Why We're Backing John
We had better say at once that we are not impartial. Clacton for Europe is run by John Stevens's campaign, and in this by-election we are asking people to vote for him. We would sooner admit that in our first sentence than have it discovered in our last.
Our reasons are not complicated. John Stevens is pro-European without reservation. He does not hold that leaving the European Union was a sound idea let down in the carrying-out; he holds that it was a mistake, and he says so in plain terms. After ten years in which most politicians have learned to speak of Europe only in careful half-sentences, that plainness has become rare enough to be worth something.
He has, besides, been making the case for the better part of his life, and not without cost to himself. He sat as a Member of the European Parliament. He is now deputy leader of the Rejoin EU Party. And he has stood against Nigel Farage once before, at Buckingham, and beaten him. He does not come to this argument as a stranger.
Why fight here, of all places
There were those who counselled him not to stand at all. Their reasoning was that this constituency, of all of them, is the least promising ground the pro-European cause could choose; that a poor showing here would only advertise a weakness better left unadvertised; and that the seat might as well be left to a man in a costume.
We think that reasoning quite wrong, and unkind besides to the people who live here. No election in a democracy is a joke, and the question of where this country belongs in the world is not one either. To call a seat unwinnable is one thing. To treat its voters as beyond reaching is quite another, and we have had our fill of that from people who have never spent a wet Tuesday on the seafront.
There is a harder-headed argument as well, and it is the one that settled the matter for us. In 2024 Nigel Farage took forty-six in every hundred votes cast here. This is the very heart of the Leave country, and everyone knows it. Yet opinion across the nation has travelled a long way since then, and barely three in ten now think the decision was right for the country. Still no major party will say as much, because each of them is afraid of precisely this: of being made to answer for Brexit in a place like ours, and found wanting.
That fear is the whole of the difficulty. It is what keeps the three-quarters of Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters who now believe Brexit a mistake from ever hearing their own parties say so. It is what holds the Conservatives in what John has called a servitude to Reform. Break the fear, and the argument may at last be had honestly.
A respectable pro-European vote in this constituency would begin to break it. We shall not win the seat, and we will not pretend otherwise; but to show that the case can be put in the hardest ground in the country, and not be laughed out of the room, would take from the parties that have spent a decade avoiding the subject one more excuse for their silence.
That is why this by-election matters a good deal beyond our own coast, and why we mean to work at it. If you think as we do, we should be very glad of your help.