The Road To Clacton Pier
Almost 90 years after "The Road to Wigan Pier", Clacton is where we should look
In the 1930s, George Orwell wrote a book about the Northern British working classes called "The Road to Wigan Pier". The title was somewhat of an in joke because by the time he wrote it
Alas! Wigan Pier had been demolished, and even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain.
Clacton Pier, however, remains and is popular with the families who visit.
A certain N Farage and assorted journalists and other hangers on were there a week or so ago to prove it and it looked very spiffy in the June sunshine. I, personally, haven’t been on it for years, though I run to it/past it every time I come back to England and I have also been to the nearby Walton Pier (about 6 1/2 miles away as the seagull flies or the runner runs). In fact I often do what I call the Pier to Pier half marathon where I start in the middle(ish) and run first to one then back all the way to the other and then return to the start. I mention this not to boast at my fitness so much as to try and show that I have a certain knowledge of the area.
Anyway, it would do politicians and journalists to do an Orwell like thing and spend some time in the vicinity of Clacton Pier (and the rest of the Clacton constituency for that matter). There’s a fair argument to make that Clacton is a potential future for most of the UK. That’s because if the UK doesn’t solve the fertility crisis everywhere will be just as lacking in young compared to old retirees, so it would be worth seeing what works, what doesn’t and why.
Matt Godwin noted recently that the Tory grandees look down on Clacton1 and he claims (correctly I think) that the snobbery against Clacton is long standing. He points to this sneering Matthew Parris Op Ed from a decade ago in the Wapping Liar.
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.
and
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.
Now it is true that milking resentments is probably an unhealthy strategy even if it works politically, but it would be better to consider how to fix the discontent that leads to those resentments.
So.
Clacton. And environs.
Two miles from Clacton Pier in the other direction from Walton is Jaywick which, along with Blackpool in the North West, has the distinction of being the most deprived place in the UK for the entire time the Tories have been in power and probably quite some time before that. Clacton as a whole is right up there in the deprivation stakes, but Jaywick is the winner.
If you go to Jaywick it doesn’t look that bad. It’s kind of run down, but it’s a reasonably genteel working class sort of poverty. The BBC had a video interviewing some locals which talks about “a wealth of community” and I’d say that is basically correct. And you don’t have to take me at my word, Google streetview has driven there fairly recently so you can see what it looked like a year ago. The houses are relatively small, some of the cars are old, and pretty much the whole place would benefit from a coat of paint and a more general replacement of rotting wood fences etc. but compared to the grinding poverty described in the Road to Wigan Pier it’s luxury (cue 4 Yorkshireman).
Tim Worstall quotes Orwell as he points this out2
In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.
Every house in Jaywick has a bathroom, a fridge, a washing machine and a TV (something that Orwell had no idea of) and (almost?) all houses have a heating system far beyond what Orwell would have expected. I expect most have cars (or had them, I expect some have voluntarily gove them up due to age). Almost all residents have cell phones (I’d guess penetration is close to 100%). While we can complain about the bureaucratic monstrosity that is the NHS, everyone in Jaywick has a GP and can be prescribed drugs to help them. People in Jaywick may have little to no disposable income once the basics of food, heat and housing are met, but they aren’t starving or shivering in the winter - though if Net Zero continues unmodified that may not remain the case. Yes Jaywick is poor compared to the rest of Britain, or Western Europe in general but compared to the developing world or even Eastern European countries like Romania or Albania (or Ukraine) Jaywick is comfortable.
Which leads us to the immigration issue
You go from Clacton to Jaywick on the coastal route passing not one, not two but three Martello towers, built a couple of centuries ago to protect against invasion from the French. At various spots on the coast and a little inland (more that I recall in the Walton direction than the Jaywick one) there are 1930s era concrete pillboxes built to protect against invasion by the Nazis.
Neither of them, nor the Coastguard radar tower halfway to Frinton, has done anything to stop the invasion of the asylum seekers and other immigrants. This invasion is something that has not directly affected Clacton much. Yes there are a few Indian and other ethnic restaurants, many corner shops and the like are run by the same and there may be some Eastern Europeans in the hospitality and building trades, but the mass settlement of immigrants has not happened. However there have certainly been indirect effects. The mainly retired residents of Clacton and the other coastal towns have children and grand children who are competing for housing, jobs and so on with the immigrants and perceive that they are at the back of the line.
