Clacton is back in the news. When I visited earlier this year, I didn’t realise it would briefly become the epicentre of British politics.
Nigel Farage is fighting a by-election against Count Binface. If he wins, he has beaten a bin. If he loses, he’s been beaten by one.
Farage himself has considerable form when it comes to losing elections. He stood for Westminster seven times before finally winning Clacton on his eighth attempt in 2024.That still leaves him some way behind the undisputed champion, Screaming Lord Sutch, who fought and lost 39 parliamentary elections. But seven defeats put Farage firmly into Monster Raving Loony territory, alongside Miss Whiplash.
This might seem harsh on Nigel Farage, but there is a serious point. Politics is full of people who were laughed at and written off before eventually triumphing. Farage is one of them.
At the 2024 general election, he won 46.2% of the vote in Clacton. That makes him the overwhelming favourite to win again, but it also means that a majority of those who voted chose somebody else. In theory, there are enough non-Reform voters to defeat him if they unite behind a single candidate.
In practice, the latest polling suggests they won’t, but Reform have recently under-performed in by-elections.
Why did Nigel Farage call the Clacton by-election?
The immediate cause of the by-election is a financial scandal.
Farage resigned and triggered the contest while facing scrutiny over a £5 million gift from cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne. Reform UK, meanwhile, is caught up in a police investigation into £500,000 of donations made before the 2024 election.
The official Parliament record says that the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened an investigation into Nigel Farage on 13 May 2026. The matter under investigation is “Failure to register an interest” under Rule 5. This concerns the £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne. While the by-election is under way the investigation cannot progress.
The timing is particularly awkward for Reform. The Rycroft Review into foreign influence in British politics was published earlier this year after Rycroft had been, in his words, “extensively briefed” by the police and security services.
His conclusion was blunt: “foreign interference in our politics is real and persistent.”
Rycroft highlighted the established threat from Russia, China and Iran, but also identified what he called a “potential new threat”: foreign actors and wealthy private citizens — including those from allies such as the United States — seeking to influence British politics in pursuit of their own agendas.
Rycroft doesn’t name Farage or Reform. British security agencies don’t normally publicly identify the politicians they brief ministers and reviewers about. But the recommendations which followed would make it considerably harder for British political parties to receive large sums whose ultimate source cannot be established, or for wealthy foreign individuals to channel money into British politics.
That presents a particular problem for Reform. Few British politicians have cultivated relationships with wealthy political actors in both Russia and the United States quite like Nigel Farage, while increasingly uncomfortable questions are now being asked about the origins of some of the money flowing around Reform and its senior figures.
Some of these transactions have attracted the attention of Britain’s anti-money-laundering system. Banks filed Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs, with the National Crime Agency over several transactions connected with Farage and Reform figures. A SAR does not mean that money laundering took place, or even that the person receiving the money did anything wrong. It means a financial institution considered a transaction suspicious enough to report it to the authorities.
Among the transactions reported were:
- a £5 million personal gift to Farage from cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 election;
- about £1.075 million from Fiona Cottrell to Britain Means Business, a company controlled by Reform deputy leader Richard Tice;
- two subsequent £250,000 donations from Britain Means Business to Reform UK, which are now being investigated by the Metropolitan Police;
- an £80,000 personal loan from George Cottrell to Richard Tice, which was also reportedly the subject of concerns raised by bankers.
At the centre of some of these transactions is George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster and longstanding associate of Farage.
The Financial Times has reported that a betting account in Cottrell’s name received almost $9 million in cryptocurrency from unidentified sources. The origin of the money could not be established by the financial institutions examining the transactions.
Cottrell also transferred more than $2 million to his mother, Fiona, shortly before she made a series of large political payments. Fiona Cottrell subsequently transferred £1.075 million to Britain Means Business, Richard Tice’s fundraising company. On the same day, £500,000 moved from Britain Means Business to Reform UK.
None of this proves that the money received by Reform came from the unidentified cryptocurrency payments. But it does explain why banks, the police and political-finance regulators have become interested in establishing where the money ultimately came from.
Farage and Tice are now suing the NCA, alleging that confidential information from the SARs was improperly leaked to journalists. The NCA is investigating the alleged disclosure.
There is another uncomfortable connection with foreign money.
