Thread by @JohnHyde1982

Tomorrow @bbcquestiontime is coming from my home town Clacton and its audience features purely Brexit voters.

Social media will no doubt be full of negative comments about gammons and xenophobes. But that doesn't tell the full story...
(short thread)

It is true that 69.5% of Clacton (well, the district of Tendring) voted to Leave. But this is a town ignored, allowed to rot and exploited by snake oil salesman promising easy fixes.

People were told they would lose out through Brexit, but what if you have nothing to lose?

Like so many seaside towns, there was a crippling long-term lack of investment which brought the town to its knees. Employers like Butlins, Woolwich and major retailers have all left town in the last four decades.

The effect of this was that young and higher educated people (those more likely to vote Remain) left Clacton in their droves. The town is statistically the oldest in the country and has one of the highest rates of unemployment.

To illustrate the flight, the population of 15-19 year-olds fell 14% from 2011 to 2021. It increased 41% among 70-74 year-olds.

At the same time, with only low-paid jobs available, deprivation massively increased. The proportion of children living in poverty is almost 35%. clactonandfrintongazette.co.uk/news/north_ess…

So with higher-paid jobs wiped out, people made poorer and the town in steady decline, who steps in as a potential saviour? UKIP.

Farage visited numerous times, and Douglas Carswell was briefly the first UKIP MP.

Carswell was such a fan of Clacton that he now lives in Jackson, Mississippi, some 4,553 miles away.

This town was cynically identified as a petri dish for testing out the kind of rhetoric that won the referendum. The people of Clacton were promised a way out of their problems by people who neither understood nor (I would suggest) cared about solving them.

So when you watch #bbcqt tomorrow and perhaps get angry at how these people could possibly think and say as they do, then please understand the hardship and exploitation they have been through.

(I know @anandMenon1 and @campbellclaret are on the panel, so tagging them in case they read this for a bit of context)

And just one more thing... I'm so sick of journalists doing vox pop pieces from Clacton and happening to find the most racist and offensive people. They exist, of course, but I've seen it so many times where those people are sought out to suit the narrative.