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Matthew Parris provides More Reasons Why Clacton Suits Ukip, As Both are Going Nowhere!
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Tories should turn their backs on Clacton
Matthew Parris
Published at 12:01AM, September 6 2014
The seaside town represents a Britain that’s going nowhere. The future belongs to places with more ambition and drive
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.
Dear Matthew Parris: if the Tories abandon the working class to Ukip, they will deserve to lose 2015
By Tim Stanley Politics Last updated: September 6th, 2014
I’m writing this blog at midnight: the angry hour. The hour when you’re only awake because you’ve spotted something that infuriates you and – damn it – you have to put every furious thought down. They teach this process in anger management, apparently. Talk through what went wrong from beginning to end and maybe it’ll all make sense.
What went wrong is that Matthew Parris wrote an article for The Times. A very ugly article indeed. He took a trip to Clacton, the seat being contested in a by-election by Tory/Ukip defector Douglas Carswell, and Matthew was not impressed by what he found. He found a bit of Britain that isn’t London.
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.
Yes, it sounds like Hell, Matthew. Not a Starbucks in sight – and car parking spaces that would barely fit a limousine. How our intrepid reporter coped with the natives I cannot say, although it’s quite obvious that he didn’t like them. Really, his language is shockingly rude about people who are – lest we forget – human beings.
Clacton-on-Sea is a friendly resort trying not to die, inhabited by friendly people trying not to die… 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.
The conclusion to all this nastiness? That the Conservatives should abandon Clacton to the Neolithic Ukippers and reach out instead to aspirant urban middle-classes and hard-working immigrants (because anyone who pays less that £1 million for their house has clearly not been working very hard all their life – the peasants).
“I am not arguing,” argues Matthew, “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.” So, yes, he is saying that the Tories should be careless of their needs. Because what they need is what they ask for – respect. And Mr Parris can’t bring himself to give that to tattooed simpletons on crutches.
Why am I so angry about all of this? For philosophical and personal reasons. Philosophically, I cannot see that Matthew is a democrat if he thinks national leaders should dismiss an entire class and its opinions. I cannot see that he is a patriot if he dislikes his own people so much. And I cannot see that he is a Tory if he does not feel a responsibility to serve them. After all, the essence of Toryism is to seek to assist all the people regardless of background. It is the Left traditionally that separates people by sectional interest – the desire to become “the masters now”. By contrast, the One Nation Tory tradition seeks to forge a spirit of national community that promises aspiration and compassion for all. Even Margaret Thatcher – yes, Margaret Thatcher – did that. After all, she let those working class people buy their own houses, never privatised the NHS and united the nation in liberating the Falklands. To be a Tory, at its best, is to serve. Not to dismiss and ignore. Conservatism stripped of compassion is just nasty social Darwinism.
And Matthew’s column grinds my gears on a personal level because I, too am “ordinary”. I know the kind of people he’s describing; there are a lot of them in my family. And although I may have grown up into something that could perhaps be described as “exotic”, I’ve retained a deep love of the ordinary. I love seaside towns like Clacton: the piers, the fish’n’chips, the crappy shows (more impersonators of the Bee Gees than there were Bee Gees), the fag ash, the “family tattoo emporiums”, the loud families, the tired old gramps falling asleep on the bench, beer in plastic cups and merry-go-rounds that electrically hum Black Lace classics. It might not be pretty by 5 star London standards – but it’s Britain. Those people who Matthew dismisses built this country. They have survived world wars, recessions, depressions and 16 Eurovision humiliations in a row. They are indomitable – and no Westminster bureaucrats or clever-clogs writers will ever change them. I love them. I love them because I have to as a Christian and I want to as a fellow Briton. We are family. And you don’t turn your back on family.
Matthew seems to imagine that he’s handing out sage advice to David Cameron about how to build a Tory majority, but he’s dead wrong. On the contrary, columns like this suggest to people from my background what they’ve always suspected: that Tories are laughing at them. By and large that isn’t true, but Matthew has come to represent a segment of liberal opinion that defines itself by a perceived superiority to everyone else. And if David Cameron follows that strategy at the next election, he’ll be left with just one segment of the population enthusiastically backing him: Matthew Parris.
Now it’s 12.50am and I must go back to sleep, if I can. I’m still very, very angry. I may well be so for some time.
Saturday, September 6
A Tory schism is now all but inevitable
Last updated at 12:01AM, August 30 2014
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4191391.ece
Douglas Carswell’s defection is part of a strategy to scupper the EU referendum and take over the Conservative party
Never trust a man in love with his own probity. On the BBC yesterday morning Douglas Carswell made three references to himself as “honourable” within 35 seconds. “Putting my principles on the table,” he has claimed. The language should arouse immediate suspicion.
Ignore the weekend’s cooings about Mr Carswell: “honourable man”, “intellect”, “man of principle”, “no ordinary rebel”, etc. Just consider what he has done. Here is a politician who, to get himself elected, wrapped himself in the mantle of the Conservative party, spent years at Westminster undermining the Conservative party and now renounces his party at a moment chosen to inflict maximum injury.
