Could Clacton bin off Nigel Farage?

0:00Nosheen Iqbal:This is The Guardian.

0:52Nosheen Iqbal:A warning before we start. This episode contains extreme and offensive views. So we're here on Clacton High Street, butcher, charity shop, post office, savers, sort of the usual motley crew of an English high street. Mid-morning in August, it's pretty lively. Looking out across the Golden Sandy Beach, backed by a promenade with ornamental gardens and a pier heaving with rides and restaurants, you can see why Clacton was once a seaside jewel on England's east coast. But these days, there's another story that's told about this town. Clacton is one of the poorest, oldest and whitest places in the UK.

1:42Nosheen Iqbal:People here face a life expectancy that is 18 years lower than those living in wealthier parts of Essex. Blood pressure is chronically high. More people suffer from it here, proportionally than anywhere else in England. Asthma, chronic kidney disease and diabetes are more common than in most places. Clacton is home to around 53 ,000 residents. But almost half the working age population don't have a job. One in five have never had one. It's here, in 2024, that Nigel Farage finally won a seat in the Houses of Parliament. Eighth time lucky. And it's here where he's forcing his ninth go. I've thought about it hard and I've decided today, today I will resign as a member of Parliament for Clacton-on-Sea, thereby forcing a by-election, which should happen, I hope, in short order.

2:37Nosheen Iqbal:Farage says he's protesting against the scrutiny into his financial affairs, an undeclared£5 million gift, for example, and that the people of Clacton should decide whether he's still fit to serve. and what do you make of this by-election being called i think it's an absolute farce i think it's like a circus to be honest with you i think it's an absolute shambles and i think it's ridiculous that they're wasting all this government money all this public money on a by-election that we don't need to be having to re-elect somebody who we really shouldn't have as an mp it does feel like a deflection by farage to try and take the focus of the fact that he's taken large amounts of money off people that he probably shouldn't have done.

3:18Nosheen Iqbal:The main parties are boycotting this contest. And so instead, Farage is going up against a record-breaking 33 candidates. The ballot paper is three feet long. And his biggest rival, Count Binface. To help improve schools, hospitals, businesses, arcade grabber machines, pub toilet, hand dryer locations, and other things that humans vote for. The intergalactic space warrior from Sigma-9. I think he seems so much more down to earth and a bit more like he's got more idea of what's happening here. If only the whole thing was a joke. Why would you vote for someone with a bin on their head?

4:08Nosheen Iqbal:From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, Nigel Farage's political gamble with Clacton.

4:27Nosheen Iqbal:I get to Clacton with our producer, Ivor, around 11 o 'clock. We head to the town square, which is actually more of a triangle. It's got amusement arcades running down one end and banks, betting shops and the McDonald's on the other. A street preacher is promising salvation to pass us by.

4:50Nosheen Iqbal:I've arranged to meet Neil Stock, who served as a local Conservative councillor for more than 20 years and was awarded an OBE for his effort. I last interviewed him during the COVID pandemic. Back then, he was leader of the local council, Tendring District. Neil, how would you describe the character of Claxton? Yeah, Clacton, like many other seaside towns, had quite a glorious past. It's a beach. There's moil dyes. All real sand and it's ideal for everybody. So if you look at a brochure from the 1930s that was promoting Clacton, you see these fantastic looking hotels, fantastic gardens, fantastic guest houses where you can come and spend your holiday.

5:33Over four miles of some of the finest seaside in the country. and it was clearly quite an upmarket destination and back then people weren't flying aboard for their holidays and they were clearly coming to clacton and places like it and spending a lot of money um and indeed that's how clacton was created as a as a seaside resort it's only about 130 years old something like that it was actually created from practically nothing the railway line was

5:52Nosheen Iqbal:was brought here is it this long-standing butlins heritage am i right well yeah and then the butlins of course and although carnival too is a very make-believe affair and the mood may be light It starts with the hard work they're putting in at this Clacton holiday camp. It was, I mean, the Butlins thing, people sort of scoff and say that's a bit low rent, but it was big for business. Lots of, you know, for the local economy, it was fantastic having a Butlins here. This is the day of beauty queens and princesses, or anyone who likes to look good in a swimsuit. Loads of people worked there. If you're still at school, you can get a job there part-time on a Saturday.

