Old notions of class are redundant here. Credit: Mary Turner/Getty
The best place to watch the drama of Britain’s fastest changing postcode is next to Rainham’s 12th-century Norman church. At quarter past six, a tube-carriage haul of glum commuters is dumped at the station, where Essex meets the London sprawl. The final slog home is a curious walk of shame: past the gated Georgian pomp of Rainham Hall, and a sign for the Prawn Hub takeaway, mocked up in glaringly familiar colours. Barrack rows of new builds await them, following the pylons out to the desolate Rainham Marsh, where once upon a time, the Britain of the Nineties dreamt of building its own Disneyland.
What’s it like living here? I ask two men skulking off to the pub through the graveyard, past a pair of Lithuanian builders drinking cans. “It used to feel like a lovely English village,” says one. “Now it’s a fucking shithole and I can’t wait to get out.”
That night, the local branch of Reform UK met to plot their revolt against this New England. In the seedy light of the local working men’s club, the rebellious bourgeoisie of Essex shook hands with their exiled London counterparts: retired City bankers, tradesmen, medical students, labourers, and a softly spoken NHS worker from India. On stage was a map depicting the theatre of war: Barking and Rainham and Havering, the gap between London and shires, and the new fault line of British politics.
“The people gathered here are terrified for their children’s future,” explained Philip Hyde, a veteran of Havering politics, before taking to the stage with his mic. “You won’t believe the things I’ve been researching,” he teased his sullen audience. A litany of misery poured forth: cuts to police; IMF reports on public sector austerity; bankrupt councils; young families being raised in collapsing flats. A new mosque planned in Romford. A cavernous pause was left to allow the audience to groan. “We’re the bloody minority around here now,” someone heckled from the back.
Just 40 minutes away on the tube, Westminster is facing the prospect of a seismic revolt. Should Reform hold its polling momentum through 2029, a thick seam of light blue will reorder the old electoral map, spreading from the suburbs of East London, across the safe Tory seats of Essex, and out towards Nigel Farage’s holdout in Clacton. Barking and Dagenham — a Labour stronghold — is set to fall too. Here, amid the inter-war housing estates, the proportion of the white British population has fallen by 51% in two decades. The last election saw a 17.6% swing to Reform, and a slight Labour drop.
The defeat of the BNP in 2010, then the 2012 London Olympics, were supposed to remake the area into a confident multicultural district. Now, though, Reform’s revolt is set to be levied by two forces well beyond the comprehension of that long-lost decade. Demographic anxiety in the face of historic mass immigration has unearthed the folk memory of an exiled cockney diaspora, forced even further into the Essex shires. Old notions of class are increasingly redundant in these shifting hinterlands. Mass migration and downward social mobility have created a quasi-ethnic voting bloc, one that regards the British state as defunct, broken and entirely alien to its interests.
At the Rainham working men’s club, Hyde’s romp through national decline had driven the audience into an embittered fugue. Midway through an excoriation of the council, the master of ceremonies was interrupted by an angry mother. During a protest in Whitehall after the Southport stabbings, she claims her son was jailed for 13 months simply for standing there. “Where was Nigel Farage when they were sending innocent boys down for nothing?”
“Bring back Rupert Lowe,” someone heckles in the ensuing fracas. The tension’s been brewing all night: between a party in search of professionalisation and a lagered-up, pissed-off crowd. The bickering is only broken by a young man, taking to the stage and seizing the mic. “There’s no point squabbling,” says Kai Cunningham. “Reform is our only chance. The country is broken. Barking and Dagenham is broken, and all the lefties need to hear us say it’s broken, and realise we’re still here advocating for our country.” The loudest cheer of the night bellowed out.
Cunningham is representative of the new Reform. Twenty-one years old, confident, brisk, cheeky: fluent in both the fall of modern Britain and hope of its renewal. He has seen something like it with his own eyes. Jordan Kukabu, a friend from school, was stabbed in the heart with a machete outside Dagenham Heathway Station. “If I had gone down that route,” he says, as we walk past the day after the meeting, “I could have ended up like him.” A boxing club turned him around. Then came a political awakening while undergoing basic training in the army. At night, in the barracks, Cunningham would watch “atrocities taking place across the country” on his phone.
