Over the last few weeks I’ve travelled up and down the East Coast. It’s the tenth anniversary of Brexit, and with local elections looming, Reform are loudly predicting a string of victories. In some places they sound less like a political party and more like a touring production—same script, slightly different audience each night.
Hull feels different to the places I’ve visited so far. It’s a proper city, with all the things that implies: a football team, theatres, museums, a university, a medical school. It may sit on the coast, but it isn’t stranded there in the way that Skegness or Great Yarmouth are. There are roads in and out, a sense—at least on paper—of connection to the wider economy.
And yet it feels, unmistakably, similar.
It is a place where industry left and didn’t come back. Not in any meaningful sense. Not in a way that reshaped the labour market or restored the social fabric that industry once supported. You can see the gap it left—not just in the skyline, but in the texture of everyday life.
Places like Kingston upon Hull, Great Yarmouth and Clacton-on-Sea look similar on the surface—low employment, high deprivation—but the underlying patterns are slightly different. The headline unemployment rate doesn’t actually tell you very much; the real story is economic inactivity. In Hull, around a quarter of working-age people are inactive, and a strikingly large share of that is driven by long-term sickness and disability. It’s the classic post-industrial city problem: a relatively young population, weak labour demand, low skills, and a large pool of people effectively excluded from the workforce on health grounds. Adjust for that, and “true” joblessness looks far higher than the official figures suggest.
Coastal towns like Clacton and Great Yarmouth arrive at a similar destination by a different route. Employment rates are lower and inactivity is higher, but more of it is driven by an older population and a thin, seasonal economy built around low-wage service work. There is still plenty of ill-health and benefit dependency, but retirement and demography play a larger role than they do in Hull. The uncomfortable common thread is that none of these places has a labour market strong enough to pull people back in. Whether people are out because they are sick, ageing, or simply not needed, the effect is the same: inactivity quietly doing the work that unemployment statistics no longer capture.
Which is why the politics feels so febrile. If you want to understand the appeal of Reform, you don’t need to start with ideology—you can start with the absence of work that feels real, stable, and worth doing. When the economy stops making credible offers to large parts of the population, people go looking elsewhere for explanations, and for someone to blame.
The only moment that really challenged that view came on a Saturday morning in the park by the Humber Bridge. People running, walking dogs, chatting—an easy, unforced sense of normality. It’s a reminder that these places are not defined solely by decline, however tempting it is to write them that way. The problem is that these glimpses of vitality don’t yet add up to an economic story. The centre of Hull is surrounded by my prosperous suburbs, full of better off liberals.
Nineteen of the fifty-seven council seats are up for grabs. The Liberal Democrats currently hold a slim majority. Reform, for now, have been relatively quiet in the city—very different from Sunderland, where they are loudly convinced of imminent victory. Whether that reflects confidence or caution isn’t entirely clear. But if the underlying conditions are anything to go by, the ground they are competing on is already prepared for them.