I’m not sure that the people in this corner of Essex are anti-immigrant specifically (or racist or Islamophobic… though their jokes can be very very dark and may specifically reference the way Islamic believers seem to spontaneously detonate) but I am quite sure they object to the perception that immigrants go to the front of the line for government services and how any criticism of immigration policies is branded as racist/little Englander nationalist. People here fly the cross of St George because they are proud to be English. They used to fly the Union Jack and still do a bit, but the popularity of that has waned with the pandering to Scottish nationalism.
When Farage said that many Islamic immigrants didn’t understand British values, he was speaking for these people and they agree with him. It’s not just the cricket test (after all many Pakistanis are mad about cricket) more its the toleration for others. They might (probably do) tell terrible jokes about the Jews and gas ovens, but they aren’t anti-semitic and they don’t want the Jews to be expelled or anything. That may be less true now given the pro-Hamass brainwashing propaganda of the BBC but I’m pretty sure it holds.
The other recent Farage jab about Rishi Sunak “not understanding our culture” will also resonate with the voters of Clacton. Sunak is not, IMHO, a bad man, however he exemplifies the “anywhere” culture of the transnational elite. And how can he not? he worked for Goldman Sachs in New York, still has a green card apparently, and is married to the heiress of a huge Indian technology fortune who, for tax reasons, is officially not domiciled in the UK. That explains why he consciously chose to skip most of the D-Day memorial and why he has a tin ear regarding things like National Service. Most of the current Uniparty leadership is the same. They would propose the same policies whether they governed in London, Brussels or Paris. They agree with the US Deep State about the nastiness of Donald Trump and so on. Boris managed to make it look like he was more sympathetic and then he managed to blow it all by lying repeatedly and continuously instead of taking it on the chin and apologizing. The BBC has an item on a survey that says that most voters don’t trust politicians.
Trust and confidence in the UK’s politics and election system has never been worse, according to analysis by the electoral expert, Sir John Curtice.
His report for the National Centre for Social Research finds record numbers of voters saying they “almost never” trust governments to put country before party or politicians to tell the truth when in a tight corner.
“The public is as doubtful as it has ever been about the trustworthiness and efficacy of the country’s system of government and the people who comprise it,” Sir John says.
The report suggests disillusionment over Brexit among leave voters is one of the main reasons for the collapse in trust. […]
The report, entitled ‘Damaged Politics’, finds 45% of voters would “almost never” trust the government to put country before party - the highest proportion ever.
Almost six in ten (58%) would “almost never” trust politicians to tell the truth when in a tight corner and eight out of ten voters (79%) say Britain’s system of governance needs to be improved “quite a lot” or “a great deal”.
That undoubtedly applies to people in Clacton.
Bluntly today’s politicians have earned their lack of trust and none of the political parties other than Farage’s Reform show any sympathy for the costs imposed on everyone to satisfy the virtue signalling of the leaders. In particular Net Zero.
Net Zero
If you look out beyond Clacton Pier you can see the enormous Gunfleet Sands wind farms, and often (as in the picture below), that huge wind farm is essentially stationary, rusting away and generating precisely 0 kWh of electricity
Moreover the UK’s political parties have all signed up to not just massive amounts of wind power (and solar in a country 2/3rds of the way to the Artic that gets an average of under 2 hours of sunshine a day in the whole of December and January), but to phasing out natural gas cooking and heating, fossil fuel cars and so on. The costs for people like Clacton’s pensioners to replace their existing devices with new electric ones are ignored but they will cause these people to see their standard of living drop. In fact it already has and the ban on fracking means that the UK will remain dependent on foreign oil and gas for ever.