A plan was hatched. A degree in law would get Cunningham credibility. It would force those in Westminster to take him seriously. “We need more white working class men going into education, because let’s be honest, no one is going to listen to some brickey from Dagenham.”
Should Reform win — either in upcoming council elections or in 2029 — the party will inherit an area on the brink of even greater change. On the council website, a video of drone shots shows the up-and-coming district in the shadow of the London skyline: neo-Georgian municipal buildings, built in the days of Fifties full employment, overshadowed by a burgeoning vista of tacky high-rises, their garish plastic facades glowing in the estuary sun. Thousands of jobs are promised for a population set to jump by a half in the next decade.
But walk the streets below and a parallel city emerges. Britain’s fastest changing district, it’s ground zero for the historic wave of migration now set to define Britain’s 21st century. Every year, 18,000 people come here, and another 18,000 leave. “I have no idea who lives there,” says Cunningham, pointing to one of the newly built high-rises. At street level, arrivals from India, Nigeria and Afghanistan shun the worn-out shopping parades and high-street shops, opting instead for thriving open-air markets: an unnerving hum of a fringe non-place in a new global city. Transient, eerie and mysterious are how other locals describe it. It all speaks of a demographic upheaval so vast, says one social worker from nearby Ilford, that the state can barely conceive of the pace of change.
Glimmers of the past remain. The Becontree Estate — once the world’s largest social housing project — still offers a stubbornly suburban image of privet hedges and satellite dishes. Here are the cues for Cunningham’s vision of renewal: he speaks of his father and granddad’s generations, stretching back to the Ford Factory that opened back in 1932. They enjoyed simple things: a job, a home, a place to raise a family. Can Reform restore this? Cunningham mentions the party’s policy on apprenticeships, but there’s some deeper grievance, one beyond the exhausted sparring you see on Question Time. “It upsets me when people say they’re leaving, that they’ve got no one around anymore,” he says, recalling the family and friends that have packed their bags. “But there’s a younger generation that wants to stay and put up a fight.”
The loss of young people like Cunningham irks both the local party and its grandees. “Really, that’s the sort of young man we should be attracting back to the Labour Party,” says Jon Cruddas when I tell him about our tour. The former local MP is currently writing a social and political history of Britain through the lens of Dagenham, exploring how the “dynamics of modern capitalism” ran through the area. Here, he explains, was the Fordist utopia that inspired Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, then the steady unravelling of social democracy across the 20th century. The prospect of having to conclude his book with a Reform victory would be grimly ironic, especially for a man who’s helped keep the area Labour against the odds. The seat was supposed to fall with the Red Wall in 2019, but a hyper-local political machine kept the bricks here intact.
Cruddas became the area’s MP in 2001, at a time when 40,000 local manufacturing jobs were in the process of disappearing. The next two decades formed an almost moral crusade to stop the area from being forgotten completely. He once tried to get Ed Miliband to watch Fish Tank, a film set on an estate in Dagenham that might, as Cruddas puts it, explain crumbling class constituencies, worklessness and the importance of human flourishing. “He told me it was too depressing to watch.”
Cruddas sees Dagenham in almost novelistic terms: a place at the vanguard of change, seeming doomed to exist beyond the comprehension of Westminster — until all it can offer is hubris and warning. For him, it all started with the 2001 census, which failed to pick up on demographic change ahead of the BNP’s short-lived local triumph.
Now another reckoning is coming. “What’s at stake in the area is not just the future of the government, but the future of the Labour Party,” says Cruddas. In some sense, No. 10 understands this. Blue Labour, forged in the area, has been courted by Starmer, hoping to cobble together a coalition of Britons who want security, community and common sense. At the helm is Dagenham veteran Morgan McSweeney, rolling out set pieces once reserved for Nick Griffin. That involves the basics — repairing potholes, civic pride, neatly tailored patriotism (this time with an eye on the Donbas) — all glossed up with deportation spectacles and lively graphics on social media.
But Dagenham is not just a political lesson in staving off Right-wing populism. Just like Huxley’s interest in the area, a quieter, more tangible dystopia is being formed in this hinterland of London. Here is a vision of a radically different 21st-century Britain, an upheaval slowly emerging round its towns and cities: precarious work, ersatz apartments, a churn of neighbours, all gazing out over a solemn, unknowable sprawl, offering barely an echo of the lively, globalised, multicultural Britain promised to the country in the Blairite pomp.
