This is a subscriber-only article
Clacton-on-Sea is a town of around 50,000 people on the coast of Essex, about 80 miles (130 kms) northeast of central London. You may never have heard of Clacton, but you have almost certainly seen it on TV. It became the favoured backdrop for television crews seeking a town which voted heavily to leave the EU in the June 2016 referendum. Clacton fits the bill perfectly for the news media – the Guardian dubbed it Brexit-on-Sea. It once had an MP representing the extremely Europhobic UKIP party and one of the largest Leave votes in the country at 70%, versus a national average of 52%. It is also rather a dreary spot with a large elderly population, a high number of residents on social welfare and above-average unemployment. There are lots of towns like Clacton up and down the forgotten east coast of England but none as easily reachable for television crews from London.
Clacton has furnished a regular parade of disgruntled voters for the cameras, happy to explain that their town has been left behind and expressing confidence that things will improve once Brexit has been accomplished. They are likely to be disappointed.
I lived briefly in Clacton back in the 1970s, while at the nearby University of Essex, 20 minutes up the road near the bustling city of Colchester, which is about the size of Cork. Clacton is not located in some remote backwater: there are hourly trains to London which take about 85 minutes and there are plenty of thriving towns around Essex. Clacton was once a popular holiday destination for Londoners, until the package holiday was invented back in the 1960s and the Londoners opted for the Costa Brava. I can still feel the wind whip in off the North Sea as Clacton’s economic obituary was being written by the tour operators, around the time the United Kingdom (and Ireland) joined the European Economic Community as the EU was then called. Whatever caused Clacton-on-Sea to go into decline, it was not the European Union: it was already in visible decline before Britain joined.
Some towns just do better than others and Clacton has found no growth driver to replace the missing holidaymakers. Another East Anglian town, Cambridge, is just an hour away and has attracted a booming tech industry. Clacton instead attracts inbound retirees – the population has risen a little – and this explains a large part of the higher Leave vote. People over 65 opted for Leave at double the rate of the under-25s, a pattern of social conservatism also evident at the recent Irish referendums on abortion and on same-sex marriage.
This factor alone explains much of the apparent regional variation in referendum outcomes for which the news media insist on finding economic explanations, preferably with camera shots to match.
Declining fishing ports
There are dozens of towns like Clacton around England, including some declining fishing ports like Lowestoft, Grimsby and many former industrial centres in the Midlands and North. Globalisation and economic competition explain decline in some cases, but there are successes as well as failures in towns and smaller cities exposed to the same economic forces.
Why some do well while others decline has been studied intensively by economists and geographers around the world and a recent report from the Brookings Institution in Washington draws two conclusions about patterns of growth and decline in the US. The first is that size matters – the bigger centres have bigger labour pools and this becomes a key attraction for new businesses needing skilled staff. This is very evident in Ireland: Cork already has some tech and pharma companies, making it better placed to attract more. Who wants to be the first, and perhaps the only, pharma company in a smaller centre?
The second conclusion is that remoteness is a real handicap. If your town or small city is a long way away from everywhere else, the going will be tough. This is not so much of a problem in Europe where distances and commuting times are short, but the US has some older towns in decline which lack scale and are several hundred miles from the next sizeable urban centre. Some of these places attracted economic activity for some special reason, mining towns for example, and have a huge locational disadvantage when the tide goes out.
Thankfully, Ireland is a compact little island with an improving road network, and locational disadvantages are much smaller.
It is a delusion that Brexit, whatever form it takes, will rejuvenate English towns such as Clacton, whose decline has nothing to do with EU membership or EU constraints.
There is nothing to stop the UK pursuing more effective policies to help declining sectors or regions. And it is a cop out to blame inaction on the EU.
SHARING OPTIONS: