AS PART of a masters course, former editor of the Yellow Advertiser, Paula Dady has written an extended comment piece on UKIP in Thurrock.
Paula lives in Aveley and has been a keen observer of Thurrock life through the years.
======================
Back Down The River
By Paula Dady
STEPPING out of my house at the top of a long, winding street, I look down through the mass of lights towards the Thames. Lying silent and invisible in the dark distance, its presence is told only by the sparkling structure of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. This is a cold, clear February evening – and despite a damp feeling in the air, there’s no mist hanging over the marshes tonight.
I can see for miles, but I’m hoping the UKIP meeting I’m setting off for now will give me a different kind of view. I’m hoping for an insight into the deep political changes happening in this seemingly innocuous, transitory place.
This is Thurrock, a large area of south-east Essex which includes Tilbury, a natural gateway to the River Thames and London with its geographical open mouth facing the Continent. Since prehistoric times this was the first soil trodden for many of those entering the country. Halfway through the last century, Tilbury was the place where
The Empire Windrush docked, carrying its cargo of 492 West Indian immigrants. They had come to England to fill empty posts in state-run services such as London Transport and the NHS because of a post-war labour shortage.
Now, this is prime UKIP territory, with voter polls showing that Thurrock is one of the Parliamentary seats most likely to ‘turn purple’ in the 2015 General Election. Thurrock Council, the unitary authority that covers the area, came out of 2014 with six elected UKIP councillors. Tim Aker, UKIP’s Prospective Parliamentary Candidate here, is already an East of England MEP.
Mr Aker has a number of different videos on the Thurrock UKIP website and in one he lays down a challenge to the Labour candidate, Polly Billington, to join him in a public debate on immigration. He calls it “the number one issue in Thurrock”. There will be an opportunity for members of the public to ask questions and I have decided I will.
I know this area well. I live here. It was also part of the ‘patch’ I covered when I worked here as a local journalist. I moved on from my newspaper job nearly a decade ago, but now I’m on a new quest. I want to understand why this largely working class domain has moved from traditional Labour stronghold to Conservative at the last election – and now, it seems, much further to the right.
The meeting is taking place in Grays, the hub of Thurrock’s local government operation. The town centre has a one-way traffic system that offers little chance of escape and the speed of the flow means my heart steps up a gear as I try to find a street parking space. I don’t want to use the large car parks set well back from the main thoroughfare at night if I can avoid it – the large, unlit spaces under the flyover adjacent to it are often populated by small groups or lone figures, obscured to shadowy outlines.
I struggle to believe my luck when I find a space little more than a street away from the venue.
As I cross the road to the Thameside Theatre, water gushes and spurts from the kerbside and I look down in dismay at the seeping stain on my smartest tan leather boots – and when I look around at some of the other meeting-goers traipsing in beside me, I think that maybe trainers and a more casual look would have been just fine.
As soon as I enter the building, though, a variety of different people in suits thrust pieces of paper into my hands, each with broad smiles and a touch of desperation.
One is a letter handed out on behalf of the Labour candidate, Ms Billington. She has decided not to attend and gives her reasons why; she feels this debate has been set up entirely on Mr Aker’s terms. Another is from a market research company, offering me cash to join focus groups looking at why Thurrock voters are switching from Labour to UKIP.
The third comes from a young blonde man who smells strongly of a Calvin Klein-style aftershave; it is a sheet to fill in with one question I would like to ask Mr Aker. Police line an area to the right of the entrance. I take a deep breath and make my way to the third floor.
In the lift, I think about that line of police and how they might be worried about trouble at an event like this; in January, a swastika was spray-painted on a memorial in the town’s park just hours before the start of a public service there on Holocaust Memorial Day, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
No-one has been apprehended for that crime, but whoever did it, there’s reason to believe race-hatred is out there. It strikes me that ‘immigration’ is something of a sanitized term; what it means as a political topic to different people may be many different things, from control of our borders in the future to how the law treats immigrants who are already here.
The Essex UKIP website has its clues to the party’s views on this, of course; I find a posting entitled ‘Enoch Powell – The Rivers of Blood Speech – Judge for Yourself’.
The piece was posted in December last year and has an introduction by a UKIP member called Phil Palij. Here, he writes about how he thinks attitudes to the speech have changed:
“The big difference now is people are looking at the facts and in this case the words of Enoch Powell’s speech and making up their own minds. He was far ahead of his time.” 1
I wonder how many prospective UKIP voters who read the posted extracts of Enoch Powell’s famous speech truly see its reality – that it proposes a world where ‘no blacks’ signs could again hang in windows in this country. And whether or not that is really what they want.
White plastic chairs have been arranged in a large area with purple walls, though I realise the latter can only be an odd coincidence. At the top end of the room, tables have been laid out bench-style with seats behind for the politicians’ panel, though it is clear by now that Mr Aker will not be opposed in tonight’s debate. The chairs are filling up fast, but I manage to find one which is slightly separated from most of the others by a pillar. Noting down my name and my question on the paper provided, I ask some more suited men sitting at the side who I should hand it to.
“The Indian man over there,” one of them says, pointing, “he’s the one collecting them in for Mr Aker.” I guess I should have seen that coming and find it hard to suppress a faint smile as I hand the man my paper. He looks awkward and then I worry that I may have seemed patronising; maybe this meeting is going to be harder to get through than I thought.
Mr Aker is busy shaking hands with people and chatting briefly as they take their seats. He wears an immaculate, buttoned suit and has a baby-soft, smoothly shaved face. Straightaway, something about him makes me think of evangelical preachers speaking to the masses in tents – and I wage a little bet with myself that when he chose his tie he knew baby pink is supposed to be the colour of cleanliness.
I listen in to some of the chatter as I keep my eyes falsely focused on the papers in my hand. One of the men who has filed into the room is talking about prison.
“It’s hard to believe how soft they’ve gone,” the man says, “I know someone who gets himself in trouble so he goes inside and gets three square meals a day.”
“Yes, and heating,” Mr Aker adds, smiling antiseptically.
I want to ask him if he thinks the country’s jails should be unheated, but I wait for the debate to start instead. The wait seems to go on for a while and I can feel the seeping heat of Mr Aker’s popularity in the room as he makes his way round.
A video of Mr Aker giving his speech is posted on the Essex UKIP website. There is also a link to the Mr Aker’s election campaign video, which sets him out firmly as a local candidate, “born and living” in Thurrock, unlike the Labour candidate, Ms Billington, who lives in Islington. Mr Aker grew up, it says, in Aveley. This interests me; it is the village where where I currently live.
Aveley has its advantages and its drawbacks. From a personal point of view, I can say with honesty that I have had friendly, helpful neighbours here. On garbage collection days, I come home to find they have wheeled my emptied bins neatly back into place in my front garden.
When my husband was recovering from surgery for cancer and I was nursing him at home, they asked if I needed any shopping. When one of my elderly, but spritely, neighbours was suddenly taken ill, they made sure he had frequent visitors. And when I say ‘they’, I mean a number of different neighbours, up and down the long, winding street. There is a sense of camaraderie, perhaps of the old East End – and I have felt proud and, yes, even uplifted at how that friendship is extended to all, no matter what their background. Now I hope that won’t change.
Drawbacks come in the form of some of the physical surroundings; the ‘village’ is run down and, on the other side of the roundabout that divides the two small parts of Aveley, the Kenningtons estate was plagued for decades by a series of GLC-owned landfill sites, known as Aveley 1, 2 and 3. In very recent years, these have finally been grassed over, though work on the landfill park is ongoing; there is a need to monitor levels of gases and leachate, including such desirable elements as arsenic.
But for all the years they were in operation, like many of the other landfill sites across Thurrock, Basildon and various parts of Essex, they caused an almost intolerable nuisance to those whose homes were nearby. In Aveley, residents were separated from the vast landfill by little more than a narrow road and a wire fence; they were on one side and the landfill on the other. The biggest problem on a day-to-day basis was the putrid smell, often making people reluctant to open their windows or use their gardens. In the late 1980s, a massive landslide at the Aveley site exposed rotting refuse from decades before for days on end.
And all the time, resentment grew for the London boroughs that sent it here; and I think that this is a significant resentment, because it is part of a much larger feeling in Thurrock that has never quite gone away.
I soon realise that the questions from the ‘immigration debate’ audience are, for the most part, not really questions; they are statements about what the asker perceives to be the ill effects of immigration, upon which Mr Aker takes the opportunity to expound some of UKIP’s policies – to loud applause and exited cheering. He talks about the party’s proposed introduction of a “points-based Australian-style” immigration system, about “making sure that local people are first in the queue for social housing”.
He takes some more time to talk about the housing issue, mainly in two aspects; one concerns the over-development of many areas of Thurrock and the other the issue of poor maintenance of much of the social housing stock. He tells the story of a recent visit to the resident of a council flat and the tenant’s despair at the damp conditions.
