And then there’s Camden Town, one of the most impenetrably weird neighborhoods in London, with its inequality, its destructive conflagrations, its degrading tourism, its faltering but proud cultural legacy and its obscene threats. I once saw a preacher tussle with a legless man in a wheelchair outside the entrance to the Northern Line. 

To succeed here, a politician must recognize the paradoxes of the constituency, and understand how the area has changed and warped over the years. “Holborn and St Pancras,” wrote the academic Rob Ford recently, “is distinctive on practically every demographic indicator available.” It is full of university students, private renters, young professionals, and residents born abroad.

Did the former prime minister understand these constituents? Keir Starmer held his seat here for 10 years, yet many are glad he has gone. “I was pleased to see the back of the despair, of the hopelessness,” says Millie, a 26-year-old Labour canvasser. “It was sort of like a bad breakup… ‘It’s not you, it’s us’…. You felt bad when it happened, but the whole time you wanted him to leave.”

As a result of Starmer dumping his voters, the people of Holborn and St Pancras find themselves in the middle of a political hinge-point. Today, in their by-election, they get to choose whether Andy Burnham will cement his “new manager bounce” via his candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, a former child refugee from Somalia. Or whether Zack Polanski and the Greens can claw back relevance, having snookered themselves after pushing the Labour party Leftwards. George Galloway is supposedly campaigning here, too, for his Workers Party of Great Britain — if not for the constituents. Though nobody knows where he is. Last I checked, he was “in exile” in South Africa. 

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Many people I meet echo Millie. They were annoyed at Starmer for not being present, for undermining Jeremy Corbyn — say what you want about Corbyn, the people half a mile to the west in Islington North have a lasting affection for him — and for abandoning Gaza to unrestrained Israeli aggression. Starmer’s gone now, gone back to his favorite pub in Kentish Town, but some of these issues persist. 

The Holy Land has never been far away in this campaign, or from its streets. And opinions are held passionately on both sides. Both the Greens and the Workers Party of Great Britain are leaning heavily on the issue of Gaza in their literature. Furthermore, there are just over 2,000 Jewish people living in the constituency, according to the 2021 census. They hold various, often competing, views pertaining to Israel and Palestine.

Polanski, himself a Jew, was roundly bollocked at a recent Jewish community hustings in Holborn. He told the room: “Many genocide scholars around the world recognize [the Gaza war] as a genocide and calling it that is not antisemitic.” The room loudly disagreed. But Polanski continued: “In the Jewish community we need to come together to recognize that when we call that antisemitic we are making ourselves, as Jewish people, less safe.” After he finished speaking, amid boos, a woman in the crowd turned to her neighbor and whispered, “And he calls himself a Jew?”

The Green stance on Israel eclipsed their party conference at the weekend, where the membership passed a motion declaring Zionism to be racist. That this is now party policy has angered many, including the chair of Jewish Greens, Vivien Lichtenstein, who is publicly considering leaving the party, and the UK chair of Amnesty International, who has now left.

“I don’t think it’s helpful,” Lichtenstein told the BBC, “and it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever to Palestinians in Gaza who have suffered devastation, orphans left behind, it doesn’t make any difference to Palestinians in the West Bank who are currently suffering, are currently being attacked and killed.” Polanski was conveniently absent for the vote. But his name is inextricably linked to it. 

In a boutique shop in Primrose Hill, I speak to a shopkeeper who makes her feelings clear. “He’s what we call a kapo,” she tells me, describing Polanski. She says she’s experienced antisemitic harassment before, “I’ve had six, six or seven six-foot men circling me and calling me a baby killer.” After that, the conversation pivots to her disdain for the UK immigration system. “I would only vote for [somebody] that actually preferred us to all these inbreds that are coming in… and doesn’t put an alien in a hotel.” She’s planning on voting for Reform. She gets her news from Instagram. 

Given the tenor of the national debate, perhaps it’s not surprising that the canvassers here are keener to talk about housing policy. It’s a terrain that demands excellent local knowledge. But Polanski is not a local and locals can tell. Faduma, 31, is the sort of voter the Greens would traditionally be looking to attract — a young, liberal-minded Muslim woman, moved by the suffering of Gaza, sympathetic to Corbyn and deeply enmeshed with the community via her work at a youth center on Crowndale Road. 

“He’s not from the borough,” Faduma says of the Green Party leader, “I think he’s a great politician, and his promises sound fantastic. But how much is he going to deliver for us if he does win? [He doesn’t] know the community’s needs.” Faduma loves it here. “The second I leave Camden,” she says, “I can feel it.” Likewise, Faduma implicitly knows that Abdi-Wali is a Camden girl. “She understands what’s going on. She knows what’s happening with her constituency.” 

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By Samuel Rubinstein

Few people know the area and its history in such granular detail as Esther Leslie, a professor of political aesthetics and the co-director of the People’s Museum in Somers Town. Leslie is planning to vote Green. “I wouldn’t normally. I’m more of a revolutionary, if one can still say that. [I’m] not that interested in elections… I don’t think [they’ve] got much of a chance, really. I think Labour will walk it.” 

Her tiny museum is only a single room packed with information about local, countercultural legacies and potted histories, detailing, among other things, how the area was transformed in the Twenties by the Magdalen Mission and Britain’s first female surveyor. Together, they established St Pancras Housing Improvement Society and began clearing the slum tenements to make way for new flats, culminating in a ceremonial bonfire during which residents set fire to effigies of cockroaches, rats, bedbugs and fleas. 

Much of the progress made by schemes like this, seems, in Leslie’s view, to be falling away. “The fantastic housing that this [museum] was set up to honor has been allowed to decay… There’s overcrowding, there’s mold, or there’s just vacant buildings that sit empty for years.” According to the Camden New Journal, there were 356 void council properties in the borough; 43 of these were in Camden Town, “including 13 two-bedroom flats, eight three-bedroom flats and three four-bedroom flats standing empty”. It was recently reported by the North West Londoner that “Camden has recorded a 23% increase in rough sleepers in the last year, the biggest proportional rise of any London borough”. 

At the same time, hugely expensive development schemes are rising across the constituency’s four square miles. “The British Library is building this massive commercial tower,” Leslie says, “and underneath it, they’re digging out Crossrail Two Station to link Euston and St Pancras, even though that project has been stopped, but they have to do it in case it comes on-stream again. All of that really impacts people’s lives here.” 

But in some ways, the development has improved the area. It’s certainly made it safer. Walk along the now-pristine dock towards Camden Road, you’re far less likely to get mugged or intimidated or hassled. The water looks nice too: fewer sunken shopping carts. But it has also jettisoned much of the area’s unique character in favor of new-build architectural slop. Camden’s newly-modernized Stables Market appears to have lost something vital, a loss that has substituted sordidness for bland marketability. A few months ago I set out to buy a novelty bong shaped like a gas mask for a friend’s birthday, but couldn’t find one, and felt quietly bereaved.

In the lobby of Camden Goods Yard, a massive, multi-million-pound block of flats is being erected by Berkeley Group. In 2025 the developer told planning inspectors it would “mothball” the site if its appeal to cut the amount of affordable housing in the scheme was unsuccessful. Peering out across the lobby is a portrait of Amy Winehouse. What might she feel about her image being reconstituted as gaudy art for shareholders to barely notice as they carry on shafting the locals over affordable units? Hell, I wonder what Baudrillard would think. 

Down the grotty high street from these £2 million flats is Saint Martin’s Gardens. This park, flecked with gravestones from a previous incarnation as a cemetery, provided the backdrop to John Healy’s unflinching memoir of his time spent homeless among the winos of Camden in the Sixties. “I called it the Grass Arena,” Healy told The Observer, “because, in the parks where the winos congregated, you could never show any weakness.” People still drink there today. On a bench, two young men, Ricky and Ali, are enjoying a lunchtime quarter-bottle of Smirnoff mixed with Sprite, along with a packet of cigarettes. Both grew up here. Both distrust politicians generally but like Andy Burnham. “He seems alright,” Ali says. If they could change one thing about the area, I ask them, what would it be? Ali says housing, but Ricky worries about the empty schools. 