6:26And loads of people came in for holidays, obviously, and fell in love with Clacton. But now those same fantastic hotels and guest houses, they're still here, but lots of them are bedsits and looking rather sad. And there is quite a lot of that, I'm afraid, as there is depressingly in lots of seaside towns.

6:42Nosheen Iqbal:The Clacton Parliamentary Constituency includes several coastal towns and villages. Clacton Town itself, where I'm speaking to Neil, is the most known. And seven miles to the north-east, there's Frinton. Frinton-on-Sea was used to be, certainly before the war and even during the war, very, very upmarket. Connacht Avenue, the main shopping road in Frinton, was known as the Bond Street of East Anglia. You had, you know, Churchill used to have his cabinet meet there sometimes, and very wealthy people had houses there. There were some fantastic properties. Down the coast from Frinton is Jaywick, which is routinely described as the most deprived neighbourhood in the country.

7:21Nosheen Iqbal:It's where a UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty reported a crisis in 2019, and where Channel 5 set its series, Benefits by the Sea. More recently, you might have seen it popping up on your feeds as YouTubers compete to make content. I spent a day in England's poorest town alone, inside England's worst slum, that sort of thing. And the people who live there are utterly sick and tired of this because they like living in Jwick. There's a very high percentage of outright homeownership in Jwick as there is across Clacton. Let's say an Englishman's home is this castle and that's kind of writ large a little bit.

7:55in Clacton I think it's like you may not like Clacton other people may not like Clacton but the people in the for they actually like it and you know everyone else can get stuffed kind of thing so they're very independently minded I think that's it demonstrated isn't it by the fact that Nigel Farage won here the only time he's actually been successful in the parliamentary election and he has tried a lot of times UKIP were extremely successful in the local government elections a few years before that and then obviously they've sort of morphed into the Reform UK party. And a lot of it is sort of sticking two things up to the establishment, saying, we just don't care about Westminster.

8:32We're just not interested in what's going on. It's not relevant to us. It's not relevant to our lives.

8:36Nosheen Iqbal:It's getting noisy and people are giving us the side eye. So we head to a cafe. At the doorway, a customer with a Union Jack tattoo sitting outside points to me and says, you're barred. I'm not sure if it's a joke, but we go in. Neil, you've given me a good political history of Clacton, but can you tell me why you think it is people here vote the way they do? I think a lot of it just comes down to the fact that people here don't really feel they've got anything to lose by voting for reform. They're not really necessarily voting for it, they're kind of voting against all the others. I think one of the reasons is that, you know, you sort of said they're not necessarily better off and would a reformed government be able to make them better off.

9:22But I think a lot of people don't make decisions, electoral ones, voting ones, based on whether they think they're going to be better off financially.

9:27Nosheen Iqbal:Neil has a lot of opinions on why Clacton is run down. He comes back to the hotels, now converted into bedsits. Where you've got lots of single men in their mid-40s who, and this is a bit of a sexist thing to say anyway, but a lot of men don't go and see the doctor enough unless they've got a woman bullying them to do it. I don't ask them why that is, but that is a fact. Are you saying that a lot of, like, divorced dads are... Yeah, exactly that. And they're not going to the doctor when they've got something wrong. They're drinking too much. They're eating awful food from one of the many takeaways.

9:57They're not cooking for themselves. They're not looking after themselves. And lots of landlords will talk about going round to see a tenant who hasn't paid the rent that week and struggling to open the door because there's a body behind it.

10:08Nosheen Iqbal:Neil, what matters... I mean, you worked in local politics for over two decades. What did you find came up time and time again? What matters most to voters here? I think, I mean, like you've only got, we've been walking around the town centre and it looks a little bit dated and a little bit scruffy. And I'm probably being polite when I say a little bit. Although these days, to be fair, almost every town centre in the country looks quite similar. They've all caught up with Clacton. Yeah, but it's not just the high street, is it? What else do people care about? What would you see as the town's main problems?

