Tories should turn their backs on Clacton

 

The seaside town represents a Britain that’s going nowhere. The future belongs to places with more ambition and drive

Matthew Parris

Saturday September 06 2014, 1.01am, The Times

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At Stratford railway station in East London they’re a bit sheepish about the line to Clacton-on-Sea. Directed to platform 10a, the intending passenger easily finds platform 10; but of 10a there is no trace. It transpires that 10a is elsewhere, down a staircase at the far end of the platform. On 10a there are no train indicators and no staff. But you may just spot a “Clacton” sign on the train as it pulls in.

By the time you get to Clacton, most passengers have fled at intermediate stops. You walk almost alone through a well-kept station built for busier times, past a tidy canteen with a good range of meat pies at £1.50, and past a welcome-to-Clacton artwork constructed sweetly of glazed tiles picturing the resort. A red plastic litter-bin is prominent in the composition.

This is not a dirty or un-self-respecting town. Evidence of local pride and municipal effort is everywhere. The pier and the Princes Theatre struggle gamely on. On September 14 they welcome Ken Dodd and his Diamond Anniversary Happiness Show; later, Nights on Broadway with a group called the Bee Gees Story.

I met nothing but helpfulness there. Clacton-on-Sea is a friendly resort trying not to die, inhabited by friendly people trying not to die. Clacton is the constituency in England and Wales with the highest proportion of retired residents, almost the lowest proportion of residents aged 25-44 and the highest proportion of single elderly person households.

These are not wealthy retired professionals (almost 40 per cent of residents have no qualifications at all) and if you associate tattoos with youth, Clacton will surprise you. Father Time is busy with his scythe here: I counted 19 estate agents on Station Road, and you can get a three-bedroom detached bungalow for £94,995.

Only in Asmara after Eritrea’s bloody war have I encountered a greater proportion of citizens on crutches or in wheelchairs.

Shops tell you so much. Though at Burton’s they are offering “Free shoes when you buy a suit! (from £99)”, Lycra is the textile of choice and I saw not a single woman under 70 in a skirt, still less a dress. I was able to stock up on reading glasses at £1.99, and in Holland & Barrett the “Serious Mass Muscle Gainer” came in bucket-sized black plastic tubs at the checkout for the impulse purchaser. There are ten tattoo parlours and no Waterstones.

Enough. Don’t buy the too-easy media picture of a rancid or untended town, or of bitter people; but understand that Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere. Its voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.

So of course Ukip will do well in the by-election. Pollsters say they’ll win easily, though I found the Tories (busily repainting their constituency office) in defiant mood, and I do wonder if Douglas Carswell’s self-portrait as Man of Honour and Genius will entirely survive the campaign.

My aim, though, is not to deny Ukip its likelihood of victory. They make a good fit for Clacton. Somebody has to represent the static caravans and holiday villages, and the people and places that for no fault of their own are not getting where a 21st-century Britain needs to be going.

Nor do I deny that we Conservatives, if we tried hard enough, could get some of these voters back. There are many in a place like this who might be attracted again to the Tories by a noisy display of hostility towards immigration-and-Europe, political correctness and health-and-safety: hostility to a Britain that has forgotten the joys of Ken Dodd, meat pies, smoking in pubs and the Bee Gees.

No, my aim is to ask this: is that where the Conservative party wants to be? Is it where the Tories need to be if they’re to gather momentum in this century, rather than slowly lose it? Or do we need to be with the Britain that has its career prospects ahead and not behind, that can admire immigrants and want them with us, that doesn’t want to spend its days buying scratchcards and its evenings smoking in pubs, that’s amazed at all the fuss about whether gays should marry, that travels in Europe and would hesitate to let those links go? I am not arguing that we should be careless of the needs of struggling people and places such as Clacton. But I am arguing — if I am honest — that we should be careless of their opinions.

A besetting sin of democratic politics is that party politicians, like religious evangelists, must seek clients. The weak, the unlucky, the resentful, the fearful, the old and the poor will always be the easiest to enlist as clients, for they have nowhere else to go but into the arms of politicians promising them sympathy.

It’s harder for politicians and priests to enlist successful people, busy people, people who want to go places, because these people are less likely to be looking for the crutches — practical or moral — that politics or religion can offer. So, often without meaning to, a political party seeking not only votes but self-affirmation is drawn towards a town called Hopeless.

This is the terrible, I would say fatal, mistake that the left made in the 20th century with Christian Socialism. Marxian Socialism is about success, not failure, and elevates achievement, not suffering. But the British left lost its way and ended up with the politics of victimhood, subsidy and the soup kitchen.

When Tory canvassers describe as “good areas” the streets where support is strong, they mean “good” in both its senses. But for Labour canvassers their good areas are the bad areas. Ukip, if it prospers, will find the same. More and more, their hopes will lie in Lycra not tweed.

Some of the Tory right want to drag the Conservative party the same way: to invest our political future in the disappointed, the angry, the nostalgic and the fearful. This is not a crazy strategy, because the market in pessimism is easy to capture, and easier to hold on to than the market in optimism; there will always be millions of pessimists.

But the truth from which the right hides is this: you cannot have both. You cannot look like a party for the resentful and still appeal to the cheerful. If you want to win Cambridge you may have to let go of Clacton.

From the train leaving Stratford at platform 10a, you can see Canary Wharf, humming with a sense of the possible. You must turn your back on that if you want to go to Clacton. I don’t, and the Tories shouldn’t.