As the sun sinks onto Harlesden and Wembley, I find a gaggle of Green canvassers. Horsia, 66, has dedicated her evening to campaigning for the Greens, even though she wouldn’t vote for them in a general election. “I don’t think he’s Prime Minister material”, she says of Polanski. “He doesn’t always speak in a way that that to me appears to recognize the broad audience that he needs to cultivate and bring along with him.” Horsia is a scientist and is profoundly concerned by the climate crisis. She wants an environmental “purist” in Parliament and thinks Polanski could reliably “back the right propositions”. This is interesting, as Polanski has mostly shrunk away from campaigning on environmental issues in favor of the economic and geopolitical. “He needs to get back on it,” she says, “and I’ll be a real mosquito in his ear if he doesn’t.” 

Before I can ask more, I’m chased off by a press officer with a smile that reads “Go fuck yourself”. This kind of frantic comms control is unusual for the Greens — but they’ve come a long way since 2023, when the party was struggling to maintain relevance and still had two leaders. The party conference that year felt like a school reunion; lots of friendly faces remembering each other from somewhere or other. The upstart Polanski was very on-message when I met him at that conference. But it was hard to tell whether he truly meant any of it, or whether the former actor had simply learned his lines. After all, just five years previously, he had been a vociferous Liberal Democrat. 

So far, Polanski’s stagecraft has served him well. And actors can go a long way in politics: think of Zelensky, Reagan, and Blair. But sticking to the script isn’t always enough, particularly if the script-writing process is member-led and increasingly risk-tolerant. Moreover, the script the members come back with may not care for the people here. They may barely factor in. 

Whatever Polanski’s political lifespan, this fragment of north London will outlast him. In many ways it embodies a vital problem of modern politics, that the everyday is fracturing like a broken mirror. The fragments of Camden and Kentish Town and Holborn and Primrose Hill and Tufnell Park and Somers Town and King’s Cross are all extremely sharp. Sharp enough to cut yourself on if you grasp them crudely. 

On 8 October, the voters of this North London constituency will judge whether today’s Labour Party, a now tired vehicle born of Edwardian Britain, Methodism and industrial trade unionism, is still worth a punt against the siren calls of the radical Greens, who are offering “eco-populism”, festival aesthetics, youthful vigor and politics-by-meme. The result is likely to set the contours of Burnhamism over the years ahead, shaping the malleable politics of the new PM.

It marks a pivotal moment for both Burnham and his rival Zack Polanski: a contest over the viability of the Labour Party and its traditional hegemony over Left politics. It is freighted with expectations. Can Burnham reunite the Left’s broken voter coalition and reverse the precipitous decline stewarded by Starmer? Or will Polanski prove that his party’s poll surge can be translated into parliamentary seats, a first step on his path to “replace Labour” as the dominant Left force in British politics. Failure for either would be a humiliation: whatever the result, one man’s whole political raison d’etre will be deeply undermined, their respective coalitions left more fragile than ever.

For all his painfully awkward dilettantism, Zack Polanski has managed to turn the Greens from a kooky fringe outfit into a viable electoral force. Party membership has more than tripled to over 200,000 over the past year. As much as the march of Farageism across northern England saw off Starmer’s premiership, the Greens’ success in Gorton and Denton signaled to Labour MPs that his entire project was done for. It had failed to win back the disaffected postindustrial working class, and birthed a heightened national-populist insurgency — while simultaneously taking a sledgehammer to the Left coalition that won Starmer the 2024 election.

Part of that coalition found shelter in the warm embrace of the Greens, which briefly overtook Labour in the polls earlier this year, before settling more recently in the low double figures. That ceiling may well be down to Polanski himself and his enthusiasm for social media stunts. He has retweeted posts questioning the use of non-lethal force against an armed Islamist, mid-rampage in Golders Green, and reposted an image suggesting Nigel Farage should be guillotined. Nor is it easy to forget — or forgive — his mortifying history of promising to hypnotize women’s breasts bigger.

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Still, news of Polanskism’s early demise is greatly exaggerated, principally expressed as wishful thinking, and crucially missing the point: the Greens don’t need to appeal to the median voter, nor do they need to assemble a broad cross-class union of disparate social and cultural-political forces. Rather, their purpose is to energize, articulate and represent the interests of that small but significant portion of voters for whom Polanski’s Bluesky musings are not beyond the pale, but signifiers of superior virtue. Done well, that could be enough to wreck Labour’s prospects of being re-elected.

Altogether, the Green showing in Holborn will confirm whether Labour’s pains are principally superficial — the result of years of uniquely inept leadership under Keir — or structural. A Polanski victory would assert the latter narrative: if even Labour’s most popular politician is powerless in the face of the macro trend, then hope is surely lost. Perhaps, even under new leadership, the rot cannot be stopped; Labour’s decline is the terminal result of tectonic and sociological shifts that have plagued the movement since the decline of Fordist manufacturing. In this reading, Polanskism will flourish in a climate in which broad-based, rooted political projects have given way to mutually suspicious tribal bubbles.

But there is a paradox at the heart of this reading of defeat. For while losing his first by-election would doubtless embarrass Burnham, it would also temper the instinct for a more managerial, orthodox politics. His coalition problem cuts both ways: he needs the Green-curious metropolitan Left just as he does the Reform-curious disaffected working class. Defeat in Holborn would make this conundrum harder, not easier, to manage.

After all, efforts to mitigate the Green surge in North London could require a Leftward shift in all manner of tricky policy areas: not only on Mahmood’s immigration and asylum reforms, but also on North Sea drilling, wealth taxes, and Israel-Palestine. The seat has a decent share of Muslim voters (one in five), as well as stressed young renters in over-priced houseshares and thousands of students: all receptive to the central Green messages of inchoate anti-capitalism and Labour betrayal. The conflict in the Near East, in particular, has become a totemic struggle for the radical Left, the fulcrum upon which all social justice struggles now somehow hinge. For the fresh graduate class, the willingness to eagerly and interminably utter the word “genocide” has become the ultimate political axiom (simply “war crimes” or even “ethnic cleansing” won’t do). So Labour has been smart to select a hijab-wearing former child refugee as its candidate, a welcome reassurance for the Green-curious, for whom these markers of apparent oppressed minority bona fides really do matter. Not that Sagal Abdi-Wali is some tokenistic appointment. She has already been leader of Camden council, and has spent three decades as a well-known “community activist”.

Of course, Holborn is more complicated than just Camden, and not as straightforwardly Green as Hackney. As in much of London, there are pockets of urban deprivation, but the seat’s boundaries stretch to the smart facades of Doughty Street (home to Starmer’s former chambers) and includes the King’s Cross headquarters of Google as well as the homes of established liberal professionals in the Georgian terraces of Kentish Town. This seat is Rest is Politics, but it is also Novara Media. If that causes headaches for both Burnham and Polanski, George Galloway’s Workers’ Party candidature does too, proving attractive to conservative Muslims hoping to give Labour a bloody nose, and to those repelled by the vibes and coding of a party of hyper-liberal urban cool kids (the Greens’ cringeworthy efforts to appeal to Urdu speakers notwithstanding).

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It is certainly true that running a party leader with an energetic local campaign might well turn the usual by-election distortions into massive swings. But even in May’s local elections, the absolute nadir of Starmerism, the Greens found themselves nine points behind Labour, and they will, according to the bookmakers, be relegated to second place in October too.

Still, even second place is no mean feat. Before 2024, the Greens were confined to a single electoral citadel: Brighton. Positioning itself rather smugly as a bastion of middle-class progressives, hedonistic students and New-Age crusties, the Sussex seaside town was practically synonymous with the old Greens. Then, at the last election, the party expanded its seat haul to four: Brighton, of course, and a similarly off-kilter hipster seat in Bristol, but also two true-blue rural constituencies concerned with over-development and nature conservation. This created a strange two-tier Green bloc. On the one hand, the party was for laptop-sticker postgrads; on the other for Countryfile-watching former Tories.

Needless to say, that is a shaky, contradictory political coalition, not unlike Labour’s own. And, under Polanski, the Greens have only looked to add further elements to the mix: northern mill-town biraderi networks, and Islamic migrant communities collectively appalled by Gaza. But Holborn doesn’t fit neatly into the new Green Party’s cultural-political triad: what you might call the Greta-Gaza-Gardener alliance. It is a seat where the Green coalition’s internal contradictions are hard to hide: a constituency of students, renters and professionals for whom Gaza is important, gardens are largely irrelevant, and where clan politics holds less purchase than elsewhere.

