'What can God do 4 Jaywick?' is pinned to the church notice board in Clacton's neighbouring town. 'Probably very little' answers Pat, Jaywick forum activist, a retired paediatric nurse, and foster mother to countless children. The land that is now the town was bought in 1928 by an entrepreneurial cavalier for £7500, and sold in individual plots for £50 a pop. Before that it was a swamp. East End builders bought the plots and built holiday homes out of disused Pullman carriages and lashings of asbestos. The result is a rash of uniform bungalows as flimsy as cardboard boxes. Jaywick is not pretty, and the sun - when it shines, does little in the way of remedial work. After the devastation of the war, these holidaymakers moved to Jaywick permanently, and many still live there today. 'Creaking along' is the standard response to 'how are you?' to which Douglas Carswell replies, 'a bit like my old party.'
Jaywick has a distinctive whiff of soggy fish and limp chips. Drugs are prevalent, and crime is high, though much of it goes under the radar; you don't report a crime if you don't want your house bashed in, Pat tells me. Many of the residents are tugged along the gravel tracks by muzzled pit bull terriers. Matthew Parris might not be surprised to hear that like Clacton, Jaywick has no Waterstone's. However it does have a library that a group of residents, spearheaded by the late Kath Palmer, successfully campaigned to keep open. It is kept afloat by fundraising and volunteers who run a 'knit and natter' and a writing group among other community activities.
Pat and I sit in her conservatory. She is tall and tough with a wheezy laugh; a woman for whom Carswell claims to have 'far too much respect to argue with'. Pat doesn't buy it, 'he won't argue with me because he knows I'll give him merry hell', she says. Keith, Pat's 'old man', a retired engineer, comes in from the garden with the washing and a black tomato. 'Mist is coming in from the sea', he says. We talk for a couple of hours, mostly about Carswell and Jaywick. 'For the first time ever', Pat would have voted conservative if Carswell had stayed. They've had a lot to do with each other over the past few years, and Pat thinks he's 'not a bad bloke.' But she will not vote Ukip, mainly because of their EU policies. The majority of the restaurants and shops in Jaywick are run by hardworking foreigners; her own Cypriot uncle is one such. These immigrants are currently the main employers in a town where employment is almost impossible to come by.
Immigration policy is only one of a few Ukip standpoints that is unattractive to Jaywick's residents. It is a mistake to assume these towns are 'designed as prime Ukip target seats', as if there were something inherently 'Ukip' about Clacton and Jaywick. I did not meet a single person in either town who would vote Ukip if it wasn't for Carswell, and I met a fair number who wouldn't despite him. Perhaps brandishing these towns as Ukip bunkers allows us to 'turn our backs' on them and remain on the moral high ground. For decades, this struggling section of the Essex coastline has been treated like the diseased limb of the UK. In 1926, the literary critic Patrick Abercrombie called it a 'shantie (that) has sprung up.' In 1937 W. Dougill referred to it as an: 'ugly heap of debris'. In 1967, Kenneth Lindley talked about 'the bungaloid infection' of Jaywick. And more recently, Jonathan Meades said that these towns by now know to 'sit back, relax, and await the accusations of defacing rural England, a gangrene spreading through the land. Await the council's bulldozers.' Such accusations allow us to amputate with impunity, lest the vital organs of Cambridge and London should be compromised by the supposed racism, nativism, and widespread debilitation infecting these towns; the supposed Ukipean ooze.
The irony is that if, as advised, we continue to turn our backs on places like Clacton and Jaywick, we become increasingly sectarian, narrow minded, and intolerant of people who might not share 'the right' values and opinions. If we hack away at the limbs that diversify us as a nation we will surely create 'Lkip': London Kingdom Independence Party. In doing so, we develop the same characteristics that we deplore in residents of small and flailing sea side towns. And is London, with all its high flying, high rising and high achieving so different? Are there not serious problems with drugs and alcohol, sex trafficking and hate in the capital, despite the number of Waterstone's? Amputation will not work, the gangrene is probably in us all somewhere.
