The country is slipping away. The whole place, slowly, but London suddenly, blinding glass slabs becoming East End blocks, ‘SPLENDID NEW APARTMENTS!’ turning to marshland, to golf clubs, to small towns and a train station, Laindon, Essex, which has a nice 4×4 Porsche parked outside. Decline is the mood of Britain, and I was going to Essex to talk to people about it. Any political energy left in this country is behind Reform, and lately Nigel Farage has been using a new label for his people. ‘We are the party of workers, but also the party of entrepreneurs,’ he said recently. Did he mean the two simultaneously? The appeal to rich and poor and the people done good… Something in that mix sounded like an evocation of Essex.
At a car boot sale in Dunton, near Laindon, Barry has just sold a piece of Hitler-themed merchandise, a piggy bank where the coins go in the Führer’s mouth. The market has been open since 5:30 a.m., and by midday it is emptying and only the bad stuff is left. A mad wind is running about the place. A guy near Barry is having no luck selling a selection of car doors and headlights, and others are trying to shift muddy power tools and disposable vapes.
A sign at Dunton’s entrance:
NO COUNTERFEIT GOODS. NO DISPOSABLE VAPES. NO ALCOHOL. NO POWER TOOLS.
‘Do you want a bag?’ Barry says to the young buyer of the Hitler head. ‘I wouldn’t walk around with it. The ol’ Jewish people aren’t that keen on him!’
Barry wears an England football cap and a white shirt, mostly unbuttoned. Big silver cross on a chain around his neck.
‘I ain’t done this all my life,’ he tells me. ‘I worked for British Gas. A high-powered job. People always ringing me. “Do this, do that. Get this, get that.” They moved to Leeds, British Gas, and I didn’t want to go to Leeds, so I took the money and retired. And you get bored at home, don’t you, so I got this stall down in Romford and I loved it. I done that for 25 years but it got too much. I had to employ people and get up at three in the morning and got home at seven at night. You make money. But money’s not everything, is it?’
Barry retired again, got bored again, and started selling old coins, war medals, canvas prints of Winston Churchill and Hilter piggy banks at Dunton. Memories of England old. He used to live in Barking, in east London, but now he’s in Leigh-on-Sea, west of Southend. He is also a Labour voter. Keir Starmer is doing – and he said this sincerely – ‘an absolutely fantastic job’.
Barry tells me you can’t beat life in Southend. ‘You’ve got two lovely theatres. You’ve got Cliffs Pavilion and this other one. And every three or four weeks we go and we see the bootleg Beatles, Elvis and all that sort of thing. It’s great, you know? Miles better than where I used to live in Barking. I mean, I’m not racist at all, but in Barking there is more… How can I put it? Foreigners. Let’s say that. More foreigners than English people. It’s turning into a ghetto. I mean, I love foreigners myself.’
In moving from Barking to Leigh-on-Sea, Barry had made the same journey as those Londoners who left the East End around a hundred years before him, some after their city industrialised and many after the two world wars, who pushed their lives along the north bank of the River Thames and through rejected marshlands, at once frontiersmen and invaders, to settle on England’s coast.
Business at Dunton isn’t what it used to be, and one woman manning a stall with her husband says it’s because immigrants don’t buy the same things as British people. ‘Even the Poles would spend money,’ she says. (She would rather I didn’t use her name.) ‘But this lot only want old trainers or frying pans. The whole country now, no one is spending anymore. We were doing alright a few years ago.’
‘We feel like we’re being discriminated against. Especially when you see a lady put in prison for what she put online. Then you see other people being let out.’
She is a reluctant Reform voter. ‘We don’t know if they’ll be any different, but they’re all we’ve got. Our last chance.’ No one wants to know what follows the last chance. John is selling DVDs at another stall and worries about violence. ‘If this were happening in France there would be riots,’ he says, a load of feeling and pain behind the word ‘this’.
It is a short drive from the car boot sale to Ingatestone Hall, where local collectors of classic MG cars in boat shoes and polos and blouses and pink three-quarter-length trousers have driven their vehicles to a meadow for a lovely picnic and a raffle. There must be around 50 cars parked up. Lots of perfectly kept Roadsters and Minis.
Ingatestone Hall is in the constituency of Brentwood and Ongar. Thirty per cent of homes have four bedrooms or more, and the Conservatives won the seat with a 6,000 majority last year. Today, Electoral Calculus gives Reform a 79 per cent chance of winning the seat at the next election.
I meet Jim, who started his career as an engineer and ended it in facilities management. He’s done well for himself and is spending his day – as is every 66-year-old man’s right – hidden from his family. He sits in a camping chair in sunglasses and a cap. A happy man next to his red 1972 MGB GT.
Business at Dunton isn’t what it used to be
‘I don’t think Reform are going to be any different to anyone else,’ Jim says. ’But my son is inclined to believe Farage’s promises. He believes he should have more for his money than he’s getting.’
‘It does strike me as strange that you come back off your holidays and you queue at Gatwick for half an hour, and someone can just get on a rubber boat and just come over. I do agree with people’s human rights. I just think you’ve got to speed it all up. I spoke to someone recently, and they said in the second world war we prevented the Germans, who were a force to be reckoned with, from entering the country. But a few people on rubber boats? I mean, that’s frustrating.’
I speak to a lady with a tote bag from L’association Automobile et Patrimoine du Pays de Fougères, a classic car association which holds an annual rally down western France. She says she might vote Reform.
At the Chelmsford City Racecourse, a 30-minute drive from the MG rally, I meet Peter. Today is supposed to be a ‘family fun day’ at the track, but he has left the wife and kids at home and brought the Racing Post. We sit on a picnic bench and watch the event. A horse owned by Sir Alex Ferguson wins. Kids in suits and dresses play. People down Pimm’s. Peter tells me he is on gardening leave from the Co-op.
He says he lives not far away, in Shalford. ‘It’s really nice,’ he says. ‘We go into Finchingfield and Saffron Walden, which are nice. Braintree is not too bad. It’s okay.’
‘You look here today. I worked in London. This is nothing like London. This is nothing like London. This is… This is… This is what the people of Essex want.’ Everything to change, and nothing.
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