Even if Polanski cannot forge his Greta-Gaza-Gardener alliance into a winning vote here, his leadership of the Greens will continue. As long as his loss is respectable, it may even be read as portentous, further eating into Labour’s temporarily rescued Left hegemony. A Labour victory, however, will hand Burnham the argument that his party’s malaise was mainly Starmer’s: and that a mildly Leftward, pub-friendly patter and anti-Thatcher schtick is enough to reunite the Left bloc and hold off Balkanization.

Once in this North London seat, Marx sat at his desk, with Lenin a few years and miles away, and the Fabians busily drafting the machinery of a welfare state that did not yet exist. Today, we have a former hypnotist who can’t stay off his phone, going up against a Labour candidate whose task it is to prove that having a nice-guy leader is enough to stave off secular decline. That this will be enough for one of the candidates to succeed is perhaps the biggest indictment of the politics of our era.

Lansbury came from a radical family, and he’d been campaigning for women’s rights since the 1880s. Then in the Liberal Party, he’d gone on to join the Social Democratic Federation, the country’s first socialist party, before being elected in December 1910 as the Labour MP for Bow and Bromley, in the East End of London. Once in Parliament, he was infuriated by the Liberal government’s refusal to extend the franchise to women and by its approval of force-feeding Suffragette prisoners on hunger strike. “You are beneath contempt,” he shouted, walking up to the government front bench. “You will go down in history as the men who tortured innocent women.” He was suspended from the chamber for that outburst.

He was equally angered by his own party’s failure to confront the government on the issue. Having exhausted all other tactics, he resigned his seat and called a by-election, asking his constituents “to endorse my policy of making women’s suffrage the beginning and end of my parliamentary fight”. It was a risky move. Bow and Bromley was a marginal constituency, and he’d only been elected in 1910 because the Liberals had declined to field a candidate and had backed him, giving him a clear run against his Conservative opponent. But it was worth the risk for one so committed to the cause. 

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The by-election that followed was noisy and atypical. The Labour Party was incensed by Lansbury’s actions and declined to give him official support, while the Liberals again refused to participate. Women’s groups from around the country campaigned for Lansbury, with public meetings addressed by the constitutionalist Millicent Fawcett, the socialist Ethel Snowden and the extremist Emmeline Pankhurst. Meanwhile, anti-suffrage opponents rallied under the slogan of “No Petticoat Government”, and the Conservatives tried hard to insist that this wasn’t a single-issue election.

The most effective poster read: “Lansbury is sick of Parliament. Bow and Bromley is sick of Lansbury. Vote for Blair and make everybody happy.” And on polling day, that’s what happened. On a 10% swing, the Conservative Reginald Blair took the seat and Lansbury was out of Parliament for a decade.

In the long run, standing on his principles didn’t do him any harm. When he returned to Westminster in 1922, again for Bow and Bromley, the number of votes cast had more than tripled, the electorate swelled by the enfranchisement of the working class and of most — if not yet all — women. It turned out that he’d been, in that curious modern phrase, on the right side of history. And when the Labour government split in 1931, and the party suffered a massive election defeat, he was the only ex-Cabinet minister left in Parliament, becoming leader by default at the age of 73. He held the party together in its darkest hour, his record speaking for him as a veteran campaigner for women, peace and the working class.

Nigel Farage, it hardly needs saying, is no George Lansbury. There is no issue of principle, or even of policy, at stake in today’s by-election in Clacton. And the difference doesn’t speak well of today’s politics. Beneath Farage’s thin-skinned petulance and posturing, there lies the media’s — and perhaps the public’s — fascination with electoral contests, rather than actual policy. Keir Starmer’s premiership was a time of flatlining productivity, of rising unemployment, of an incipient borrowing crisis (bond yields are higher than when Liz Truss “spooked the markets”). But the average voter could be forgiven for not noticing the parlous state of the economy as the drama of Andy Burnham’s by-election victory and unopposed coup played out in the press. This isn’t politics, it’s soap opera, and with the departure of Peter Mandelson, Farage is now the longest-standing character still in the show, in large part because he recognized the direction of travel early on.

It wasn’t always thus. Even if we consider the closest recent parallel to Clacton, that of David Davis in 2008, there was a serious point being made. Davis was the Conservative shadow home secretary and believed that a critical moment had been reached when the Commons voted in favor of the Labour government’s proposal to allow detention without charge for up to 42 days. This came in the midst of an attempt to introduce identity cards, attacks on the jury system, and increased surveillance by councils and quangos. As Davis pointed out, “600 public bodies have the authority to bug phones and emails and intercept the post”. So he resigned both his shadow cabinet job and his seat to fight a by-election in his constituency of Haltemprice and Howden in Yorkshire on the issue of civil liberties.

Then, as now, the other major parties didn’t contest the election. Labour, understandably, had no wish to defend its record, and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said his party supported Davis’s position and wouldn’t therefore stand against him. The whole thing became a farce. There was a record field of candidates — 26 in all — including the likes of David Icke, Mad Cow-Girl and Ronnie Carroll (the man who’d sung “Ring-a-Ding Girl” in the 1962 Eurovision Song Contest). There were so many of them that they weren’t allowed on the platform to hear the result, for fear of breaking the stage. 

Davis won, of course, with an increased share of the vote, but it was a pyrrhic victory, both politically and personally. Gordon Brown’s government paid no attention at all. And Davis’s career suffered. Just three years earlier, he’d fought David Cameron for the Conservative leadership. Now, he looked a much reduced, peripheral figure. “If I was given my job back, I think I’d take it,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ll be offered it.” He wasn’t, and he didn’t serve in the Coalition government of 2010-15.

In retrospect, Davis’s by-election captured the moment when British politics became totally trivial. The question of civil liberties was genuinely important, and has become ever more so. But the chance to challenge the growing power of the state was ducked by the media, which had decided that soap operas were more fun. The Daily Mirror saw Davis’s actions as “a cynically disguised leadership challenge to David Cameron”, while the Daily Telegraph said it was “a challenge to Mr Cameron’s authority”. It wasn’t. It was an attempt to position the Conservatives as the party that would defend the individual. When it was turned into a circus, the opportunity passed and the direction of travel remained unchanged. The era of the police raiding people’s homes in pursuit of social-media rudeness was just about to dawn.

And now comes Farage in Clacton. He may not have distinguished himself in Parliament, he may have struggled with delegation and with running a political party, but he has proved over the last three decades to be a consummate campaigner, and calling a by-election looks like a retreat to his comfort zone. But it’s a path fraught with danger. To start with, he runs the risk of becoming a laughing stock, even more than did David Davis. Breaking the 2008 record, there are 34 candidates, ranging from the SDP through three separate representatives of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, all the way down to Rejoin EU. It’s hard to retain any sense of dignity in these circumstances. Worse still, the focus on Farage’s finances risks giving the impression of him being a spiv, rather than the lovable rogue that has previously been his great selling-point. 

These three self-triggered by-elections tell an unedifying story of political decline. Lansbury’s was an honorable position and it was seen as such. Davis was also a principled man, but he was treated as a joke. And now Farage reduces legitimate concerns about the probity of his funding to a caricatured gimmick of the electoral process.

Oddly, though, that comment from the Suffragette may yet be applicable. The Bow and Bromley by-election in 1912 does not “stand out in history as a great political landmark”. But if Farage is sufficiently damaged, then Clacton in 2026 may do.

It must also be one of the most journalistically picked-over places in Britain. Reporters have been taking the train here from the capital for years, stopping locals on the street to probe and poll their views; dissect their prejudices; stack their takes. White, deprived and elderly, it has become a stand-in for the large hinterland of Britain so remote from our elites. For some, the attention has become maddening. “Over the past few years we have become a joke and a cliche because of Nigel Farage,” says Sarah Elizabeth Cox, who is drinking a glass of JD Wetherspoons wine as her son snoozes in a buggy parked at the table. “I now say I’m from Clacton for my sins.”

Now, Farage is preparing to take a stand here against the establishment, or at least against a former BBC comedian wearing a bin on his head. If Britain has any unifying institutions left, Spoons must be one. Could I, sitting in the pub from sun-up till closing, plumb a little deeper than the psephologists?

When the Royal Hotel was built, it stood alone on a clifftop. Clacton-on-Sea was just an idea then. For a long time, perhaps forever, the area had been nothing but farmland out on the Essex coast. But then, in 1886, the land was bought up by Peter Bruff, a bearded Victorian engineer, who set about building railways and rerouting steamers and diverting capital flows to justify the construction of a new town. His ambitions were high. It would have, Bruff declared, “no slums or any object that could offend the eye”. The lowest type of London daytripper — “men, women and children who only seem to enjoy themselves when revelling in drink and obscenity” — ought to be discouraged from visiting.