It is on the premise that, 'everyone is created equal', that Douglas Carswell believes modern society was founded and should operate. However, 'it is such a revolutionary idea' that we cannot really get our heads around it and the main political parties certainly haven't. All three, he argues, are social democratic parties who believe they are masters of the universe. They patronise the public, and have 'no genuine connection with the people they claim to represent'. To emphasise the point, he likens the Tories to Lehman Brothers whose longevity, he claims, led to arrogance, conceitedness and 'elementary mistakes with other people's money'. Labour meanwhile, the party that stood for the advancement of ordinary working class people, is now 'totally beholden to the principles of the elite'.
So why Ukip? 'Simply offering choice and competition changes things', he says, citing Metro Bank as an example of a smaller firm performing better than Barclays and therefore causing the latter to up its game. Ukip could be seen as 'a sort of Gladstone.com' party because of its classical Liberalism, its laissez faire attitude to government, and its emphasis on the Free Market. The Free Market, radical democracy, and an 'organic way of organising things' he claims to be 'passionate' about. People on the left, he says, tend to think you can 'organise things by design' while 'true liberals recognise that the best things that happen, happen spontaneously'. Carswell is keen to highlight his positivism towards modernity. 'As people have become more interdependent on each other, human nature has improved.' He is referring specifically to the hot cross bun I had for breakfast, and how it was the product of collectivism; 'a great example of specialisation and exchange' between 'hundreds of thousands of people' worldwide. Which is an obvious springboard to his stance on immigration; Carswell thinks we should control our borders, and have the same points system as they have in Australia. He talks of 'how ugly nativism is' and the assumptions of 'innate superiority about Britishness' which are 'such nonsense.'
Carswell is also passionate about McFlurries. Only a cardboard cup of synthetic ice cream can deter Carswell from his loyal subjects, who flock around him as he strides the streets. 'Trying to mix with us common people?!' Asks a local in the queue. Mr Mason approaches Carswell outside McDonald's, (it all happens at McDonald's.) His paranoid schizophrenic wife has been taken away from him by social services after 39 years of marriage. He does not seem sure whether to blame Carswell or appeal to him for help. For a moment, it is as if Mr Mason is challenging Carswell to be the local politician he seems to be. Carswell takes up the gauntlet; 'I don't know the rights and wrongs of it, it's not for me to judge, but I have the details. Leave it with me', he says. He is the Ted Glen of Clacton; seemingly keen to help his constituents when called upon. And many of the Jaywick and Clacton residents testify that Carswell has improved things for them personally. Often it is as small a thing as polishing up a CV, but there are also several cases, similar to Mr Maynard's, where he has taken a proactive interest and, in Pat's words, 'pulled strings and changed things'.
The rosettes that politicians pin to their lapels are somewhat random, ineffectual and frilly. The Ukip rosettes are all the above, and they are screeching purple and yellow. Carswell is as ambivalent towards the campaign paraphernalia as he is towards mainstream British politics; as a Tory he didn't put any defining logo or slogan on his flyers. He is keen to present himself apart from a party, and a favourite line of his is 'if you vote for me, you get me.' Twice he mistakenly refers to the '9th November' for the by-election date, and tells a resident 'it's not important, it's only politics.' Either he is flippant and out of his depth, or he genuinely is concerned about the people who vote rather than the vote itself. It is not hard to see the appeal of politicians like Carswell whose external aim at least is to involve himself in the lives of the people he represents.
Pat says, 'Jaywick is my home, it's my community and that's the attitude you have when you serve people.' It is not a revolutionary statement, but an obvious point that is often overlooked. The more we serve our selves and situations, the less likely we are to face outwards and diversify our otherwise clean, neat and sweet society. Jaywick and Clacton are not desirable or in any way aesthetically pleasing towns. They are struggling and deprived towns, haggard and run down towns, with occasional flashes of beauty.