As I look at those sitting around me, I can see nods of agreement as they listen attentively, but I notice that they are somehow more subdued and – well, more sad than before. It flashes through my mind that whatever any other UKIP politician anywhere else may be getting up to, Mr Aker is determined to take up the issues of his constituents – and he knows how to latch on to the problems of the people here tonight, the disgruntled of this town.
I wonder if at least part of what he is really doing is picking at the pieces of the shattered promises that went before – or maybe even the wounds they left behind. And the promises have been many.
Working as a local newspaper reporter, I was at Tilbury’s Cruise Terminal for the launch event of Thurrock: A Visionary Brief in the Thames Gateway, which included a keynote speech by Tessa Jowell, in her then role as Culture Secretary in Tony Blair’s government.
Hundreds of residents were among those who sat and watched as Dutch architects got up on stage and photographed the audience in a bizarre gesture supposed to symbolise the importance of the views of the people. We were entering a new age, where environmentally-friendly houses would be designed with the help of local men and women; some of these homes would be built in freshly-planted woodland and others on stilts in the midst of marshland. A plethora of artists’ impressions made it all seem so real.
That was June, 2004 – and more than a decade on, if regeneration has come here I suspect it is hiding very well from too many of the people who were supposed to be such a central part of it.
Tens of thousands of new homes are currently planned, built or under construction in Thurrock. I see them every day, but I haven’t noticed any on stilts. Actually, I haven’t seen any that look very different from all the other high-density build homes going up across the country. They weren’t designed by the people who live in them, for sure – still, I reflect, at least they are comfortable flats and houses for those who need them.
Tonight’s meeting is brought sharply back into focus for me by more energetic cheering and clapping. In the midst of this a middle-aged man sitting somewhere behind me calls out: “The trouble is, when you vote for the big parties, you put your trust in them, but once they’re in they don’t want to know the likes of us. They don’t seem to listen to us. They never hear what we’re saying.”
Mr Aker eagerly replies that UKIP does listen to the people, unlike, he says, “the rest of the political classes. We are public servants and you are our masters.” This is a mantra he goes on to repeat throughout the hour.
Suddenly, my name is called out and I feel my heart beat faster. It seems to me that Mr Aker stares a little askance at the paper for a second or two before he visibly straightens up, ready to speak.
“Immigration is the number one issue because it underpins every other issue,” he says, “and it is the number one issue on the doorstep.”
His words start to blur for me as he talks about the Labour government’s “shameful” record on immigration and how it has been a subject no-one has been allowed to discuss properly in this country for decades; he is looking directly at me and I think it would be rude to look down to take notes, but his gist is unmistakeable – the electorate wants to talk about it now and that is why it is the number one national issue.”
There is cheering and he asks me if that has answered my question.
I say, ”Thank you for trying to answer it, but I wanted to know why immigration is the number one issue in Thurrock, when this is a place that clearly has so many other pressing issues? I mean, speaking hypothetically, If immigration stopped altogether, would it solve those issues? Would we have a fairer society, with more equality of opportunity for all?”
“I didn’t suggest stopping immigration completely,” he says.
“No, I know,” I reply, “but what I mean is, could your proposals on immigration really resolve the other issues?”
There is silence from the audience and Mr Aker returns to the idea that it would help resolve other issues “if immigration was better controlled and we took back control of our borders”.
Then he adds: “Anyway, maybe it wouldn’t be the number one issue if people had been allowed to talk about it.”
I thank him for trying to answer my question and the debate moves on. I think it may be going off on a tangent a little when a man a few seats behind and to my right asks a question from the floor, seeking opinions on the care given to ex-servicemen when they return to civilian life. Yet Mr Aker responds to this with considerable energy, condemning the lack of proper military hospitals and care for returning soldiers. I realise this is not off topic after all, but the airing of views on who deserves priority when it comes to public money and resources.
Someone else in the audience mentions Orsett Hospital and the care it once provided for military personnel, as well as everyone else in Thurrock. There are some loud sighs in the room and another voice says, “Yes – and look what we’ve got now.”
Orsett Hospital was once Thurrock’s general hospital, set in a pleasant semi-rural location a few miles from Grays. It has since been reduced to a much smaller concern for outpatients and minor injuries, the greater part of it sold off as prime housing land.
The people of Thurrock are now sent to Basildon Hospital instead, where the high death was recently the subject of national news stories.
Former Labour MP for Thurrock, Andrew Mackinlay, who remained in office from 1992 to 2010, spent a great deal of his time campaigning to keep Orsett as a general hospital in the mid-nineties.