Today, much of what was the Royal Hotel is occupied by the Moon and Starfish. Yet sitting in the garden just after 11am, Cox doesn’t want to talk about the pub’s most famous visitor. In fact, she wants to talk about everything but Farage. She wants to talk about Clacton’s problems, and once she starts it’s seemingly hard for her to stop. There is a huge issue with homelessness, she says. Like so many other English seaside towns, the deprived and the lost wash up here in search of help but end up freezing in tents all throughout the winter. Cox’s mortgage has become extortionate, more than her rent had been in London. Potholes are cracking open everywhere. Fires keep breaking out. Train prices render commuting impossible, even to nearby Colchester. She is angry with a broken social settlement that has allowed places such as Clacton to rot. “It is one of the abandoned seaside towns,” she says. “I love living here but I feel sorry for the young people.”

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Farage's Clacton reckoning

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Clacton has the highest proportion of economically inactive people in Britain. Jaywick, a ramshackle settlement on Clacton’s western border, is the most deprived place in England. What went wrong? The classic account is that once British holidaymakers were lured to Southern Europe by bargain flights, the seaside towns, deprived of tourists, began to slump. It is notable that at the last general election, Reform UK took three such areas among their five seats — Skegness, Great Yarmouth and Clacton.

But as I wander through the pub, everyone I speak to is happy to be there — resident and daytripper alike. They praise a community feel that, perhaps, they think remains stronger here than elsewhere in Britain. Margaret Clayton and Shirley Sizer have come on an over-sixties group outing from Cambridgeshire. Margaret has been coming here since childhood, when she used to visit with her Salvation Army Sunday school. It hasn’t changed much, she says.

Jean and Terry Williams moved down from London 40-odd years ago. They were married in East Ham, East London, but decided they had to leave when their son went to school and, according to Jean, his class swelled with Indian children who could not speak English. There was no time to teach the native pupils, she says, because they had to provide language tuition for the migrants. That was not a problem in Clacton.

But the Essex coast is not immune to England’s demographic shifts. Jean and Terry describe a local street that, to their eyes, is starting to look like Beirut. Terry thinks many of the vape and kebab shops must be money-laundering operations. Jean is relieved their son is in his forties and that she therefore has no need to worry about the ethnic composition of the schools. They have fled one wave of migration, but are being met here by another.

It is the bright peak of the day and the octogenarian couple are drinking in the garden, their skin wrinkled and puckered by decades of seaside living. They like it here, and bat away any suggestion that its population is too old. People need a place to retire, don’t they? Both plan to vote for Farage, despite his recent travails. “Personally, I don’t mind him,” says Jean. “I think all politicians are the same. I’m not being rude, but they’re all crooks. I’m not going to vote for tin man.”

Her attitude is typical. If they’re all crooks, why single out Farage? A grinning man with a missing front tooth, twisting a £20 note furiously below the table, tells me hasn’t followed the story closely but that Nigel is the bollocks and can keep his £5 million for all he cares. “Did he just pocket it and fuck off?” he laughs. “He’s one of us then.”

The man is angry that immigrants arriving on small boats are housed immediately, fed and watered in three-star establishments across the country. He was recently sectioned and then placed into supported accommodation in Clacton, he says, but then kicked out when he was arrested for “something stupid”. Now the council won’t help him.

He is also archetypal of a category of man that can be found at every asylum protest across Britain: unmoored, his life dissolving around him. Then he takes a call on a tiny black mobile, one small enough that it might be smuggled into prison in a cavity, and excuses himself.

I retreat back into the pub, which is as dim and cool as a cave. Tim Martin, who founded and owns JD Wetherspoons, has attempted to construct his empire along the guidelines detailed by George Orwell in 1946. The clientele must consist of regulars, there for the conversation as much as the beer; the architecture should be “uncompromisingly Victorian”; no radio should drown out conversation. Orwell’s preferred pub name was Moon Under Water, hence Clacton’s maritime twist: Moon and Starfish.

And as in the fictional Moon Under Water, the punters do seem to know each other. Around lunchtime, a group of auld fellas congregate around two tables in front of where I am sitting for what seems a regular meeting. People shout greetings across the room. World Cup bunting zig-zags across the ceiling, while England flags are draped from the bar and over a window. There are paintings of ships on the wall and little brass portholes cut into the walls. It is as if we are all visiting the home of a retired admiral with a mania for vexillology.

The lunch crowd gathers, eats, and departs rapidly. For many of Clacton’s older residents, Spoons is effectively just a cut-price restaurant. I watch an old woman in a wheelchair defeat a popadom the size of her head. Beside me, a man and two women in floral dresses are laying into Farage: the by-election is a farce, a waste of money, and he may be forced to stand again anyway. They would like Count Binface to win, but are concerned he’ll have to remove his headgear in Parliament.

Later, I find Paul, back out in the garden. He isn’t a fan of Farage either. “I don’t think he’s done fuck all for Clacton,” he says. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the by-election is that Farage is a constituency MP at all. Nobody I meet makes any connection between their Member of Parliament and local issues. They like him because they want to cut migration, or they oppose him because they do not. Their views do not seem to be shifting either. Farage is baked in.

Paul is drinking Guinness and holding a spindly silver vape that looks like an alien hookah. Until a few years ago, he lived in Brentwood, in London’s eastern commuter orbit. He worked in construction, breaking tarmac. But Brentwood got too posh for him and, for reasons he does not specify, he doesn’t work anymore. But he had an opportunity to move near the sea and he took it.

“Honestly, I spoke to a copper a while ago,” Paul says, “I said, “is Clacton really bad?” He said it’s no worse than any other seaside town. Every single place has its bad people. I’ve never had any trouble.” Paul normally does not vote, but next month he plans to support Count Binface. “Mate,” he says, “if I had one million I’d be set for life and this fucker got…”

For years, Clactonology has described the place as “weary” or “divided”, even as residents have been held to really be the most powerful people in Britain. The most significant work in the canon was written a little over a decade ago by Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP and Times columnist. Clacton-on-Sea, he claimed, was going nowhere. “This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlor Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.”

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UKIP — then standing Douglas Carswell in a by-election here — was a natural fit for such a place, Parris concluded. “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.” The Conservative Party had to abandon the voters of such places, were they not to be dragged down themselves.

His words caused such a furor that UKIP began quoting Parris on their leaflets. But today, 2014 feels like a foreign country. After Brexit and Trump, with Marine Le Pen permitted to stand for the French presidency and the AfD leading the polls in Germany, it is hard to imagine anyone dismissing all-our-yesterdays Britain quite so blithely.

Seagulls wheel and bank over left-over lunches as a new crowd materializes, alongside a bouncer in a white shirt. As it grows dark, I speak to Dave, a neat man with silver hair, who bemoans the unfair reputations of Clacton and Jaywick. He lived and worked in London all his life, before retiring from the civil service to see out his days here. “Living in Clacton is like living in the old East End of London,” he tells me. “People chat to you. These days in London, people won’t even look you in the eye. Here, people stop and chat to you when you walk the dog.”

Dave is amiable and relaxed, smoking a cigarette in the summer air. But he seems angry at the state of Britain. “One phrase I hate,” he says, “is when people say, “I’m entitled to this.”” Benefit claimants feel entitled to money; migrants feel entitled to free housing. He would like Farage to crack down on both.

Though JD Wetherspoon pubs don’t show football, as a rule, they seem to make an exception for the World Cup. And at 8pm, Belgium kicks off against Spain. I sit next to a 20-something window fitter, who thinks Clacton is run down with few opportunities for people his age. He doesn’t like Farage, but will vote for him if the alternative is a man dressed as a bin, for whom he evinces a deep contempt. The crowd is different, now, the punters markedly younger. A clutch of men in tight jeans holding little bottles of beer has formed by the bar. When I leave, shortly after midnight, the pub is almost empty; near me just a few teenagers remain, drinking shots and playing a garage track from a phone.

A Friday in the Moon and Starfish, then, is spent mainly with people who came here from London. They relocated for the cheaper cost of living and the clear air and also, in many cases, for somewhere that is still overwhelmingly white British. They are attempting, consciously or otherwise, to recreate a community that used to dominate much of the capital, along with the pie and mash shops that cluster round the pub.