Down by the river, you can find this new Dagenham being built on the ruins of the old Ford factory. Cranes tower over the estuary horizon, tending to a highrise village of 3,500 flats, part of the 50,000 planned for the area. Here, the place seems trapped by the weeping Thames sky, the dismal orbit of the A13. The end not just of London, but of the world itself. “Dagenham is home to a proud and diverse community that reflects the industrious and pioneering spirit of its heritage” boasts the construction site billboard. “This place is driving accelerated support for Reform,” Cunningham says. “On the doorstep we have a simple message that works well: improve the lifestyle of the people here rather than just adding more.”
In 2025, faced with a disastrous start, Labour seems finally to have heard Cruddas’s concern for human flourishing in Dagenham. Last year, a Demos essay by Chris Naylor, the former chief executive of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, portrayed it as the platonic form of the New England coming into being. This, he wrote, is a place where “vast changes in expectations, the erosion of trust” in politics meet the decline of “old world power paradigms” and collide with “new technologies” and ”rapidly changing demographics”.
But if Naylor’s essay is an accurate reading of Dagenham as it is, and Britain as it may yet be, its purported solutions also offer a warning for Starmer. Here the administrative state’s buzzwords around hubs, community engagement and multicultural success run up against reality, one that may yet spill over to rout not just Labour, but the entire Westminster establishment.
One issue is money. The local council is in worse financial straits than bankrupt Birmingham. The relocation of Smithfield and Billingsgate market to Dagenham Dock, and the arrival of 2,700 jobs, was recently scrapped due to rising costs. Amid that epic demographic upheaval, meanwhile, locals are increasingly resentful of how many foreign-born households are given social housing — especially when the wait for a four-bedroom home here is 67 years.
Outside an abandoned pub, Chloe, in her early thirties and pregnant, walks carefully with her two year old near the indifferent hum of the A13. She spent six years on a council waiting list for a house, while living in a “rat-infested flat” where the rent rose to nearly £2,000 a month. “I was basically the wrong colour,” she says wryly. “It’s not just English people, but second- and third- generation Asian and black families that are fed up and want to leave. I don’t want to sound awful, but it’s just not England around here anymore.”
Walking back to Rainham, certainly, there is a sense of exodus. Gated bungalows, guarded by stone lions and Union Jacks, dream of Deep Essex. In Orchard Village, the regenerated estate where Fish Tank was filmed, Mia*, a data and systems manager, points out the flats of people who’ve left: for Chelmsford, for Billericay, for Basildon. “You’d like to see Nigel Farage’s party around here to be quite honest,” she says. Hailed as a regenerative success after being rebuilt in 2009, the estate has drifted back to the despair Ed Miliband once ignored. “I feel sorry for the young people around here now,” says Rob, semi-retired, wearing his knackered Tesco outfit, rolling a cigarette in a stone patio full of gnomes. “I just can’t see a way to get on, have a life.” He’s never voted, but next time might well pick Farage.
The train takes you away from Dagenham and towards Rainham once more. Silent rows of new houses line the tracks, stretching out into the expanse of the silent Thames marshes until they become part of the forgotten landscape itself. Back on the high street, not far from Rainham Hall, I meet Greg*. A small business owner, he was a reluctant Reform voter at the last election. “The change I see in the area frightens me,” he says. “When people don’t know what the future will look like, they can do strange things.” As we talk, in the dusk of the spring evening, there is birdsong and daffodils, traces of the suburban escape that was.
*Some names have been changed.
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Subscribe“Britain voted Brexit because of austerity”. I take it you didn’t vote for Brexit James, or you’d know that wasn’t true.
To be fair to James, he is quoting the views of others.
Thank you, Howard.
An excellent essay, in which the last three words of the first paragraph neatly encapsulate Vince Cable’s life in the political arena : “almost entirely pointless”.
VC is not pointless. He recently tweeted this;
“You don’t need to be a Communist or even a Socialist to recognise the positives as well as the evils in Lenin’s rule. Not least, his New Economic Policy established pragmatic market socialism which eventually succeeded in Deng’s”
He and his ilk are dangerous.
Sadly I have to agree. Far, far too many of his generation held similar deluded opinions, in fact in many ways they are the progenitors of today’s ‘woke’ sub-culture.
