If only people would stay in the boxes we put them in, how much easier it would be to call this election. I am talking to Alison, who says: “I am veering towards Ukip. Well, some days.”
We are in Broadstairs, in South Thanet, where Farage is standing and I have met a good few “Alisons” – decent people who are veering towards Ukip. I wish I could say they were all bonkers and racist, but they aren’t. I will say the party they are voting for is. Each week, as another Kipper gets done for some kind of insanity – a £3,000 restaurant bill in Margate? A plan to kidnap Obama? – I whoop with joy.
Alison, though, is thoughtful. “My daughter is a nurse, so I know it’s not right what they say about the NHS, and we need all sorts. But we need other things, too. I might make my mind up on the day.”
I hear this a lot, alongside “Is it OK to say that I don’t always vote?” It is this mixture of uncertainty and lack of voting record that makes me doubt some of the polling. Pollsters have risen as conviction politics has fallen. Graphs fill the vacuum where beliefs used to be. Hence the robot speak about “values”, which are something you should show rather than tell.
Ukip’s “values” reside in Farage’s bizarre unease with all things modern, and paranoia about immigrants.
“They are right about people working and paying tax, but when they start going Muslim this and Muslim that ... it does my head in,” a young cashier tells me.
What is clear is that Farage needs Thanet more than Thanet needs him. Many locals are incensed at the publicity surrounding him, as it paints their part of the country as inherently small minded and racist. It’s all a lot more complicated than that. I come from Suffolk, so I feel in my bones how far away psychologically these places are from the governing state of mind that is London. Their feeling of abandonment is not conjured out of thin air, and it is no good to just say their emotions are imaginary.
Jobs, primary school places, doctors appointments matter. There is high unemployment here, a dysfunctional council, an unused airport, boarded-up shops. Pockets of gentrification where artists and musicians have moved in do exist, but Farage would not be comfortable in the boho warehouse spaces of Margate either. He is proud of his lack of hinterland, though a man who does not listen to music is not a man to be listened to. A man out of time and out of place.
That’s where he begins to unravel. How can he represent this place? On the way to Ramsgate, I meet a guy who tells me his own personal theory: “I reckon [Farage] is funded by the Republicans. The Tea party. I bet you won’t write that down.” He votes Tory normally, but is now going to vote Labour on this basis. In a pub, no one mentions the EU, but one guy says he will vote for Farage as he is “a right bastard”. Men seem to like him more than women, but the only thing Farage appears to have in common with his supporters is that they have no post-16 qualifications. That did not stop him doing well in the City, whereas the blokes in the pub have not exactly prospered.
Will Scobie, the Labour candidate up against Farage, is young, earnest and definitely hard working. He has already done five lots of canvassing and its only 5pm.
What impresses me is that Scobie is a local, and proud of it. He lives in Cliftonville and knows what it’s like to rent privately, as he has had to move twice with his young family. Cliftonville, with its 53 nationalities, is symbolic for Farage; his message is that all of Thanet will become Cliftonville. It’s the old immigration-as-contagion model. It is racist and it is wrong.
Scobie explains the reality: “It was grand once, but when people started going abroad on holiday, these old hotels all became multiple occupancies. Bedsits. We had a lot of looked-after children, ex-prisoners. I am not saying there are no problems, but Ukip call it a no-go area. They talk our area down. We don’t want the stigma of Farage.”
The more I talk to Scobie, the more I see that housing is key. Everywhere, housing issues are driving agendas and protest movements.
An old man knocks on the door.
“I would like to join the Labour party,” he says. Scobie gives him a form. It will be £1.92 a month. Pensioners’ rates. “Will there be actual socialism?” asks the man.
Scobie tells me that Farage is in Thanet at most twice a week for “stunts. If we get rid of him, he and his circus will be out of town the next day.”
All politics is local politics and if voters here choose on local issues, the seat is not necessarily his. While I was in Ramsgate, he was in Dover banging on about kids not playing football in the street because of immigration. Why Dover and not the seat he is standing in? Because ultimately Farage has no interest in in local politics. And it’s starting to show. He looked tired and defeated.