10:42Well, I would say they're quite large infrastructure related problems. if you could build a super-fast dual carriageway all the way to the centre of Clacton, you would change Clacton over. I mean, some people might say it wouldn't be for the better, but I can guarantee that rather than going to Southall for the weekend, people would be flocking up from the better parts of London for their holiday home. Rightly or wrongly, this is sort of gentrification I'm talking about. I'm not necessarily saying it's...

11:04Nosheen Iqbal:Eventually, we get to the by-election. If Farage wins, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner will carry on investigating whether he broke the rules over his undeclared£5 million gift, the one from the Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harbourn. Depending on what they find, there's a world in which Clacton could face another by-election. I don't want to suggest that it's a foregone conclusion, but it does seem that Farage is going to win. How do you feel about the prospect of another by-election in probably two to three months? Well, I'm happy to predict or pre-empt the fact that he is very likely to win.

11:44However, whether there's another by-election because the standards inquiry against him, I don't know what the outcome of that's going to be, but if there is another by-election, I think things could be different, actually. Whether Nigel Farage is some sort of cunning political strategist in that he thinks that by holding this first one, it will secure people to get used to voting for him, I don't know. I don't think he's that cute, to be honest, and I think he may regret his decision to have stood. in this totally unnecessary by-election. If there's another by-election here in the next few months and you get a good local candidate with who knows the constituency and is now inbibed the constituency at least a little bit and the track record is delivering stuff in the constituency, then who knows?

12:35Nosheen Iqbal:For now, the people of Clacton have been presented with a long list of contenders. who have jumped on the opportunity to have a go. It costs£500 to put down a deposit to stand as an MP. Labour, Conservative, the Lib Dems, Green and Restore have called it a circus, a stunt and a distraction from, I quote, Farage's fishy finances. So instead there are three members of the monster-raving loony party standing. 20 independents, actor-turned-anti-Islam activist Lawrence Fox and a party called Everyone Is God. There's at least one far-right nationalist, there's a teenager and there's a carpenter. 28 of the 34 are men.

13:19Nosheen Iqbal:As far as I can tell, only one, Nick Pellas, is a local and lives in Clacton. There's a lot of choice. Historic amount of choice. I think they're over 30, 30, 30, 30, 34. What are your thoughts on the fact that the other main parties aren't standing in this by-election? I think it's an insult to the people of Clacton and I think all these people that are standing are an insult to Clacton as well. A couple of candidates are milling about the town square. So Michael O 'Keefe, independent. Yeah. Your placard says... We meet Michael, who is passionate about being a voice for local people. There are people who want a local MP, somebody who will do something for them locally and then they're the other people who are voting because they're doing something for Britain.

14:13Nosheen Iqbal:Do you live in Clacton? No, I don't. I live in Lincolnshire. OK, so... A slight disconnect. Because? Lots of people we speak to aren't impressed with outsiders coming in to try and represent them. So we listen to what the candidates have to say about it. If the question you're asking me is, have you lived here before? As most other candidates, no, I haven't. I'm willing to be transparent, right? However, I have made an effort to be here consistently more than any other candidate. July 7th evening, Faraj announced his resignation. July 9th morning, I'm already in Clacton full time and I've been here continuously, pretty much uninterruptedly.

14:58I've spent some time here. I'm staying here now temporarily. And people here have been very loving. Some of them have been very welcoming. And, you know, I believe that you love your neighbours.

15:20Nosheen Iqbal:In the town square, the benches have been taken over by street drinkers. One of them is topless and swaying to Bob Marley. A group of teenagers are messing about. One of them runs over to me with a can of something to spray me. I turn my head, slightly startled. It's silly string. We walk some more around Clacton and Frinton. Journalists from The Guardian making an episode about the by-election. Would you be interested in talking? No. Lots of people don't want to speak to us. No. Some are more hostile than others. There's a lot of support for Nigel Farage. He's not for everyone. He does get people talking.

15:57No, he's rubbish. He's absolutely rubbish. I mean, they don't hold surgeries. He's never even attended any of the local council meetings about their improvements to the town. I think someone that actually turned up would be a good start. I think his voting record's 29%. I mean, that's hideous. He's supposed to represent the people of Clacton and Frinton. So actually turning up to vote in the Houses of Parliament and representing us would be a good start.

