IIt was without season in Alford, in Lincolnshire, and the start of the evening had brought a satisfied glow in the main street and the residential avenues of this calm market city. Colin Matthews, a former teacherPut another quarter of work trying to convince people to give him another mandate as a local conservative advisor and amazed by the fury epidemics he encountered. A man, he told me, had simply caught a little conservative country literature in his mailbox and had torn it into small pieces.
A couple came out of their house and rose in a very large car. For any reason, they both transported huge slices of vacillating chocolate cake on tiny white plates. What one of them said to me was laced with disdain. “They do not manifest themselves normally giving us leaflets,” she said, pointing Matthews. “They normally do not give two shit.” Even here it seemed, rude and angry, things were.
Matthews and some of his conservative colleagues explained some of the reasons for the fury of the local population: government plans To set up pylons lines in the fields next to the Lincolnshire coast, and the fact of the growing expanses of earth in solar farms. Outside the city’s main pub, a few people talked about immigrants in Skegneness hosted while military veterans were sleeping in the street. It was a strange show: to shake fury in an environment of idyllic appearance, for reasons that Matthews understood. “This country has moved,” he said.
It is certainly not a country that is ready to provide a lot of support to its party. In Thursday’s council elections, Matthews was defeated By a British reform candidate who received almost three times more support. The first election of the mayor of Lincolnshire, for its part, was won by Andrea JenkynsThe former conservative minister who has just joined the last political vehicle of Nigel Farage. At 6:30 a.m. the next morning, I watched it give the Most grace acceptance speech I have already seen, in which she said it was time to finish “sweet Britain” – kindness, be gone! – And suggested that asylum seekers should be forced to live in tents.
Most of this story concerned the defeat and collapse of conservatives. But the reform got closer to Voting of work twice in northeast of LincolnshireA local government area which includes Grimsby and Cleethorpes, a district with a Labor MP. All over the country, moreover, while the party took control of 10 advice and the conservatives crushed, there was the same feeling of realignment of the right to be part of something even greater.
A vocal part of supporters of the reform – men in particular – is nothing but familiar. They want “British stores”, zero immigration, the return of capital punishment and all the other things that are generally going to the average right -wing store list. But in Lincolnshire, I also spoke to newly converted fading voters who spoke in much more vague and provisional terms on how they simply wanted to change.
What linked everyone together – as well as many abstrainers – was the same bitterness and the same feeling I saw in Alford. Some 48 hours before election day, Luke Tryl, the director of the most in the common thinkank, had returned back Of his last discussion groupsWho, according to him, was overflowing with a level of “anger, discouragement or misery on the state of Great Britain which does not feel sustainable”. This is quite fair, and what fundamentally caused this wave of negativity could be much simpler than some people would not want.
People ‘food costs, advice tax invoices and HMRC transactions highlight the fact that they pay much more for much less – the definition of the distress dictionary. THE Winter fuel allocation cutOne of these rare political stories that everyone now mentions, has thrown the government – probably for the outfits – as a nasty bureaucrats who have put to tilt the scales even further from fundamental equity. And these distributional distributional are the context of many complaints from immigration.
There is also a global story over the past two decades. After the 2007-8 financial crash, the false dawn of Brexit, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the cost of the cost of living in progress, people have a sense of life, which represents a fucking thing after the other. In this context, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves after their electoral victory with warnings that everything was going worse It was the most stupid thing they could have done. And here we are. Life continues to go around in circles, and with each dark rotation of the wheel, Farage and his friends are becoming more and more popular.
They do it despite the clear gap between the problems on which they usually strike and what could really improve millions of lives. During the weekend, the reform leaders sounded on Teach children the wonders of the British EmpireTHE Evils of policies of diversity of advice And how they went Fight green investment. In the places where they will now be in charge, in the meantime, the same striking problems sink, even in the middle of wealth: hollow local services, terrible public transport, a chronic lack of social housing and a more satisfactory work shortage than driving vans or composing the plots stacked there. To underline this is not to neglect the policy of culture and identity, but still: if traditional politicians have finally started to act on these questions, they might begin to be less hated and to be wary.
It is, in raw terms, an image of the way this moment could pass. But I also wonder if England could have irrevocably changed in a way that none of us still understands. When I hear people pay tribute to Farage As a “good boy” and see whole streets rushing to take photos of him on their phones, I rather wonder what happened to our old bullshit detector. We are no longer the country to “do not growl” – completely the opposite, in fact. It often seems, moreover, as if the 21st century combination of the polarizing effects of social media and all these economic convulsions has left us an intensified version of an old national problem: our inability to really speak and to negotiate collectively for a better country. It seems that we sometimes suffer from the political equivalent of the rage of the roads, manifesting itself in valant cries or a tense silence.
The day after my judgment in Alford, I spent two days in Boston, the city of Fenland which has long been a word for the immigration in Eastern Europe and the support of Farage. As usual, I stayed at the first local Inn and I dined in the pub and the neighboring restaurant. Outside, everything was aligning for a victory based on anger and disaffection. Inside, despite the thirty people who saw their evening, there was a deadly calm and a scene which was summed up in a lively way where we arrived: among the pints of Madri and the mud of traditional false, even the married couples were barely called a word.