But this is the end of the line for white flight. You cannot move further east than Clacton-on-Sea. You cannot move anywhere poorer than Jaywick. For those who seek greater ethnic homogeneity, there is only one other option left: to fight. That makes the Clacton by-election essentially meaningless. It is a circus. Farage is almost certain to win, risking only mockery in his campaign against Count Binface. What is more significant is the rage pulsating throughout this town, this country. That will remain, and it will decide our future. All-our-yesterdays Britain will have its revenge.

The show’s stumbling star Frank Gallagher is undoubtedly a selfish and untrustworthy figure, trapped in a never-ending hustle to score his next drink. Yet despite his failings, both as a father and citizen, his character periodically hints at a deeper political awareness, mediated primarily through his boozy rants about the depredations of “Thatcher’s Britain”. The eight Gallagher children are clever and entrepreneurial — most of them destined to outgrow and ultimately leave the Chatsworth estate for love, university and better things. Frank’s eldest daughter Fiona is caught in a constant struggle between her personal aspirations and her responsibilities to her neglected siblings, while eldest son “Lip” is a child prodigy, earning a living selling homework to his classmates.

But if the Channel 4 series tackled its subjects far more humanely than the red tops, Shameless still ultimately presented life on the Chatsworth Estate as obsolete, a trap which imprisoned its residents. Indeed, this view of life on Chatsworth, from the uplands of New Labour in its pomp, in many ways echoed the prevailing contemporary narrative on Britain put forward by its leaders — that, post-Thatcher, Britain had changed. The dirty industries that once sustained cities like Manchester were no more, and the country’s destiny instead lay in the course of globalized services, or the “knowledge-based economy” to use the dreary Blairite parlance.

For its first season, Shameless was filmed around Wenlock Way and Clowes Street  — an iconic example of boxy Seventies architecture in the throes of neglect and decay, replete with graffiti, rotting wooden fences and spartan stretches of municipal lawn. Wenlock Way is itself located at the far edge of the Gorton and Denton constituency, the far-flung corner of Manchester due to go to the polls today. Perhaps fittingly, the estate has since been demolished as part of Manchester’s regeneration process, a transformation which has rebranded a city once renowned for dingy, sooty alleyways into a glistening steel-and-glass metropolis.

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Manchester Council, under unbroken Labour leadership since 1971, fully embraced the post-industrial future heralded by the national Labour leadership. From the Eighties, it deliberately pursued a policy of attracting high-productivity services into the city, replacing the old textile mills and factories. At the heart of this was a gigantic program of investment in the physical infrastructure of the depopulated and grimy city center, financed primarily by foreign investment, pump-priming property values to attract high-earners from London. At the same time, and as I document in my book on the subject, Manchester Council pursued incredibly hostile policies towards the building of affordable housing  — seen as an embarrassing throwback to an industrial era New Labour had left firmly behind.

This focus away from Manchester’s pre-existing residents was felt hard by residents like those depicted in Shameless, embedding a deep sense of abandonment and enmity towards the whole political class. As Frank himself poetically notes in his opening monologue to series eight:

So you’ve had your Labour reclassifying scum sending prices sky high, literally, literally taking the grass from its own roots. Now you’ve got your Con-Dem-Nation. Liberals noshing Tories like altar boys picking dim-sum. Have we had a national fucking stroke, or what?

The truth, of course, is that real-life Chatsworths were always so much more than the lager-soaked hangover of deindustrialization. Behind the cultural noise, these places retained incredibly strong communities, mutual aid networks and inter-generational family ties. Even once the factories closed, solidarity persisted on estates sustained by affordable housing, enabling communities to remain rooted to their homes even as as their economic function vanished.

All the same, the estate life depicted by Shameless has been in decline. At the end of the Seventies, over four-in-ten of the British population lived in social housing — and in cities like Manchester, that figure was far higher. Today, the figure nationally stands at just 17%, with the proportion of Manchester households living in social housing dropping by a tenth. And despite the grand ambitions of New Labour, the story of fictional characters like Lip, leaving the estate in series five to start an undergraduate degree at Nottingham University, has failed to truly materialize. In the real world, the people of places like Chatsworth have been cast adrift — unable to sustain the stable life they once expected.

It’s no surprise, anyway, that such communities now form the vanguard of Nigel Farage’s insurgency, both in Gorton and Denton and across the country. The evidence is clear that as well as geographically — following the pattern of deindustrialization — Reform’s vote is positively correlated with the most deprived communities and co-morbidities of poverty: including poor health and low levels of social trust. Gorton itself is one of the most deprived wards in the country, with over 65% of households considered deprived by the indices of multiple deprivation and with 47% of children living in poverty.

In the absence of any understanding or interest from political elites, promises of pride, identity and purpose are clearly appealing. And yet one can’t help but note the discord between the self-proclaimed “Thatcherism” of Reform — and the voters it’s currently courting in places such as Gorton. It was, after all, Margaret Thatcher’s project which assaulted the economic bedrock of these places, destroying livelihoods and purpose, and starting the systemic financialization which has hard-baked inequality into British life. Manchester lost 82,000 manufacturing jobs between 1981 and 1991, and the population of the city declined by over 120,000. These statistics reflect an economic catastrophe which afflicted almost all of Britain’s industrial regions.

All the while, it was the Thatcherite Right and its successors that began a moral crusade against “the underclass” of “benefit scroungers” — cultural forerunners of Noughties chavs. You can’t help but notice that Reform’s candidate Matthew Goodwin himself came to prominence articulating the importance of high fertility, fertility which the same Thatcherite Right assaulted for decades on the basis that families were “having children they can’t afford” and running up the benefits bill. At the time Shameless was aired, meanwhile, you would more likely find politicians of the contemporary populist Right disparaging “the chavs, the losers, the burglars, the drug addicts” — in the 2005 words of Boris Johnson.

Yet somehow these same “chavs” are now the backbone of a new English nativism: a transformation in attitude which does, fittingly, feel rather shameless. Of course, Reform’s economic stance continues to be a matter of dispute — with calls to nationalize steel and other industries somewhat consciously courting voters in its new northern base. Yet with the defections of senior architects of the previous Tory government now embedded into Reform’s “shadow cabinet”, the party seems more than ever committed to the Iron Lady’s economic legacy.

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That this transformation has been possible is testament to the extent to which Labour and the broader Left embraced Thatcher’s ideas. When the former prime minister told reporters that her greatest political achievement was Tony Blair, she wasn’t simply making a wry joke. New Labour was the formalization of the uniparty which has since come to define British politics, a rejection of our industrial heritage and the collectivism, community and solidarity that came with it. New Labour’s message was, ultimately, hardly more compassionate than the cruel mockery of the urban poor by the Tories, thriving on authoritarian “crackdowns” of various kinds, with ASBOs and the surveillance state largely there to discipline the tiresome oiks.

Once again, Shameless dealt with these themes explicitly, with one character receiving an ankle tag alongside his ASBO in series three, while elsewhere Department for Social Security officers swarm the estate to tackle benefit fraud. It’s hardly irrelevant that the Gorton by-election was itself triggered by the resignation of the area’s former MP Andrew Gwynne, after WhatsApp messages emerged showing him hoping an elderly constituent would “croak it” for daring to criticize him.

In the end, no one has become more convinced of the redundancy and insignificance of their voters than Labour. Yet when pushed, and whatever they might claim, many on the new Right still retain their contemptuous attitudes towards benefits claimants and the urban poor, possessing a basically instrumentalist approach to their new base. Earlier this month, for instance, Goodwin was caught sending out letters purportedly written by “concerned neighbor” Patricia Clegg — despite the 74 year old claiming she never signed off on them. Things have become so bad that Clegg’s son, a former Reform-voting veteran, has publicly attacked Goodwin online.

Though he was born and raised in leafy St Albans, meanwhile, Goodwin has emphasized his plastic Manc credentials via a campaign suggesting that he is as working class as Green candidate Hannah Spencer (who works as a plumber), and more Mancunian than Labour’s Angeliki Stogia on the basis that she was born in Greece (despite being a fully naturalized British citizen of over 30 years, and a local councillor for more than 10).

Yet this rebranded Thatcherite may tomorrow be the next MP for Gorton and Denton, carried into office promising to improve lives with the very same policies that caused such misery. Many Gorton and Denton voters have been ignored by Labour for decades, their support taken for granted. Goodwin may be selling snake oil, but at least he bothered to show up. And if, by some miracle, Labour hold the seat, the gap between the party and its downtrodden voters only seems destined to grow. That’s a shame. Estates like Chatsworth’s might not have been a “Garden of Eden”, in the wise words of Frank Gallagher, but they offered purpose, place, identity — all prerequisites for a life free of shame.