Yet he brays about his principles while admirers gush about his intellect. Where is the principle, where is the intellectual integrity, where is the honour in this? Mr Carswell professes shock that David Cameron hopes to negotiate a European deal that can be recommended to the British people. What other kind of deal does he think a prime minister should aim for?
Mr Cameron never did claim that he wanted to leave the EU. But if the Conservative party has changed at all since Mr Carswell last flew its colours in 2010, it has grown more Eurosceptic, not less.
He is one of those characters who sometimes briefly thrives in the thin soil of Commons philosophising — a stupid person’s thinking person with a gift for making shallow oversimplifications sound wondrously deep. He will find it a sullying business being Ukip’s philosopher king to the man on the Clacton omnibus.
He calls himself a libertarian — and joins a party the limits of whose libertarianism would be to allow smoking in pubs (and, for all I know, bear baiting) on the grounds of personal freedom. He will tire of playing king of the kids for Ukip, and they will tire of him — as happened to Enoch Powell after his defection to the Ulster Unionists.
So much for the man himself. But to scorn the individual is not to trivialise the damage he can do. The damage could be immense. The campaign by the ultras on the Tory right to wreck then remake their party is well on track.
There is a decent chance that Mr Carswell will win his by-election and some possibility that a couple of other Conservative zealots may try to follow him. A “Ukip surge” and the momentum that could be created by a series of awful by-election results for Tories in the months before a general election could be grave. Mr Carswell’s move will hearten 30 or more Conservative MPs on the party’s right; they are with him in spirit already and are waiting for their moment. I fear that moment will come.
Ukip and the Tory irreconcilables are perfectly relaxed about the possibility that Mr Cameron could lose the next election; they do not want the EU referendum that would follow his victory. They want the present Tory leadership to stumble and fall, and, from the internal battle that would follow, they see the emergence of a new kind of party led by a new kind of leader from the anti-European right.
My fellow columnist Tim Montgomerie could not have been more wrong when he wrote in yesterday’s Times Red Box blog that “Ukip voters don’t believe that the Tory leader is serious about the referendum”. The “let’s-get-out-now” brigade in British politics have a very different fear. They fear that Mr Cameron would indeed hold his referendum and win it.
Accordingly they will do all they can to derail this referendum; and they know that if Mr Cameron gets his mandate in next year’s general election, this will be hard to do. They therefore aim to derail the Tory campaign, starting now.
It’s no good us moderates bleating that this could only lead to a Labour victory and no referendum. The right know that. And if a Labour victory (which they believe would be short-lived) is the price that has to be paid for their take-over of the Conservative party, then many would be content to pay it. Their eyes are fixed on the longer view.
I hope, but cannot be confident, that we can stop them. The seismology of British politics awaits a major quake. Ukip and the Tory right aim to trigger this quake. From the rubble they believe a party of the right that looks very like themselves will emerge. The more liberal and centrist Tories, they think, could make common cause with some Liberal Democrats and even Blairite Labour politicians. Their ultimate aim, then, is for Ukip and the Tories to merge under the banner of a new Conservative party.
This is a logical, if odious, plan. It may prove achievable. But it’s not a plan that — for all their bluster about honour and principle — the irreconcilables dare admit to. So they will continue to protest their loyalty but moan about Mr Cameron’s weaknesses, casting him — he whose personal ratings are well ahead of their party’s — as the problem and remaining ready with the sly shin kick or the sudden access of personal conscience whenever Tory fortunes seem to be rising. Mr Carswell’s “principled” resignation is part of that strategy.
I now see schism in the Conservative party as all but inevitable, whether in government after 2015 or out. Perhaps it will be healthy for democracy. There are plenty of nutters out there and maybe the nutters do need a party to represent them, though the slow-dawning disappointment that awaits the Tory right in the coming decades is that there will never be quite enough nutters to form a government.
For the rest of us Conservatives there emerges just one imperative, and Douglas Carswell’s departure should fix it in our minds. We must have nothing to do with these people. No concessions to Ukip, no more rightward creep, no fluttering of eyelashes and no dogwhistled calls for anyone to come back. These people don’t want a compromise — Mr Cameron has already thrown them too much meat — and the more you give them, the more they’ll demand.
Douglas Carswell’s departure is an early warning of what may be to come. So now is the moment to dig in. If a schism is coming, we moderates must draw our own battle lines. And about this there must be no question: we aren’t shifting. We, the old, battered, wary, pragmatic, often-compromised, one-nation Conservative party, are the Tories. If divorce looms we must make sure the breakaway zealots don’t get the house, the car, the company, the client list, the trademark or the brand.
So I finish as I started, with this message to Mr Carswell and his crew. Go to Ukip by all means. And stay there.
To view the original of this article CLICK HERE
You may well consider reading up on my earlier take on this issue of the division of the Tories as it seems Stuart Wheeler sees it, by placing Douglas Carswell in a position to ensure Ukip is more acceptable to Tory EUrosceptics so that Boris Johnson can fracture the Tories and bring the two together distanced from the overburden of baggage brought to the union of the two parties without Farage or his ego and insecurities at CLICK HERE
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Greg_L-W..
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