at such prolery. Such was the line taken by Matthew Parris in a notorious 2014 article:

[Clacton’s] voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoos-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterday’s Britain … Is that where the Conservative Party wants to be? Is it where the Tories need to be if they’re going to gather momentum in this century, rather than slowly lose it? Or do we need to be with the Britain that has its career prospects ahead and not behind, that can admire immigrants and want them with us, that doesn’t want to spend its days buying scratch cards, and its evenings smoking in pubs, that’s amazed at all the fuss about whether gays should marry, that travels in Europe and would hesitate to let those links go? I am not arguing that we should be careless of the needs of struggling people and places such as Clacton. But I am arguing—if I am honest—that we should be careless of their opinions.

Apart from the vicious, uncharitable tone, it is precisely this attitude that has landed the Conservative Party in perhaps its greatest ever crisis. ‘Winning’ on the terms set by your opponents is a just self-flattering way of losing monumentally. Putting principles to one side for a moment, all that happens under this formula is that you alienate your core vote while failing to hoover up support from the kind of people who will always hate your guts in any case.

The Tories have spent the last 14 years trying exactly this: flirting with the luxury belief class while ignoring more ordinary heartbreaks, pandering to foreigners who already swing 70% to the Left while stigmatising the interests of the native population, joining in the liturgical celebrations of sterile forms of hedonism while distancing themselves from the married family. A reported 25% of their own 2019 voters now want to see their treachery punished with zero seats. And what was it all for? They hardly get any credit in the huffy diatribes of LBC radio’s James O’Brien or the very serious FT editorial page.

Parris may live for the occasional pat on the head from his liberal peers who see him as ‘one of the good guys’ on the nominal right-wing of British politics, but some of us require rather more in the way of nourishment. Plus, why an ultra-dependent immigrant population whose ancestors played no part in building this country should be viewed as more “admirable” than our suffering compatriots with nowhere else in the world to call home is not at all obvious. Anyone inclined to agree with Parris’s unthinking oikophobia should heed the wiser words of St. Paul: “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (Timothy 5:8)

What I saw in Clacton was a well-organised, highly motivated operation, able to call on the aid of both public-spirited locals and an army of right-wing zoomers from around the country. There are legitimate concerns, raised most eloquently by Pete North in the course of a recent Substack post, that Reform is little more than a one-man band, a media-fuelled enterprise with limited potential to scale beyond the persona of Farage himself and become a serious party of government.

An attention-grabbing airwaves strategy must be reinforced by a solid ground game to be effective in a national election. As North writes elsewhere, “Boomers still care if the local candidate lives in their constituency and bothers to make a leaflet drop. They think it matters. And it does.” Reform’s campaign in Clacton, inseparable from the lustre of Farage himself, is hardly representative of those taking place in other constituencies across the United Kingdom.

We are living through a time of immense political ferment. It would be unwise for anyone pinning their hopes on a national renewal to put all their money on a single horse at this early stage in the race to define the post-election Right. Failing to be sufficiently critical of those who pose as our political friends is part of the reason for our current crisis: an empty hole at the heart of British politics, no patriotic movement of 14 years’ standing to fill it, all redounding to the benefit a deeply radical (if seemingly innocuous) Sir Keir Starmer. Both for this reason and in principle, neither Farage nor anyone else should be above reproach.

However, the evidence of a vibe shift in Britain continues to mount. We are living through the beginnings of a revolt that Farage has had the decency to declare on our behalf. Whether he will still be leading it come 2029, let alone 2034, remains to be seen. His extraordinary reception among the people of Clacton, not to mention his rising popularity with zoomers on TikTok and Instagram, is surely proof of a head-start. Then again, more Frenchmen had heard of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès than Napoleon Bonaparte in 1794. Just one of these men is known to posterity.