Nathan Gill, the former leader of Reform UK in Wales and a longstanding Farage ally, was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison last year after admitting eight counts of bribery.
Gill accepted money to make pro-Russian statements while serving as an MEP, including speeches in the European Parliament and appearances on Ukrainian television. The offences took place before he became Reform’s leader in Wales, but while he was part of the UKIP and Brexit Party political operation built around Farage.
The judge described the offending as sophisticated and the harm it caused as profound.
Gill’s conviction doesn’t prove anything about Farage or Reform’s current finances. But coming alongside the questions about Cottrell, unexplained overseas money and Rycroft’s warnings about foreign influence in British politics, it makes those questions rather harder to dismiss.
Reform’s wider problem
And Farage’s problems don’t end with political donations.
Labour is recovering in the polls under Andy Burnham, while the Conservatives have at least stopped their free fall under Kemi Badenoch. Reform is also being challenged from further to the right by movements making even more extreme demands on immigration and citizenship.
Reform once prospered by outbidding the Conservatives on immigration. Now it faces the same problem from its own right, with parties openly advocating “remigration” — the removal of established residents to make Britain more ethnically homogeneous. There is an older and less euphemistic term for that: ethnic cleansing.
Recent announcements about sending prisoners to El Salvador or deploying the Royal Navy against small boats look increasingly like attempts to change the subject and rally Reform’s core vote.
Both proposals have a fairly fundamental problem: Reform is claiming powers it does not have.
Operation Fortress proposes using the Royal Navy and Royal Marines to intercept small boats and return them to France or Belgium. Britain cannot simply send warships into French or Belgian territorial waters without permission, compel either country to accept the boats, or order the Navy to disregard its obligations under international maritime law.
Then there is El Salvador.
Reform isn’t merely saying that it would negotiate an agreement with El Salvador if it eventually formed a government. Farage says talks have already begun, and Reform plans to send a delegation led by Lee Anderson to continue them.
There is nothing unlawful about opposition politicians visiting a foreign country or discussing what they might do if they came to power. But negotiating and concluding international agreements on behalf of the United Kingdom is a power of the British government, exercised by ministers under the royal prerogative. Reform is not the British government and has no authority to exercise that power.
These aren’t obscure technical difficulties which might be ironed out once somebody gets into Whitehall. They concern powers which Reform simply does not possess.
But perhaps implementation isn’t really the point.
Both announcements put immigration back on the front pages, change the subject from Farage’s financial problems and give Reform supporters something much more comfortable to talk about.
But none of this means he is going to lose Clacton. But he has managed to turn public attention to his mounting problems, none of which will go away if he is returned to Parliament.
Why does Nigel Farage keep winning in Clacton?
Despite his long history of electoral failure, Farage has a singular political talent.
He makes people feel important. He tells them that their worries and anxieties are reasonable and well founded. He has built a political movement from grievances, resentments and the feeling that somebody else is getting something you aren’t.
So why did that finally work in Clacton when Farage had failed so many times elsewhere?
Part of the answer was timing.
The Conservative Party imploded after 14 years in government. Labour won a huge parliamentary majority without attracting anything close to a majority of the electorate. Britain’s fragmented party system suddenly allowed parties which previously struggled to win Westminster seats to break through.
But there was also something about the places where Reform succeeded.
A string of struggling seaside and coastal communities swung heavily towards the party. Reform won Clacton, Great Yarmouth and Boston and Skegness.
Travelling through these towns, three things struck me about the places where Reform was succeeding.
They tended to have fewer people in work, to be geographically isolated — often quite literally at the end of the line — and to have lost many of the institutions which once held communities together.
Clacton has all three.
A town which has grown old
The first thing you notice in Clacton is its age.
The median age is around 50, ten years older than the England average. Almost 30% of the population is over 65. This matters when we look at one of the most extraordinary statistics about the town.
More than half of Clacton’s adult population — 53% — is economically inactive, compared with 39.1% across England.
That doesn’t mean half of Clacton is unemployed. Economically inactive means someone isn’t working and isn’t actively looking for work. It includes pensioners, students, carers and people unable to work because of long-term sickness. Clacton has an unusually large retired population, which explains a substantial part of the difference.
But it doesn’t explain all of it.
