The 10th anniversary of Brexit is a few months away. Between now and then there are local elections, where Reform—formerly the Brexit Party—hope to make significant gains.
I’ve spent the last few weeks travelling up and down England’s east coast, photographing and visiting places where Reform has already won, and places where it hopes to. This is the start of a longer series.
The question I kept coming back to was a simple one:
What makes a place vote Reform?
Work, or the absence of it
The first thing you notice is work.
Places where most working-age adults are in work tend not to vote Reform. They vote Labour, sometimes Lib Dem, occasionally Green. Places where a large share of adults are not working—retired, long-term sick, or otherwise economically inactive—tend to vote Conservative or Reform.
Clacton sits firmly in the second category.
The town is significantly older than the national average. Roughly a third of residents are over 65, compared to around a fifth across England. Economic inactivity is high, driven by retirement and ill health rather than unemployment in the narrow sense. The result is a place where there are simply fewer people in work relative to the total adult population.
That matters.
It shapes how people see the economy, the state, and each other. Places with lots of workers tend to be net contributors through taxation. Places with fewer workers tend to rely more heavily on pensions, benefits and public spending. That creates a very different set of instincts.
In one, immigration looks like labour supply. In the other, it looks like competition for resources.
You can dress that up in more sophisticated language, but the underlying dynamic is not complicated.
Dependency and resentment
Once you see that split, other things fall into place.
Clacton is heavily dependent on transfer payments from central government. That’s not a moral judgement, it’s just arithmetic. Fewer workers, more retirees, more people out of the labour market through ill health.
In that context, it becomes easier to see why immigration is often framed as a zero-sum game. If you believe the money is finite, then anyone new is taking something that might otherwise have gone to you.
Whether that belief is accurate is almost beside the point. It is coherent within the lived experience of the place.
And once that frame is in place, it becomes very easy for politics to turn it into grievance.
Civil society, or lack of it
The second factor is less discussed but just as important: civic life.
Places with universities, theatres, galleries and a functioning public realm tend not to vote Reform. Places without them often do.
This is partly about economics—those places are usually richer and have more people in work—but not entirely. Cultural institutions widen horizons. They make other ways of living imaginable. They create shared public space.
Clacton has very little of that.
There is no real public realm to speak of. No meaningful cultural infrastructure. Very few spaces where strangers mix, or where people encounter ideas from outside their immediate world.
That absence matters. It narrows things. It makes places more insular, more suspicious of outsiders, and less open to change.
Clacton was the most hostile place towards a camera I have experienced. Some of that is practical—if you are claiming disability benefits, being photographed doing everyday activities carries a perceived risk. But it was more than that. There was a general suspicion, a sense that outsiders were not welcome.
Not just immigrants. Outsiders, full stop.
End of the line
The third factor is geography.
Reform does best in what you might call end-of-the-line towns. Places that are not on the way to anywhere else. Places people do not pass through. Places where you do not meet many strangers unless they come deliberately.
Clacton fits that pattern.
Once you are there, you are there. It is not a place you encounter by accident. That matters more than it sounds. Places with constant movement—cities, transport hubs, university towns—are constantly being refreshed by new people and ideas. End-of-the-line towns are not.
They turn inward.
The mood
Put those things together—age, inactivity, dependency, lack of civic life, geographical isolation—and you get a particular kind of political mood.
It is not especially ideological. It is not even especially coherent. But it is powerful.
Brexit is held onto in the way older societies once held onto older certainties. Questioning it is treated less as disagreement and more as heresy.
That same instinct now attaches itself to Reform.
The people who channel it
Nigel Farage’s talent is not policy. It is the ability to recognise grievance and give it a voice.
He does not need to solve anything. He needs only to identify the feeling and amplify it.
That works particularly well in places like Clacton, where there is a large, ready-made constituency of resentment.
It is worth noting that Farage himself does not live in Clacton, but nearby in Frinton-on-Sea. That distance—social as much as geographic—is not unusual.
There is a long tradition in British politics of figures from privileged backgrounds positioning themselves as tribunes of the “left behind”. What they are really good at is translating diffuse dissatisfaction into something that looks like a political programme.
The harder truth
There is a more uncomfortable reality behind all of this.
The parts of the country that generate the most tax revenue—large cities, diverse and economically active—are not the places voting for Reform. The places that depend most heavily on that revenue often are.
That creates a tension which no slogan really resolves.
In Clacton, as in many similar towns, the economy does not generate enough activity to sustain itself. It relies on money flowing in from elsewhere. That is not unique, but it is more pronounced here than in most places.
And it is not going to change quickly.
Nigel
I did try to catch Nigel Farage in Clacton, but seemingly he is rarely there, and even a beer couldn’t tempt him out.
Reform’s economics polices are Liz Truss but larger. Tax cuts, spending cuts, benefit cuts. For Clacton that is an economic catastrophe, but so few people here are engaged economically that arguments about economics don’t land.
Clacton is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.
Older, less healthy, less economically active, culturally thinner, geographically peripheral.
People who live there feel that mainstream politicians have failed them, but in all honesty there is nothing that can be done. The town is dependent on subsidies from other parts of the country and those funds are always going to be limited. Anger and resentment won’t change that.
Far-right politics has always preyed on people mourning a lost way of life.
The rise of fascism in interwar Europe was fuelled by collapsing living standards in (increasingly overpopulated) rural agrarian Christian monocultures. And the European countries then most resistant to fascism were the constitutional monarchies adjoining the North Sea, for a range of reasons:
* They suffered less rural overpopulation because they were privileged by the US’s explicitly racist post-1924 immigration policy. (Likewise the abolition of the “White Australia” policy was an underrated reason why UK unemployment was so bad in the early Thatcher years.)
* They generally had more non-agricultural rural employment in the form of mining, fishing or forestry.
* The Nordic countries and the Netherlands had been spared the horrors of World War I, while the UK and Belgium were amongst the most urbanized countries in Europe and the UK had also been accepting of religious diversity for a long time.
While the UK was largely resistant to the original form of fascism, it’s a lot more vulnerable to today’s version because it has so many places with no economic function: pit villages in a post-coal age, seaside towns ruined by cheap flights to the Med, and Victorian industrial towns designed for the needs of the Age of Steam and uncompetitive in an electrically-powered world.