Back then, it was a matter of huge public concern in Thurrock. Basildon and Thurrock NHS Hospitals Trust had published a plan for the future of its hospital services – a plan with options that didn’t include any that would retain Orsett as a general hospital.
By January 11th the people had taken up the call to action; that week’s Thurrock Gazette 2 carried a front page story on how a public meeting called by the health authority to discuss the proposals was abandoned and rescheduled for a bigger venue after more than 300 “furious” protesters turned up.
Asked by Thurrock Council to examine the plan, the internationally-renowned King’s Fund declared the options put forward by the health authority “muddled and totally inadequate”. The report the King’s Fund team produced concluded that “Thurrock has been identified as an unhealthy area with high incidence of heart disease and other problems. This plan does not tackle this issue and does not set any targets for improving matters.” 3
It can only be imagined that the election of the New Labour government in 1997 must have brought some hope to the campaigners after more than two years – especially as Alan Milburn had visited Orsett Hospital with the Labour prospective parliamentary candidate for Basildon, Angela Smith, during the General Election campaign.
Mr Mackinlay certainly seems to have entertained that hope. The Hansard record for June 5th, 1997, includes an Adjournment debate led by him where he pleads the case for the retention of Orsett as a general hospital, with its own A&E services. And his language is powerful as he explains why the health authority plan is “perverse, given Thurrock’s riparian, industrial, Lowryesque urban area, which runs some 14 miles along the river”. 4
The new Minister of State at the Department of Health – who just happened to be the same Mr Milburn who had visited the threatened hospital when he was electioneering – was ready with a long-winded reply. Dancing delicately round the issue, he twisted it round to focus on the disposal of much of the Orsett Hospital site as land for housing – and how that would release new money for the local NHS. It was clear that neither he nor his government would save the hospital and the health authority had its way.
But now Mr Aker is busy tackling another local issue that has come up in the ‘immigration’ debate – local jobs. He is telling the audience that his party will be “making sure British jobs go to British people”.
The cheers are loud and one man interjects with his own experience; he claims that he has been unemployed for years because “there’s always an Eastern European in the queue in front of me”.
Mr Aker talks about how EU membership has also cost Thurrock jobs in other ways, giving the example of Tilbury power station. At the mention of this, there is particularly loud agreement from the floor.
This topic is one Mr Aker knows well; it is featured in another of his personal videos on the UKIP website.
Tilbury Power Station closed in 2013 with the loss of 220 jobs. It was a source of pride as well as employment in the area; before its conversion to a biomass plant, it played a significant role in keeping the country fuelled with electricity during the miners’ strike of the mid-eighties. National newspaper articles and features published when the closure was announced in make much of how little attention seemed to be paid to saving it. The Guardian website carried an article on August 16th, 2013, by journalist Terry Macalister 5, where Nigel Staves, the power station’s manager, takes him on a tour of the newly-closed green energy facilty. Mr Macalister writes:
“Although few in public life may have paid much heed to this giant Essex engine over the years, this is no ordinary closure. Tilbury claimed latterly to be the biggest biomass plant in the world, providing 10% of Britain’s renewable power, and was a pioneer in the field of low-carbon generation. But the RWE Npower-owned electricity generator has failed to qualify for government incentives to burn wood instead of coal and has been forced into inaction.
Now facing an unexpected retirement after 13 years as Tilbury’s boss, to say that Staves, 63, is upset would be an understatement. “I can’t rest easy with this. It’s a bit like an unexplained death in the family…I can’t understand the country turning its back on it,” he said.”
The plant manager’s sense of frustration was shared by Jackie Doyle-Price, the Conservative MP for Thurrock, who argued with the Department of Energy and Climate Change over the matter. Once again, it seems, a Thurrock MP found no ally in a government of her own party when it came to a crucial local issue. She told The Guardian that:
“There was so much excitement and pride here about all that was being done, it’s like two fingers have been stuck up in our face. If we need to keep the lights on in Britain then we should be doing all we can to get new investment.”
But the investment required was not forthcoming because the plant failed to meet the terms of the EU’s Large Combustion Plant Directive. As might be expected, it is something UKIP has seized upon and, during a speech to the European Parliament at Strasbourg on January 12th, 2015, Mr Aker said:
“We are always told we must stay in the EU because of jobs. Well, you tell that to 220 of my constituents who lost their jobs when Tilbury power station closed.”6
I wonder how this is really relevant to the immigration debate and I can’t help feeling a degree of vindication over my question being the right one to ask. Surely immigration is not Thurrock’s biggest issue. I think the facts speak for themselves.