It’s bleak here. The main shopping area, Yorkshire Street, is a sad parade of charity shops, discount stores, and closed-down businesses. Each time I go, I see more and more homeless people on the street. And the stories of poverty and neglect are heart-breaking. In 2020, a toddler died from a respiratory condition caused by mould in the housing association property he lived in. Shockingly, his death changed nothing: it’s still a widespread problem, almost four years on.

Steeped in political scandal and poverty as it is, things could be about to get a whole lot worse. The result of today’s contentious by-election could mean the infamous constituency could end up represented in Parliament by a clown.

Once the pride of industrial Britain, the town was soiled redeemably by “Mr Rochdale” for decades. Real name Cyril Smith, he became a Labour councillor in 1952 at the age of 23, and was Rochdale’s MP from 1972 until he retired from Parliament in 1992. He managed to sustain this lengthy term in office despite multiple allegations of profoundly inappropriate behaviour. In total, eight men alleged that Smith had indecently assaulted them as teenagers in the Sixties; six of them were living at a residential establishment for boys named Cambridge House Hostel, which Smith had been involved in setting up.

When the Director of Public Prosecutions was informed in 1970, the advice was not to prosecute. That advice was reviewed by the Crown Prosecution Service in 1998 and 1999, when two further complainants were identified. Yet neither review led to Smith being charged. He was knighted in 1988, and died in 2010.

It’s only in the years since his death that the extent of his shocking behaviour has been revealed. Among other things, it transpired that in his spare time, Smith had been taking money from — and being handed shares in — a local asbestos firm in return for delivering speeches in parliament minimising its dangers. Then, as part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), published in 2022, Lord David Steel stated that Smith had told him that media reports of his abuse of children were true. Yet Steel had allowed Smith to continue in office until he stepped down in 1992. The police, I’m told, were in his pocket. The IICSA report stated that this was not the case, but it’s easy to be sceptical when you’re even slightly familiar with his corruption.

Smith’s moral depravity cast a dark shadow across Rochdale where the authorities have a long history of turning a blind eye to abuse of the vulnerable. In the Smith Street public toilets scandal, for example, boys as young as primary school age were sexually abused by men for the price of an ice lolly in full view of the Social Services Department. The Child Protection Manager later described how she would regularly notice boys sitting on the walls and being beckoned by men to follow them inside. It was obvious to her and other staff who witnessed it that sexual abuse was happening. And in March 1989, representatives from the police, social services and schools met to discuss what was happening to a group of children aged 10-14 when they gathered daily at a local restaurant named “Tasty Bites”, when they should have been at school. Of the 12 children identified, five were in the care of Rochdale and a number were being paid for sex.

As the IICSA report made clear,  allegations of sexual assault were simply not taken seriously by those in authority — a culture that infected the council for years, and endured right up to the moment the grooming gang scandal that also took place in Tasty Bites was finally laid bare in 2012. Dozens of vulnerable girls — some as young as 14 — had been plied with alcohol and cannabis, threatened with violence, and passed around man after man for sex, while the authorities ignored their pleas for help. The ringleader was found guilty of 30 counts of rape. A string of inquiries followed, concluding that those in authority “lacked human compassion” and were “inexcusably slow” in dealing with the victims — who were seen as making “life choices”, rather than suffering.

There’s little doubt that Smith’s 20-year reign set in stone the culture of corruption, lethargy and abject failure of its statutory services that lingers. To this day, Rochdale is offered a dire choice of politicians. It’s difficult to believe that many voters will be inspired to turn out to vote for any of them. It is a battle between an ultra-macho, all-male list of prospective MPs, fought along Israeli-Palestinian lines, rather than between political parties. Amid the chaotic run-up, the Labour and Green parties dropped their candidates; not one woman is standing.

It’s an unedifying list of characters and Azhar Ali, is pretty representative of the calibre: a Labour Councillor who trotted out antisemitic conspiracy theories at a public meeting: he’s now out of the party, yet still standing. George Galloway, also accused in the past of antisemitism, is also standing — and is the favourite to win. He wants to “make Rochdale great again” — which makes you wonder when exactly he’s referring to. Standing for the Workers Party for Britain, he claims that he would save Rochdale AFC, and reopen the market. He also has the dubious honour of being endorsed by Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party. (Galloway rejected the endorsement.)

Galloway knows his audience. Rochdale is 19% ethnically Asian, and 13.9% Muslim — one of the biggest communities in the country — and appealing to ethnically Asian Muslims has always served the Scottish Catholic politician very well. When he won Bradford West from Labour in 2012 by a massive majority, he announced his victory through a megaphone, shouting, “All praise to Allah!” During that by-election campaign, Galloway produced a leaflet reading:

“I’m a better Pakistani than [Imran Hussain, the Labour candidate] will ever be. God knows who’s a Muslim and who is not. And a man that’s never out of the pub shouldn’t be going around telling people you should vote for him because he’s a Muslim.”

His success was short-lived: he lost the seat in 2015, to Naseem (Naz) Shah, a local of Pakistani Muslim origin. During his campaign he repeatedly insinuated that Shah was pro-Israel, despite the fact that she had regularly and publicly expressed support for Gaza and Palestine. I accompanied Shah on her campaign trail back then, and was told by a number of Pakistani Muslim voters that they were sick of Galloway posturing while doing little for the community. “He expects us to vote the way the men do,” one Muslim woman told me, “so ignores the women.” Undeterred by his failure in Bradford, he has set his sights on Rochdale.

Also standing is Guy Otten, originally a Green Party candidate who was disowned when old social media posts (from 2013, 2014 and 2015) cast him in a questionable light. In one, he wrote: “The Koran is full of war, slaughter, rape and pillage with genocide and slavery as well. It’s not fit for the 21st century.” In other words, as well as the two candidates accused of antisemitism, there’s one who’s been accused on anti-Muslim prejudice.

And then, last but not least, there is Simon Danczuk, the disgraced former Labour MP for Rochdale. Now running for Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party), Danczuk launched his campaign by taking aim at his old party with a “work not woke” slogan. He has now pivoted to describing himself as the only alternative to Galloway, with a slightly less catchy motto: “Rochdale not Gaza.” In other words, he is also trying to capitalise on the tensions in the town over race, religion and ethnicity. Whether he has a vision for addressing poverty is less certain.

It is worth mentioning here why, exactly, Danczuk was kicked out of Labour. In March 2015 he made headlines because he appeared to have liked hardcore pornography on Twitter. He blamed an iPhone glitch, but admitted to having used porn, saying “I think we should not be too sanctimonious about this”. (Owen Jones wrote a column in defence of Danczuk, for the Guardian.) Then, in December that year, Danczuk was suspended. He had sexted 17-year-old Sophena Houlihan saying: “You want me to spank you?” and “God I’m horny!” Houlihan says she was bombarded with explicit messages for a month after asking him for a summer job in his Rochdale constituency office.

This candidate list is a tragedy. No wonder the people of Rochdale have lost faith in politics. Perhaps most disappointing is Labour’s failure: the party should have been a first choice for the majority of voters in a town that has been so abandoned by the bourgeoisie. Instead, its best hope is to become a case study that helps Labour understand why so many working-class northerners are turning their backs on the party that is supposed to represent them. The disenfranchised, impoverished people of Rochdale embody the negative consequences of exactly the kind of poverty and marginalisation that Labour romanticises or makes use of. But its residents are too angry, too battered to spark a revolution. In perhaps an attempt at protest, 60% of the town voted for Brexit in 2016.

What this means for the future of politics is as bleak as it is worrying. At times like this, when the downtrodden can neither take another kicking nor find the strength to get up from the ground and carry on, it is easy to get sucked into a world in which any enemy of an enemy is a friend. Rochdale, having been abused and abandoned by the state, exemplifies how and why dangerous, disgraceful politicians get elected. The beleaguered town deserves far better than any of the men currently vying to be its MP. Whoever wins this election, Rochdale will lose.