Turning one’s back on Clacton, as Matthew Parris suggested, implies turning one’s back on the poor who have no honest advocates in the current system, apart perhaps from Farage. The poor need an advocate. It used to be the Labour party but they gentrified like the Democrats in the US. It could have been Boris but his new wife nobbled him on green idiocy. Turning one’s back on the poor means leaving them to decline; there’s no logical reason why they should not instead have ways to lift themselves into a better richer future the way their parents and grand parents did in the second half of the twentieth century. Someone, a think tank perhaps, ought to look and see why the poor are struggling. Net Zero is certainly part of it, immigration reducing wages and increasing housing costs another, but there’s probably more. Almost certainly most of the problems are being caused by government programs, probably government programs designed to alleviate hardship and poverty.
The pier as metaphor
The Spectator has a decent description of Clacton Pier (archive). As I said up top I haven’t been on it for years but I don’t think it has changed much beyond periodic refreshes of the attractions. Good wholesome fun for all the family and terribly terribly working class probably sums it up. That’s possibly a metaphor for Britain, especially when you compare it to what you see when you go underneath.
There’s a fair amount you can learn from the undersides of the pier so here’s a picture of the underneath of Walton Pier (can’t find one of Clacton)
The first and most obvious thing is how a pier is like a swan, graceful on top, not so elegant underneath. The North Sea is a harsh environment and the pillars that support the pier show that, there’s seaweed, rust, rot, barnacles and the stumps of previous pillars that have been replaced.
Visitors to the pier don’t see any of that, they just see the nicely painted top. In much the same way visitors to and observers of Britain see the shiny bits of London or Cambridge. They don’t see the pilings of Jaywick or Blackpool or Liverpool. But if the pilings fail because they aren’t properly cared for the whole pier will collapse into the sea.
The second thing about the pier is that it is designed for children and families. There aren’t that many things in the modern world that are but we need more of them. We also need more things that break us away from the glowing rectangles of screens. Clacton Pier isn’t perfect at that, as the slot machines and other video games show, but at least when you play them you are out of the house and breathing fresh sea air.
Thirdly the amusements offered are mostly fairly simple. This isn’t Disneyworld with exotic robotic animations bringing to life favorite movies. It’s dodgem cars and carousels and those teach the children who ride them a fair amount more about using ones mind to extend the imagination and/or controlling actual physical moving objects. Relatedly this is a pretty safe place, as is the beach around the pier. Children can mature better in such an environment where they can explore without the need for close (or any) parental supervision. Robert F Graboyes has a substack note where he observes that over the last few decades the range that children roam unsupervised has dropped dramatically. The seaside is a good place for parents to allow their offspring more freedom from supervision and my observation of families all along the sea front from Jaywick to Walton is that they often do. Kids are given the money to go buy their own ice-creams. Parents sit in the cafe while their children play pickup games of cricket or footy with other families they met five minutes earlier. And so on. This was what we did when I was growing up, in fact because my grandmother had a house a few hundred yards from the beach I was allowed to go from home to beach on my own with my bucket and spade. The good news is that the East Essex seaside retains a good deal of that.
Don’t Turn From Clacton
In short we need more Clacton Piers and more economic activity in places like Clacton. We need to figure out how to improve or at least not reduce the living standards of the residents and we need to figure out how to get more families to come there and enjoy the sun, the sand and the fish and chips. Turning our back on Clacton will lead to poor outcomes for the whole country but giving it a bit of love and attention could solve all sorts of problems.
Yeah, when I read that quote about cheer, and winning Cambridge, I perhaps do not read it the way intended.
I'm probably too prone to reading a university and its in group as believing it-selves the whole of mankind. The optimism of an academic can be the optimism of someone who has collected rents from the rest of the economy, and has no direct stake in how well that economy is actually working, up until it actually fails. If the rents are steady or improving, the academic may be happy, regardless.
In theory, economists study money, engineers study energy, and agronomists study food. These are fundamental elements of theoretically predicting how well everyone else is doing. In practice, governments may simply be paying academic economists, engineers, and agronomists to only study what the governments wish to have talked about.
Scholars who want governments and scholars overseas to treat with them may only have one set of deals they prefer to think about.
Locals may be quite a bit interested in how their neighbors, government bureaucrats, and so forth deal with them.
Theory matters, but it is also not food, shelter, security, and so forth.
Delusional insular nihilism, would not be real optimism.
Someone who tests theory, and can list items that need work, or have costs or pain attached, might be more optimistic in reality.
Eloquent and insightful - much appreciated.