At the time (the 60’s) it was so fashionable to espouse liberal/socialist views, that even the so called Conservative Party was infected with the poison. Just at look at Ted Heaths and a plethora of other feeble Tory cretins.
For me, the seminal moment was the suspension of capital punishment in August 1964, and the subsequent atrocity perpetrated almost exactly two years later in Shepherds Bush. The State had abrogated its power to chastise with utterly predictable and foretold results.
To compare Lenin’s NEP to China’s economic policy is absurd, just absurd. The NEP was very small scale and did little more than enable a few entrepreneurs to make various goods avaialble for a couple of years. China’s capitalism is on a vast scale.
oi tosspot we did not vote brexit cause of austerity..we voted cause we have witnessed yrs of repression from the EU that differed from the economic union we voted into in the 70s and watched successive gvmts take from us over the yrs..do not put ur bile to our lips
beautifully put, Steve, Thank You.
An interesting article containing a lot of truth. I am slightly surprised that Cable seems unable to see that there might be more important things than economics. He always struck me as having a little more depth than that, although I believe he was an economist for an oil company.
Having said that, the triumph of money and the economy has been with us for some decades now and has swept up almost everyone in, say, the top 50% of the population. I include myself to some extent, before I started to wake up over the last 15 years or so.
My first fegree was economics. The classical definition of which is the study of how a society allocates scarce natural resources to one of a number of possible uses.
Towards tye end of my studies, I came to the notion that economics is really about providing an intellectual justification for a political objective. Usuallywhere the political objective was the advancement of those who ere supporting the economic idea.
Afam Smiths invisible habd was no more than a justification to shift power from the landed aristocracy towards commercial enterprise. Likewise, Marx argued to take power from those who had it by dint of owning factories etc in order to replace power with those without such ownership.
Call me a cynic if you will.
Cynic then !The very clear difference between positive and normative economics was drummed into me at A level and then at the LSE..I focused on the former and very much took the view that it was a source of research for political science-not the other way round.Having said that,most economic debate currently appears to be characterised by sloppy thinking and an absence of any scientific method.
So the author is quite convinced that property assets – he means houses – should be taxed. He makes no attempt to explain why this wealth tax – which is what it would be – should apply to just one asset. A person with a million pound house is taxed on their wealth. A person with a million pound share portfolio is not. This is sensible? How does this economics expert propose that his tax will work with legal partners, for example husband and wife, each owning half the asset? It makes no sense and has never worked anywhere. And in any event, we already have a wealth tax called IHT. To raise more revenue, the Government, any Government, is going to have to look at the big number taxes: income tax, National Insurance, and VAT.
The Author obviously hasn’t heard of Council Tax,or death duties on Income /inheritance of £240,000 or above
I’d favour internet sales. And a tax on FATGA.
I used to be one of the naive souls that thought a strong economy (which meant a good chunk of free market economic policy) could only be grounded in a reasonably free and open political system. I am older now, and I know that for a fiction – not because of China (or somewhere smaller, like Singapore) proving me wrong, but because I now understand the power of the modern state to dictate how people think, quite frankly to manipulate it, through and with a media which is for its own reasons allied to it. The current propoganda on Covid is just the latest example – but based on opinion polls there doesn’t seem any doubt that it is highly effective in exerting control.
So, no, to the extent that a strong economy gives rise to a strong state, a state which is capable of dominating any communication medium it chooses to, I am quite certain that the example of China is not an aberration, it is quite capable of being the future for all of us.
‘China is not an aberration, it is quite capable of being the future for all of us.’
And that future is approaching fast. The US and the EU are clearly heading in the direction of a China-style society, while literally handing over their assets and markets to China. The same is true of Canada. Whether or not countries such as the UK and Australia can somehow hold out as islands of democracy and some sort of freedom will be one of the great questions of the years to come. As you say, our mainstream media is now in lockstep with the state, so the omens are not good.
Sadly I believe You are mostly Correct! ”Bladerunner” Style of Woke Capitalism and Chinese communism Societies , awaits the next Debt ridden generation?….”There is hope.”.thought Winston as he entered ‘Victory mansions’…
Did project fear fail because people thought other things were more important than personal wealth and wealth of the nation or was it because many saw it for the utter bullshit it was.