The by-election in Selby and Ainsty, 50 miles south of Sunak’s estate, is part of the reason why. Mention it to the attendees and they grimace. On Thursday, Labour will have a chance to overturn a 20,000 majority and lay the first meaningful stone in the path to a Tory electoral apocalypse. Two weeks ago, the race was compared to a coin toss. But since then, a great pilgrimage of shadow ministers and Labour activists has flooded the Yorkshire town, hoping to pull off the second-largest swing to Labour in electoral history. This would be the sort of decisive victory not seen in Selby since the days of the English Civil War, when a Royalist rout spelled the end of King Charles I’s rule in the North. The bookies now have them as favourites to win.

Selby, however, as both Labour and Conservative canvassers confess, is a “weird constituency”. It takes in pockets of poverty and comfortable Country Life villages. It is an area of contrasts and contradictions: a beautiful Norman Abbey within a stone’s throw of a high street garlanded with vape shops; a commuter belt to Leeds and York in the former industrial heartland once home to the most productive coal mine in Europe. A place where three-quarters of homes are owner-occupied, but the housing shortage and mortgage-rate crisis now make home ownership both untenable and undesirable. A place where you can find all of England’s problems and convince no one of their solutions.

For both parties, this is not just a by-election, but a chance to war game electoral machines for 2024. Labour see it as a zone of reckoning for a country fed up with Tory rule, and a chance to lay the ghost of Jeremy Corbyn to rest after their vote dropped here by 9.6% in 2019. The local Tory wisdom — and ready defence — is that if they lose the seat, it will be because their vote stays at home. But outside of the two major parties, Selby is also a place where we can observe, in the form of political rebels and strays, the two unresolved forces of British electoral politics: the disbelief in the power of politics to change things, and a hatred of Westminster.

Nothing sums up the latter like the circumstances which led to the by-election. The stroppy resignation of Nigel Adams — a Johnson lackey who departed after failing to get a peerage — “has pissed everyone off”, as one Tory put it. The constituents aren’t impressed either. “Good riddance, you shocking grifter,” read one of the kinder comments on a farewell post. The legacy of Adams, further tainted by his temporal association with the other more sleaze-orientated by-elections, has only contributed to a broad cynicism towards Westminster. Adams himself is now regarded as a political morality tale in the pubs of Selby: the local lad who went to London and got lost in its web in his pursuit of patronage.

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The Conservative candidate, lawyer and councillor Claire Holmes, seems eager to bridge that gap by talking up her “local connections”. But she already appears to have misread the mood of the constituency on housing.  There’s only so much she can say about the mortgage woes other than repeating the promise to cut inflation, but her pledge to protect “green spaces from inappropriate housing” was regarded as tone deaf in a constituency that can no longer rely on Nimbyism to form a winning coalition of voters. It was this comment that spurred a number of younger local Tories to abandon her campaign — “the sort of lazy politics that will stop anyone under 50 from voting for us”, as one senior councillor put it.

By contrast, Labour has seized upon housing in their campaign. Speaking in the Commons last week, Keir Starmer pointedly raised the case of a police officer from Selby forced to sell his home due to rising mortgage costs. And mortgage deals are coming to an end across the area as repayments rise by up to £400 a month. At the age of 25, the Labour candidate Keir Mather might seem perfectly positioned to court young voters stuck in the area and unable to get on the housing ladder. But — Oxford to public-affairs consultant via the office of Wes Streeting — he delivers his campaign video with the robotic flair of a sixth-former running for headboy. When I walk into his campaign office in the centre of the high street, full of students and the odd flat-capped local, Mather is whisked away into a backroom the moment I mention the word “interview”. It’s not hard to understand why. He is most effective when saying nothing and grinning weakly in front of a giant portable screen that reads: Conservative Mortgage Bombshell.

Both candidates are accurate personifications of their parties: the Tories’ an unimaginative clone; Labour’s an anodyne silhouette. Where they are concerned, the belief that “nothing will change” persists. But then there’s the array of political eccentrics who always come out of the woodwork for a by-election. Nick Palmer is one archetypal centrist dad who has gone rogue in the terraced suburbs of Selby. He is the closest thing Yorkshire may ever get to Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down. Striding from a delayed train into Selby, the independent candidate looks and speaks like he’s just had to sit through an entire series of Question Time. Armed with a clipboard with his LinkedIn handle scrawled in black Sharpie, Nick preaches a message of democratic breakdown and a system of “shit processes” from London, carried out by people “scared to have a conversation with people who’ll tell them to piss off”.

He nonetheless emerges as a canny soothsayer for the town’s misery. In a busy cafe near the station, he finds common ground with the clientele sipping cappuccinos as they gleefully watch a set of passing canvassers getting drenched in the rain. A clear “90% of the people who come in here won’t vote”, the cafe owner tells us. “Modern politicians have no power or control over the real decisions,” adds her husband. “So what’s the point?” 

One of the more coherent protest votes against Westminster comes from a former Conservative councillor now standing to establish a Yorkshire Parliament: Mike Jordan of the Yorkshire Party. Does he have anything more profound to say? “He’s more likely to say something profoundly fucking stupid,” a Tory member retorts. Behind this sentiment, however, is a quiet frustration. Jordan will be lucky to come fourth, but he represents a disgruntled Tory demographic. In a narrow race, the regionalist-populist energy he can attract and possibly harness is a potent minority view — one that Labour and the Tories cannot ignore.

The rosy-faced Yorkshireman tells me about his adventures in the Tory heartlands to the north of the constituency to garner interest in his vision for Yorkshire. “I spoke to one lady,” he tells me with relish, “who says this is the first time in 50 years she won’t vote Tory. She’s going to vote for me and Yorkshire instead.” When he took to the stage of the hustings, it took him only 30 seconds to deliver his message: “Voting for me is a chance to send a message to Westminster that Yorkshire needs to be thought about — and what are you gonna do about that, cock?” 

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It’s a straightforward message delivered in straightforward Yorkshire, but tellingly it’s being redeployed by both parties as a means to cut through the apathy. “No one on the doorstep is interested in what’s happening in Westminster,” says former policeman now Tory councillor Tim Grogan, fresh from campaigning in the key battlegrounds to the south of Selby. And taking power and money away from Westminster is about the only thing the Conservative Party has left to talk about up here, a localist stance that puts them in a strange alliance with Jordan. A new devolution deal has just been signed that will bring an elected Metro Mayor to York and North Yorkshire, in charge of £540 million in grants. But the push for more local power feels symbolic. It can’t stymie the disgruntled energy that drove Brexit — and which is now starting to turn its gaze towards Westminster in another effort to “take back control”.

We’re far from the Red Wall, but 60% of people here voted Leave. They feel the democratic deficit all too keenly. And nationally, Labour has tried to address this discontent, too, with their Gordon Brown-drafted “New Britain” constitution that promises a “radical devolution of power”, to “unleash the potential that exists everywhere in this country”. It is seen as one of the key components of Starmer’s reforming project, should he seize power. And much of the document reads like a Yorkshire Party rant condensed into polished policy prose. The irony with this, of course, is that this is likely to create more, not less, of the politics and politicians that everyone in Selby and Ainsty seems to hate.

Regionalism has frequently, and frequently lazily, been proffered to restore the discontented provinces to political equanimity. But devolution was overwhelmingly rejected by the North East in 2004; it’s hard to see that a Yorkshire “parliament” of Mike Jordans would satisfy Selby. One woman looks appalled when I suggest it. “The idea of some of the local politicians getting their hands on more power around here,” she says, standing outside Selby Abbey, “is, quite frankly, terrifying.” Whatever happens on Thursday, this mood is here to stay — a disquiet that all these candidates want to exploit, and none can bear to resolve.

It is self-seeking and short-sighted: a mistake. There is a vacuum to be filled because Tory and Labour are a functional absence. I come upon them only through campaigning literature on lamp posts and under foot: it floats around the constituency like tumbleweed. Party leaders come for photo opportunities so there is evidence for posterity that they exist. Press officers rarely respond, even to requests for information. So, others come to fill the void. Their complaints are superficially rational — opposition is easy — but they are here not to soothe but to ignite. George Galloway, a charismatic, wants to exploit the racism British Muslims face because major parties will not grapple with it. Laurence Fox is here too, offering support to the teacher at Batley Grammar whose use of an image of the prophet Mohammed led to protests at the school, and the teacher choosing exile from the town. It is astonishing to see Fox and Galloway on the same platform but, as self-defined mavericks, perhaps it is not so strange.