Even if we look only at people of working age, Clacton’s employment rate is 63.5%, compared with 71% across England. There are fewer jobs available as well. Clacton has only 0.53 jobs for every working-age resident, compared with 0.77 nationally.
This isn’t simply a town with lots of pensioners. It is a town where fewer working-age people work and where there are fewer jobs for them to do.
End of the line
Clacton is also quite literally at the end of the line. The railway stops here. It is a long way from a motorway and separated from the more prosperous economy of the South East by geography as much as distance. Like many British seaside towns, Clacton grew around an industry which has largely disappeared.
The heavy industry which supplied visitors for wakes week and works fortnight closed down. At the same time cheap package holidays destroyed much of the traditional British seaside holiday business. Tourism survived, but the economy built around weeks spent in seaside hotels was replaced by day trips, retirement and lower-paid service-sector employment.
You can see the consequences in the town.
Low skills and low productivity
Clacton has a serious skills problem. Among working-age adults, 19.1% have no qualifications at all, compared with 12.4% across England.
At the other end of the scale, only 37.4% have Level 3 qualifications or above — roughly A-level standard and upwards — compared with 56.6% nationally.
That feeds directly into the kind of economy a town can sustain. The latest comparable official figures put Gross Value Added per filled job in Clacton at £41,333, compared with £62,751 across England. In simple terms the jobs that Clacton does have are low productivity, not surprising given the low levels of educational attainment.
In other words, each job in Clacton generates, on average, about 34% less economic value than the average English job. That is a huge gap.
It also creates a vicious circle. A town with relatively few highly qualified workers struggles to attract high-productivity businesses. Without those businesses there are fewer skilled, well-paid jobs. And without those jobs, younger and better-qualified people have another reason to leave.
The result isn’t a town without work. It is a town with too little work, and too much of the work it does have is low value, low productivity.
The disappearance of civic society
The third characteristic is harder to measure.These are places where many of the institutions which once bound people together have weakened or disappeared.
Factories and trade unions went first. Working men’s clubs closed. Local newspapers shrank. Shops disappeared from high streets. Community organisations struggled for members. Rhere are fewer of the institutions which prosperous places take for granted: universities, theatres, galleries, large employers and professional organisations.
That matters because these institutions don’t simply provide jobs or entertainment. They provide places where people meet other people. When they disappear, something else fills the space.
Increasingly, that something is the internet.
People no longer necessarily understand what is happening to their community through the people and institutions around them. They understand it through Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and X.
And that brings us to perhaps the strangest thing about Clacton.
Where are all the immigrants?
Clacton is overwhelmingly white. Around 96% of the population is white. Asian people make up only around 1.5% of the population and Black people less than 1%.
It is difficult to reconcile the Clacton you actually walk around with the Clacton which exists in its politics.
This is an ageing town with unusually high economic inactivity. It has fewer jobs, lower educational attainment and substantially lower productivity than England as a whole.These are real problems.
But immigration has become one of the defining explanations offered for them.
The fear of being overwhelmed by foreigners isn’t primarily a response to what people in Clacton encounter when they walk down their own street. There simply aren’t very many foreigners there.
Instead, people see immigration happening somewhere else.
They see London. They see asylum hotels. They see small boats crossing the Channel. They see videos selected for them by algorithms designed to keep them watching. That distinction is important.
Farage didn’t invent Clacton’s decline. The ageing population is real. The shortage of good jobs is real. The low levels of educational attainment are real. The low productivity is real.
His particular political talent has been to take those genuine anxieties and give people an explanation for them:
Immigration.
The decline of Clacton is real and palpable. The explanation that Nigel Farage offers is not.
This might be enough to place Farage ahead of Count Binface, and the army of weirdoes on the ballot sheet. But it’s not goig to make a difference to the long term future of Clacton, or any of the other towns that have turned to Reform
https://www.reformparty.uk/operation-fortress.pdf
https://www.ft.com/content/b74cbc54-c6ae-4f4a-9350-3dab1f2758d0?syn-25a6b1a6=1
To me it seems clear that the less likely it is that people have actual solutions to their problems, the more likely it is that they will seek to console themselves with scapegoats.
Yes, it’s a classic mental process. Can I fix the problem? Can I blame someone else?