Philip Lawrence, 72, pushes his walker, adorned with two English flags, briskly to the end of Clacton-on-Sea Pier, like someone peering over the bow of a ship adrift. Every morning for the past two years, he sits alone, looking out over the North Sea and the wind turbines that can be seen through the mist or haze. “The country is going to ruin. The immigrants keep coming. The other day I saw about 60 of them approaching the coast,” muses the construction worker, as he sips a soft drink from a paper cup.
Behind him, the attractions of the pier begin to awaken. The Ferris wheel, the bumper cars or the huge room with arcade machines and video games. Decadent leisure that will only be half filled, with impoverished local tourism. It is the usual landscape of the English east coast. Another holiday village that emerged in the Victorian era and was abandoned to its fate when tour operators began transporting hordes of Britons to Spain and other Mediterranean beaches for ridiculous prices.
In 2016, this small town of just over 50,000 inhabitants in the county of Essex was one of the places with record support – more than 70% – for Brexit. In the 2015 elections she voted for the populist, anti-European UKIP party. In 2019, she gave her support to Boris Johnson. In 2024, that histrionic and provocative character who has distorted British politics for the last two decades, Nigel Farage, has decided at the last minute that he will run for the eighth time in Parliament, on behalf of the Reform UK formation, which he himself helped to create. found. And the constituency he has chosen for his adventure is Clacton-on-Sea.
“Oh, he’s a brilliant guy!” Lawrence says when asked about Farage. “When he speaks, he says exactly what he means. Straight up.” He returned to his hometown during the pandemic, after a lifetime in London. He now lives with his sister, scraping by on a state pension of just over 200 euros a week.
“Essex, Essex, Essex is rubbish… a boil on the nation’s arse!” sang the puppets on that famous satirical programme, Spitting Image, from British television in the nineties. Today it would be unthinkable to hear something like that on screen, but the county continues to contain in the public imagination all the clichés, truths and contradictions of England. Cultivated by the Conservative Party, which has always garnered a wealth of votes there. Despised and ridiculed by the upper and urban classes. In Essex, the girls and boys who populate reality shows equivalent to Spanish programs Women and men and vice versa either The island of temptations. “Young, hard-working, slightly brutalized and culturally sterile,” journalist Simon Heffer of the newspaper described 30 years ago. Sunday Telegraph whom he baptized as Essex Man (Essex Man).
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More desperation than ignorance
Heading south along a beach with miles and miles of fine sand, it takes just over 40 minutes on foot – five or six by car – to get from Clacton-on-Sea to Jaywick, considered in recent years to be the poorest and most run-down place in the United Kingdom. It has 5,000 inhabitants.
The small houses lined up along the seafront, rented for years to London tourists and now occupied by Britons who mostly live on welfare, present a decaying image. Some are burnt down, others decorated with graffiti.
Many of the hostels in the area have ended up providing shelter, financed by the Government, to irregular immigrants who arrive in the country. They are a small percentage, but it increases tension in an area that is already a social hive.
Behind the beachfront homes, the alley is a scene of accumulated garbage, rusty barbecues, fierce-looking dogs and hanging clothes. One street further back, between house and house, you can count endlessly abandoned commercial premises. a single pubwith the disturbing name of Never Say Die (Never give up).
It is difficult to find someone in the neighborhood who does not see some virtue in candidate Farage, with his speech so apparently patriotic, so xenophobic, so critical of the new left, so vindicative of an England that feels abandoned.
Not everyone buys 100% of the merchandise, though. “I can’t stand the homophobic and disgustingly racist discourse that he exudes. You can tell he has never set foot in this area. He has no idea what these people are like. Of course there are all kinds, but you also find beautiful people,” explains Kim, referring to Farage’s message – like many others, she does not want to give her surname or be photographed – a woman in her early thirties who lives with her grandmother, her mother and her children in a single-room house.
Her mouth, with its teeth completely decayed, is what draws attention more than anything else. “It is impossible to get an appointment with the NHS dentist. Just to see the family doctor I have to get up at seven in the morning and queue up to get an appointment,” Kim laments.
Candidate Craig Jamieson has decided to run for the Climate Party, a minority party, in the Clacton-on-Sea constituency. At 51 years old, he is the owner of a small renewable energy company, and he is convinced that the sea breeze and the sun in the area are the force that can lift the region’s economy. But he admits that it is difficult to compete with Farage: “He is funny, very entertaining, charismatic, willing to discuss everything openly and, in a sense, represents some of the best qualities of what it means to be British,” admits Jamieson, who It is difficult for him to fit his environmental discourse into a population that fights to get ahead on a daily basis. “In that situation, it is absurd to ask people to count the calories or the carbon footprint behind the can of spaghetti bolognese they eat,” he admits.
The “true indigenous people”
In one of the many homes that proudly display the sign supporting Farage and Reform UK, Paul, working in the four square meters of front garden, is eager for conversation. He wears only shorts. He is 58 years old. He looks 10 more. He shaved head. Tattoos all over the body. He doesn’t have many teeth left either. He was born in London. He bounced around Hong Kong and Thailand. He built, restaurants… everything until he returned to England and settled in Clacton-on-Sea. He is another of those who claim that Farage “goes with the truth first.” Upon noticing that the journalist is Spanish, he begins all his sentences with “don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against you, but…”, and engages in a paranoid delirium in which everything conspires against “the true indigenous people of England, the white population.”
“My family voted Labour when it really stood up for the working class, but I stopped voting for it a long time ago. And I am not convinced by either of the two main candidates,” she complains.
—But Rishi Sunak is a Hindu of Indian origin who has arrived at Downing Street. Does He not make you proud?
“Surely he is a hard worker and deserves it, but he is also complicit in all this anti-British speech, against everything English, against white people,” he answers while closing the door of his gate.
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