Farage in Clacton – Socialists need to build resistance everywhere

This is an adapted version of a speech Rachel Eborall gave at the Festival of the Oppressed 2026. Since the event, Nigel Farage has resigned, triggering a byelection in Clacton, where he will stand for re-election. A millionaire banker for the poorest town in the country. All major parties announced that they will not stand candidates against Farage, so as not to legitimise his farcical resignation. Rachel Eborall, however, argues that socialists can and must fight for the people of Clacton and against the far right. 

Jaywick is a part of Clacton that voted to return Nigel Farage as their MP.

A seaside village of about 5,000 people, around 60 miles from London. Before electing Nigel Farage, it was famous for poverty porn TV. Jaywick was made famous by Benefits by the Sea, which generally highlighted the mistakes of people on benefits to the delight of the audience – not just amusing but also reassuring: things might be bad for me, but not that bad!

Why would Jaywick be chosen for such a TV show? Mainly because there are lots of people surviving on benefits by the seaside. The poverty, deprivation and desperation are palpable. Boarded up houses, no facilities, broken roads, busted bodies and fly tipping. Somehow noticing fly tipping seems minor, but it signifies something deep. Having to negotiate walkways through used mattresses and broken fridges just screams that this place is neglected – why didn’t the council pick this stuff up?

Jaywick has been declared the most deprived area in England. 62% of residents rely on benefits, and let’s not deal in euphemisms: we know that the low rates of benefits mean that 62% are living in poverty. 47% of children in Jaywick report going hungry. In the poorest part of Jaywick, only one in three households has safe access to cooking facilities. If you want to travel to find work or access education, that might be problematic, as buses are often cancelled because the roads aren’t safe.

Jaywick has been identified as the most deprived neighbourhood in England since 2011. Since then we have had six prime ministers, the coalition government, a Conservative government and a Labour government, and nothing much has changed for the people of Jaywick – though I imagine cynicism has grown. But Jaywick was not always a symbol of abandonment. I’ll come back to that.

A vacuum of hope

It is in this vacuum of hope that the far right have grown. In 2024 the people of Jaywick voted for Farage, giving him a seat in parliament, despite the fact that he is committed to cutting benefits, which will have a massive impact on the people of Jaywick. They voted for Farage even though he wants to scrap climate change protection measures that would help Jaywick now, to stop regular flooding, and in the future, to prevent Jaywick being swallowed by the sea due to rising sea levels.

But let’s face it, the people of Jaywick and Clacton didn’t vote for Reform because of Farage’s sound economic policy. Voters are pretty open about why they are voting for Reform: they voted for mass deportations and detention of migrants. In the Reform imaginary, migrants are a catalogue of threats: the abusers of women, the crime gangs, the single mothers who get housed as soon as they ask – and, in the imaginary’s neatest trick, people who are simultaneously stealing British jobs and scrounging benefits. The idea is that by getting rid of migrants, and particularly by stopping the small boats, the lives of Reform voters in places like Jaywick will improve. It’s not clear how this is supposed to work in Jaywick, where 97% of the population is white British.

Reform have stoked up racism, but we should be clear that they didn’t import it. They were able to stoke that racism because Britain is built on racism and shaped by racism. Racism is not an alien concept to the British way of life – it’s baked in. Reform stoked the fire, but the embers were always there. The disgusting racist rhetoric is also accompanied by calls to get rid of ‘woke’ culture, and we know what that means: getting rid of human rights for women, people of colour, queer people, and of course a particular viciousness towards trans people.

Woke means different things to different people, but I think its rejection represents a nostalgia for a past that never existed – imagined probably after the Second World War and definitely before the 60s. A time in which things were more white, the family and church were more central, men were in control and gay people were closeted. It is also a nostalgia about institutions: a strong judicial system with tough sentences and harsh prisons; authoritarian schools that don’t mess about with soft subjects, with strict teachers and corporal punishment. And, tellingly, a well funded health service – because this imagined past is generous, but only to those who are imagined to deserve it. Welfare for ‘us’, discipline for everyone else.

No compromise on the politics of liberation

So that’s the terrain – what should we do?

The first thing, the second thing and the last thing is to never compromise on the politics of liberation.

We can never deny the racism and violence of the far right mobilisations, and we need to avoid the politics of figures like Eddie Dempsey who are soft on patriotism, or even try to use patriotism. Dempsey admitted that RMT members had probably been part of the Tommy Robinson marches and participated in riots outside hostels, arguing that ‘The problem with people on the left of politics, and it has been for a long time, is that they spend so much time worrying about what’s going on in people’s heads rather than what’s going on in their bellies’.

In this formulation, Dempsey and others like him are arguing that if the working class movement can provide the material conditions that people need, then they won’t be drawn to far right politics. But the bellies-not-heads position concedes exactly what Reform needs it to concede: that anti-racism is a distraction, something the left worries about instead of the real issues. The anger is real, and it often focuses around material conditions, but it is shaped by racism, alienation and hopelessness.

The anger cannot be dismissed simply because it is shaped by racism – but nor can the racism be waved away as merely misdirected material grievance. People are right to be angry: people are poor, ill and hungry, and successive governments have continued to follow the politics of austerity, prioritising the needs of employers and the rich. When reading about Jaywick, lots of terms like ‘economically insecure’ and ‘food precarity’ were used. We need to use everyday words: too many people are poor and hungry. We also need to be furious, and express that fury, that people are living in poverty, that people and the land are being constantly exploited, and that climate change is ignored. One in three people in the poorest part of Jaywick don’t have access to cooking facilities. That is shameful, and we should be furious and hateful towards the system that allows that to happen.

Campaigning around the cost of living is key to expressing the anger, but it can also erode some of the hopelessness by articulating that, as organised people, we can impact on the world and change it. Our lives are going to shit, but that isn’t natural or inevitable – it is produced by capitalism, and we can act collectively to improve it. However, if these campaigns are to be successful, they will not be made up of the far left but of wider forces, and some people may express far right ideas. We mustn’t ignore these to keep the peace – we must tackle these ideas. Key to this will be articulating the politics of solidarity, and effectively showing that far right ideas will make the cost of living campaigns more difficult, as they divide the working class and let the ruling class off the hook. We need to be having patient conversations, arranging cultural events and propagandising.

We need to embrace a variety of tactics, and be thoughtful and strategic about the campaigns and mobilisations we are involved in – some on the left abstained from the Together Against Racism march because it was too liberal, but there are things we can achieve by mobilising even for imperfect demonstrations: meeting anti-racist activists, being energised by others who want to fight back, sharing propaganda.

We also need to organise against the far right in our workplaces. As these ideas become more prominent within society, they will permeate our workplaces – in fact, Unite trainers report more reps saying that they are voting for Reform. We will have to defend those workers under attack whilst making anti-racist arguments with those who hold these ideas. At the moment, issues of discrimination are often seen as issues for HR, and we need to ensure that they are seen as a trade union matter. And we cannot leave the fight to a Labour Party whose tactic to defeat the far right is to ape it – we need to draw those worried about a Reform government into campaigns defending the rights of migrants and trans people now.

No no-go areas

Reform doesn’t have any no-go areas. They are trying to organise everywhere, and they are being successful. They have won control of Derbyshire, Essex, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire County Councils. They run the metropolitan councils of more urban areas including Barnsley, Calderdale, Doncaster, Gateshead, Sunderland and Wakefield. Despite the recent shenanigans of Farage, they are set to win a sizeable number of MPs in the next general election. Just as the far right doesn’t have no-go areas, neither can our opposition. The growth of far right ideas isn’t natural or inevitable, but they are stronger in areas where no one is opposing them.

Some of those on the left see places like Jaywick as no-go areas, lost places. But I promised to come back to Jaywick’s history, and it is a history of resistance.

Jaywick began as a holiday village in the 1930s: rows of small chalets, built for Londoners to escape to the sea, never intended to be lived in year-round. Then families who had lost their homes in the Blitz, or who didn’t want their kids evacuated to strangers, moved into the chalets permanently – defying government orders that said they couldn’t. The village that officialdom now writes off as a failure was founded on an act of collective disobedience: ordinary people deciding that their need for a home outweighed a rulebook.

And they kept fighting. In 1970, the local council tried to force residents out by issuing 770 compulsory purchase orders – one for nearly every household. It failed, because residents organised and fought back. In the 1980s, regeneration plans proposed mass demolition of the village; these too were defeated by vociferous protest from the community. Three times the people of Jaywick have been told their homes shouldn’t exist, and three times they have refused to accept it.

That is the tradition the left should be speaking to – not the Jaywick of Benefits by the Sea, but the Jaywick that beat 770 compulsory purchase orders. Resistance can be built everywhere, and we must be part of building it – in our communities and in our workplaces.