Last week, the Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater, a well-being coach and personal trainer, was harassed in the street by a Muslim anti LGTBQ activist, demanding that she condemn LGBTQ education in schools. (Leadbeater is gay.) “The colour of blood is what you are,” he said. Now she has police protection. Labour sources say Galloway supporters are repeatedly driving past the campaign office; once they crowded in to harass them. Labour activists, including Muslims, were pelted with eggs and one was beaten. In white areas, fake Labour leaflets are circulated, saying, “Labour supports taking the knee”, and “The Labour Party believes that it is high time that white people acknowledged their privilege”. Labour itself published a leaflet showing Boris Johnson shaking hands with India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the caption: “the risk of voting for anyone but Labour is clear”. Labour Friends of India asked for its withdrawal.

It is a co-incidence, or perhaps, worse, an omen, that this is the constituency whose Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in 2016 by a white supremacist outside, of all places, a public library. Leadbeater is Cox’s sister. I wonder if it is another mistake from a Labour Party that embraced centralisation, a wound that took too long to show itself: the wrong candidate in the wrong place. Many Labour supporters feel unseen by the party they once embraced as family. Is it seemly to emphasise family ties, through a woman who only joined the party this year? What happened to Jo Cox is a tragedy, but her sister’s candidacy is still morbid nepotism, and it is unpopular with some voters. It takes politics further away from them, and into someone’s else’s personal narrative. “I can’t vote for someone who jumped on a bandwagon,” says one former Labour voter, “the sister of someone quite good.”

Batley is superficially sleepy. The once bustling market has declined; the police station has gone. Most commercial activity is sucked into a vast supermarket, with the now mandatory support for a foodbank in the window. (More than a third of children live in poverty in Yorkshire, and most of them are in working families.)

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Alienation is obvious as you wander Batley and Spen. The young SDP candidate Ollie Purser tells me: “The biggest demographic I meet is people who aren’t going to vote and before I can even give them a leaflet the door is shut.” I follow him as he campaigns in Birstall, an estate of red-brick houses dominated by a sign that says NO BALL GAMES, and in an area where people, according to Purser, either say, “There’s nought for kids to do”, or they else they say: “There’s too much anti-social behaviour”. The main issues here are public services — the Liberal Democrat candidate Tom Gordon says constituents are using Dentaid, a charity that usually operates in developing countries — and whether to build a new Amazon distribution centre for more air pollution and ill-paid, exhausting jobs.

“You all talk shite,” says a man when he opens the door to Purser, though genially. “I have no interest in voting whatsoever.” “Anything to do with working-class culture gets chopped up,” mourns the next, though he takes a leaflet. “I never go out,” says the next, “I’m a Mum”. As we leave two children wave from the window. “I’ve never voted in my life,” says the next potential voter, who must be 70, and Purser patiently explains the principles of a polling station to her. Even when voters do enter a polling station, Purser says, “they are always holding their nose. That’s the problem. [People] biting their lip and putting their cross next to the name because they hate the other team more”. These people are, Purser says, “dislocated. Atomised. Individualised.” As if to illustrate this point, there are two local Facebook groups dedicated to the town: Batley Matters and Batley Really Matters. Even the advocacy groups have split.

In the middle, preening calmly amid the chaos, is George Galloway, the former Labour MP fighting an Oedipal battle with the party he once loved. Though he remains the same, he changes parties more often than he changes his hat: from Labour to Respect to the “economically radical and socially conservative” Workers’ Party.

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Galloway hopes to take Labour votes from the Asian community that make up 20% of the electorate here. He believes they are vexed by what they perceive as Labour’s lack of support for Palestine and lack of action on Islamophobia. One woman says her five-year nephew saw a tabloid headline, and said: “Auntie, look, we are terrorists. It says there”. This has reached a tipping point for Galloway supporters, with Palestine as the flashpoint. Shops in Batley are papered with pro-Palestine messages, and it is not, for these voters, something remote. It is, at least partially, a proxy conflict. In Palestine’s suffering they see themselves: it is a paradigm of their perceived powerlessness. One woman explains the change in dynamic: “We’re not your servants anymore.” Another woman says, “Obviously Israel own everything. It is an untouchable country.” She, though, will vote Conservative. I doubt this view is as widespread as Galloway would like.

Outside Galloway’s campaign office I find a mass of photographs of Galloway on sticks, so they look like a bus station with only one destination: a Galloway victory. I meet him in Starbucks. He is all twinkling vanity; he reminds me of Boris Johnson. Like Johnson, he likes campaigning more than governing; like Johnson, victory over the enemy is not a moral but a psychological imperative. The chase is all. If policy alone was his aim, he would add his voice to the SDP perhaps — “we respect them”, he says — or the Yorkshire Party — campaigning for devolution through its candidate Corey Robinson — or even Labour itself, prostrate but still breathing.

He speaks in perfect paragraphs, emitting campaign literature laced with memoir. Galloway does not converse, not really. He orates, mirrors, boasts. Labour is now a party of “trans-maniacs” who deplore the British voters and the British flag. Labour has, he says, no leadership. They are, rather, “a series of people sitting in circles. I remember vividly Tony Blair’s wife shouting at me to stop shouting, when in fact all I was doing was speaking clearly in the way that one does when one is making a speech. I remember it vividly even though it was more than forty years ago”. I wonder if this, at least partially, is why he is here. He has a long memory.

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He also remembers a woman outing herself as a lesbian at Conference decades ago. “Everyone clapped. I remember saying to the fellow next to me, ‘Why is everyone clapping? Should I announce what I like sexually? Would they clap?’ The personal,” he mourns, “became substituted for what united all of us — whoever we slept with”. And yet here he is, effectively trying to deliver a Conservative MP to Westminster, because of who he is, and I can’t think of anything more personal.

Is he concerned about this? “I draw no distinction between Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson,” he says, “in fact Boris Johnson is better at it than Kier Starmer would be”. He compares Johnson’s campaigning in the Fox’s biscuit factory to how Starmer would do it, if he had done it: “He would have would have walked around like a robot, a desiccated calculating machine, while Boris was practically breakdancing on the factory floor”. For Galloway, Starmer’s failures are ever expanding, like space. Where they do not exist — the biscuit factory, for instance, where he did not appear and so could not fail — he imagines them.

I offer the decline of child poverty under Blair as an example of an important difference between Labour and Tory policy. “I didn’t say there was no difference,” he says, “I said I make no distinction. The difference is this,” he explains, “the Tory wears on his sleeve what he is. Labour are wolves in sheep’s clothing and it’s our job to tear away that sheep’s clothing and reveal the wolf within”. He changes his mind: “it’s not really a wolf, it’s more a jackal. The jackal within has to be exposed”. The jackal feeds on the dead. I think he is projecting.

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Eventually, after multiple emails and telephone calls and knocks on campaign office doors, I do meet a Labour activist, though by accident: a white man walking his Labrador in the park. He too speaks in perfect sentences, as if the relative silence on the street is creating rhetoric straining to be heard.

“The Tories,” he says, “are hoping to win by default, and they are hoping that Mr Galloway will help deliver that for them. He’s incapable of winning the election and if he wants to play a small part in electing a Tory candidate,” – his anger is obvious, though he speaks calmly — “for a party whose leader insults Muslim women, refuses to deal with Islamophobia in the Conservative Party and will do nothing to defend the causes including that of Palestine which Mr Galloway professes to hold dear then that’s up to him”.

That night there is a hustings in a community centre with only one candidate: George Galloway. His wife videos him for posterity. Kim Leadbeater pulled out, and Galloway seems both delighted and appalled. The Yorkshire Party candidate Corey Robinson says he accepted the invitation but was not given the address, and so wandered around Batley looking for it until he gave up and went to visit his family. That is not mentioned.

The interviewer thanks Galloway, whose rhetoric rises to this tiny crisis. “It is I who should thank you,” he says, “and commiserate with you for the great insult that the Labour Party has just delivered half an hour ago”.

He says Labour’s loss will cause an earthquake to destroy its leader. “Why do I care about that?” he asks himself. It’s a good question. The answer is, he says, that the country needs an opposition and, “Britain currently doesn’t have an opposition because the Opposition Leader is no leader at all. He’s so wooden that birds are trying to nest in him. He’s so robotic he might as well be speaking through a speak-your-weight machine. His words go nowhere, move nobody, persuade nobody.”

He continues in this vein for an hour while around him, in a vacuum made of cowardice, the major parties flail, and, in Labour’s case, sink to his tactics. This is a filthy by-election, and only one man is made happy by it. It will not be enough.