UnHerd77%
A day in the life of Farageland's Wetherspoons 30%
By Felix Pope36%
7/15/2026, 11:03:56 PM
Keywords: Nigel Farage, Clacton On Sea, Wetherspoons, By Election, Migration, Brexit, Ukip, Seaside Towns, Deprivation
BS Summary: This article contains 38 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Anecdotal, and Biased Writer Voice, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 20.2% saturation with 476 hits. Analysis detected 3,603 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,358 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 39.8% and a BS Rank of 30% (11,349 of 16,191 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 70.10% of the article peer group.
It is a blindingly sunny morning in Clacton-on-Sea and the Moon and Starfish is already rammed.
The punters are drinking pints of lager on bright plastic chairs in the garden and white mugs of machine-generated coffee inside.
A silent news channel is reporting that the Strait of Hormuz has again been shut down.
There are families and some children in beach-gear running around, but on the whole the crowd skews elderly.
Then again, Clacton is a pretty elderly town.
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?
Nigel Farage at the Moon and Starfish.
(Ben Stansell/AFP/ Getty)
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.”
More from this author Farage's Clacton reckoning
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.
Clacton amusements.
(John Keeble/Getty)
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.
“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.”
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.
A mother in Jaywick, one of England’s most deprived areas.
(Dan Kitwood/Getty)
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.
A bird and a beer.
(Felix Pope)
“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.”
Truth in disrepair.
(Dan Kitwood/Getty)
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.
Analysis
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