Standing Up for Clacton

There is a way of speaking about this constituency that we have all grown weary of hearing. Because we voted Leave, and did so decisively, a good many people who have never set foot here consider that they have us worked out. They picture somewhere backward, or somewhere bad-tempered, and they say so on the television without much fear of being contradicted. We have listened to it for ten years, and we have had enough of it.

A summer afternoon at Frinton. This is the stretch of coast that so many are quick to write off.

More than one town

A word about our name, since it fairly invites a question. We call ourselves Clacton for Europe because Clacton is the name of the constituency, and it is the whole constituency we mean to speak for, not the town alone. Frinton and Walton, Holland-on-Sea, Jaywick, St Osyth, Kirby Cross and the villages inland are every bit as much a part of this seat, and of this group, as the pier and the front. If you live in any of them and you believe this country's future lies closer to Europe, you are one of us, and the invitation is exactly the same.

Being pro-European has never meant looking down on our neighbours

We are a pro-European group. We think leaving the European Union was a mistake, and we should like the country to rejoin in time. But we have never taken that to license any contempt for the people we live among, and we never shall. Those who voted Leave in 2016 are not a punch-line. They are our neighbours and our families, the people we pass in the shops and along the front, and they voted as they did for reasons that were real to them: worry about work, about a Westminster that had stopped listening, about a country that too readily forgets that towns such as ours exist at all. One need not share the conclusion to see that it came from somewhere genuine. We would far sooner persuade our neighbours than lecture them, and no one was ever persuaded by a man who plainly despised him.

What the commentators overlook, in any case, is that there have always been pro-European people here, and in no small number. We did not vanish in 2016. We work here, shop here, bring up our children here, and are as fond of the place as anyone who voted the other way. To care about a close friendship with Europe and to care about this constituency are not competing loyalties. For us they have always been one and the same, for we want the best for the place we call home.

So we will not be told that where we live is a thing to be ashamed of. Nor will we go about telling our neighbours that they were foolish and ought to feel it. Both, in the end, are only different ways of talking down to this corner of Essex, and we have had a decade of both.

A voice, not a lecture

All we ask is that the pro-European people of this constituency, however many or few the pundits suppose us to be, should have a voice. That is the whole of it. Not a scolding for anybody, and not a quarrel with our neighbours, but a fair hearing for people who believe this country's future lies closer to Europe, in a place that is quite as much theirs as anyone else's.

If that is you, whatever you voted in 2016 and whichever party you support today, then come and stand with us.