On the June 25th, 2013, Thurrock Council members were presented with an update on the population as a result of the release of information from the 2011 Census 7. Headline points included a growth in the population, which is younger than average. Unemployment remains relatively high, the highest levels of qualification remain low and health remains relatively poor. Overall, nearly two-thirds of Thurrock households are classified deprived in one or more of four categories – housing, education, health and income.
And while the BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) population of the area rose from 7.2% in 2001 to 19.1% in 2011, this means that more than four out of every five residents are classified White British. English is spoken as a first language by 94%, with a further 5% able to speak English to a good standard.
But Mr Aker has returned to the matter of immigration head-on now. He is promising the audience that he will ask the Mrs Doyle-Price, who currently remains the Tory MP for Thurrock, what has happened to the 35 Sikhs from Afghanistan, asylum seekers who came into Tilbury stowed away in a shipping container last August. They included 13 children and one man who died before emergency services got to them.
They were pictures in national news bulletins, some of them barely able to walk, being led away gently to help.
“When someone is seeking asylum,” he says, ”they should go to the nearest safe country. When your house is on fire, you don’t run down the street looking for the house with the biggest telly.”
Clearly, Mr Aker believes they should be swiftly deported. The applause is as loud as ever .
Some of the questions and remarks from the audience strike me as increasingly racist, including a query on who would be moving into flats being built on land in Grays owned by one of the London boroughs and a man declaring he had been forced to move out of his house “because of all the blacks and Chinese moving in around me”.
I notice Mr Aker momentarily colour and he says something I can barely hear to those around him which includes the words “of course, some of the conversations will feel uncomfortable”.
I wonder quietly how UKIP would utilise this hatred – and maybe more significantly, how they would control it, too.
At the end of the meeting I shake Mr Aker’s hand and he smiles, but moves swiftly on to the next person. Then a suited, middle-aged man with a clipboard and a strong Estuary accent asks me if I’d like to join UKIP and I politely decline, saying I don’t belong to any political party and don’t intend to. A man standing with him, dressed more casually, steps forward.
“I never thought I’d belong to any party, either,” he says, ”until I found UKIP.”
I smile and walk away, but he has scared me; I realise that it would be all too easy to substitute that last word with another name and what we’d have here is something close to a religious movement.
As I leave I am handed the UKIP calendar for 2015 and I take it out of curiosity. Each month features an idyllic British scene from a different part of the country – except May, which is decorated by a photo of a ballot box. I notice that there is not one picture representing the county where the party hopes to make its greatest electoral impact this year.
As I pause to cross the road outside, I can see workmen and a string of vans; the water I noticed earlier must be from a burst main. I watch as it streams down the road and it makes me think.
A short drive later and I am home. As I stand by my car, I can still see for miles, right out to the Dartford crossing and beyond. I think that if this place does become UKIP territory in the General Election, I might decide not to stay – but at least I have a choice.
Suddenly, I feel quite sad. For too many years, the people here have put up with the rubbish that came up from London and the lack of care and concern that found its way along the Thames. Now it may just be that the dreadful poison is about to flow back down the river.
Footnotes
1. Phil Palij, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Enoch Powell – The “Rivers of blood speech” – Judge For Yourself’, UK Independence Party Essex News and Views for Members and Supporters, 14 December 2014, [9 February 2015], http://www.ukipessex.org/?p=1622
2. David Hyman, ‘Power to the People’, Thurrock Gazette, 13 January 1995, p.1.
3. Stuart Henderson, ‘Health Talks’, Thurrock Gazette, 27 January 1995, p.1.
4. Andrew Mackinlay, ‘Adjournment Debate: Orsett Hospital’ , Hansard, 5 June 1997, [9 February 2015], http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1997/jun/05/orsett-hospital-thurrock
5. Terry Macalister, ‘Tilbury power station mothballed after investment runs out’, The Guardian, 16 August 2013, [9 February 2015], http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/16/tilbury-power-station-mothballed
6. Tim Aker, ‘Thurrock: eBulletin from Tim Aker MEP’, UK Independence Party Essex News and Views for Members and Supporters, 2 February 2015, [9 February 2015], http://www.ukipessex.org/?p=1998
7. Steve Cox, ‘Census 2011 Release Update’, Thurrock Council Corporate Overview and Scrutiny Committee paper, 25 June 2013, item 7.