16:22Nosheen Iqbal:And what is it, I guess, that you like about Farjul, that you find that he does represent the interests of people and he's a good person to know? He stops and talks to everyone. OK. He does stop and talk, and he does seem to be getting things done. We've had some issues along here with the steps being overgrown, and he's worked with the local council to get them all sorted down towards Walton. At Clacton Pier, we meet a couple at a picnic table. They moved to the town to enjoy their retirement. He's a people person. He can talk to anybody. Yeah. And he integrates with people. I think most of the others tend to talk down to you.

17:00and tell you what's right for your area.

17:03Nosheen Iqbal:But you don't mind the fact that he's not from here either? No, but he has got a property up the road here. You know, so... And he's seen about quite a bit. So do you think he's been a good and present MP? Well, no, but I think it's hard for him because he's also the leader of a party. So he's all over the country, you know. OK. Are you bothered by any of the scandals that are dogging him at the moment? The reason as to why he reportedly called this by-election was the... I'm not worried about the money. It doesn't bother me at all because I think they're all corrupt. Right. And we know they've all got their noses in the trough.

17:43We know that and we have to accept it. It's just the way it is.

17:46Nosheen Iqbal:Do you think we have to accept that in democracy in the UK? It just seems to be the norm. I don't think we should. I don't agree with it. But I don't think there is any democracy in the UK anymore. I don't think he has voted really personally. They all take back Anders, we all know that. It bothers us in the slightest about Farage getting that money, because we know. Good luck to you. I wish someone would give me£4 million, you know. £5 million. As we're chatting, a man with a navy hat asks us to make room for a train turning round. We've got to move out of the way for the little train. It's the choo-choo tourist kind that rolls up and down the promenade.

18:20Thank you, thank you.

18:21Nosheen Iqbal:He butts in to tell us he's voting for Farage. There you go. There you go. Ask any collector person, that is normally the answer. The conversation takes a turn. He was right, Enoch Powell. Yeah, we know that, brother. He wasn't a prejudice, he was just saying, what are you going to do if you don't do this? No-one wanted to listen. No-one wanted to listen back in the 70s. That's interesting, so that's really come back in a big way. Enoch Powell was right. Yeah, we knew all along. Definitely. I was a bus driver in London for the last 45 years. I was driving in London in the 70s and continued since then.

19:00And I've seen it happen. I see it every day, every week I saw it. And I used to come home and say to you, didn't I? Yeah. You know, we've seen it. The change in the migration and the state of London, the way it's gone down. A lady stabbed four men in London with a pair of scissors. A homeless lady. Covent Garden. In Covent Garden. A homeless woman in Covent Garden. The area I've got to land in Trafalgar Square. It's all on the television. You can see it if you watch the right news.

19:26Nosheen Iqbal:The right news, that's interesting. Where do you get your news? That's right. Where do you get your news? YouTube. YouTube. Talk TV. YouTube. I never read a newspaper. We used to. Apparently she was a homeless lady. That's all I know. But is there anything, but what does that have to do with migration or in-up power is what I'm asking. It's just the rise in migration. Well, no, it's to do with the lawlessness. The fear that people are feeling. But I mean, Clacton is like 96 % white. I'm not saying, I'm not associating crime with migrants or people of colour, but is that your fear, that the more non-white people there are, the higher the crime is?

20:06Nosheen Iqbal:Definitely. What it is, is we've got enough trouble of our own with our own people. We've got enough bad and... We don't need to import even more trouble. That are white English. We know there's bad people. And black English. Do you know what I mean? And we've got enough. We don't need to import a load more. Grief. Because it is grief. But migration has halved in the last year. Literally the numbers have gone massively down. It depends on how big it is you look at, doesn't it? And it's people that don't integrate. I mean, most of the people that come here do integrate. You know? The blacks integrated over the years.

20:43There was no issues with the blacks, you know? So is it... And they try and make it... It's Islamophobia, which is not even a word. It's a made-up word. I mean, you've said it. You know? It's a made-up word, but they do not integrate. But I'm Muslim. Yeah, but they don't integrate. But am I not integrated? Yeah, you're integrating with me now, but most of the time they just keep to themselves.