Where is the economic logic of staying tied to 7% of the worlds population – a 7% that sees its share of global GDP decline year on year, compared to sacrificing some of the benefits of being part of the 7% in order to seek new and better opportunities with the other 93%? Those who argue for staying with the 7% are defeatists that have no pride in or ambition for their country.
Taxing housing assets? Do you mean taxing people out of their houses? Where are they to go? We aren’t exactly flush with spare flats.
Mr. Kirkup is broadly right about China, but:-
“(And I still do: the sooner we start taxing housing assets to fund social care the better.)”
As if Britain does not tax “housing assets” already! And that a particular “new” tax can be reserved for a particular purpose.
Not only does HMG already tax houses, but VAT is levied on building repairs. That is a huge tax on essential annual maintenance which should be encouraged, not discouraged.
One supposes stamp duty doesn’t count as a tax either.
“Effective economic policy is trumping politics.” Except that no-one to my knowledge says that there is no politics in China. In fact I am sure that the CCP itself would say that ‘the leading role of the party’ guarantees that ‘politics is in command’. Deng’s turn toward ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ was prompted by politics; the prospect that the party would lose power if it did not improve the people’s standard of living in an East Asia which was on the march, developmentally. South Korea and Taiwan show that China’s particular brand of party-state is not the only political route to prosperity, even in Asia. What should stimulate our concern is not China’s success, but our own current failures, both economic and political.
It is not just V. Cable – the international establishment is generally in love with the Communist Party dictatorship of the People’s Republic of China.
Listening to Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum fawning over “President” Xi’s speech to the international elite about “freedom and democracy” would be funny if it was not so tragic. The international establishment assume that a Social Credit system of censorship and control (denying people with the “wrong” cultural and political opinions, employment or the ability to trade) will only be used against people they dislike – never against them themselves.
As for Donald John Trump – yes the election was rigged, but he seems to have had no plan about what to do if it was rigged (even though many people warned him that the election would be rigged), Not planning out what to do if the election was rigged, was a massive failure.
On trade the policy of President Trump was straightforward – free access to the American market IF a trading partner gave free access to its market. President Trump was not interested in one-way-trade (with America importing but not exporting) – he wanted two way trade (open both ways). Hardly rocket science – so I am surprised that V. Cable does not understand that the objective was always to “make a deal” – get access for American exports.
Idiots like Cable have no comprehension of sustainability, resilience and sufficiency whether on economic, political, cultural or ecological levels.
Similarly, very little is understood in terms of the economy being an energy system and how the rising energy cost of accessing and distributing energy is increasing. This is reducing the supply of surplus energy to create meaningful prosperity which is why living standards have laboured since before the Financial Crash.
Consequently, QE and other forms of monetary stimulus are effectively subsidising the increasing energy cost of accessing and distributing energy in order to avoid a prosperity crash.
Essentially, Western economies have reached secular stagnation and monetary stimulus is life supporting a system that has reached peak prosperity in relation to fossil fuels.
https://surplusenergyeconom…
This puts greater emphasis on ecological, cultural and political wellbeing.
Idiots like Cable think they know best but it is always the working class who are experiencing reality on the ground.
Vince cable is a numpty, as is James Kirkup.
..
If we want an economy like Germany or Switzerland then perhaps 70% of the population is going to have to change it’s attitude to trade and technology. One take a horse to water but one cannot make it drink. What proportion of the British population have the same attitude and academic attainment as the Swiss entering their various technical institutes?
An interesting review of both the book and its author.
Politicians (and others) who live by the “economy is all” theory are taking a rather psychopathic view. I think that this applies to many modern politicians and, indeed, it may be a necessary qualification for long term political success. More and more, their ideology (including this particular ideology) seems to trump every other consideration.
One sees plentiful displays of ostentatious humanity, but I think most of us are capable of seeing the difference between the true and the false in this regard – in fact, I think that most of us see that rather more clearly than our politicians do.
Having just watched the brilliant documentary on the BBC about the Delorean affair, anyone who thinks that economics can ever be divorced from politics shouldn’t be seriously involved in either.
I’m not convinced that China is proving much of anything wrong. They have about 4 times the population of the US, yet are still behind it in GDP. It’s always easier to play catch up when you’re well behind than it is to continue making fast progress when you near the target. Assuming there’s no revolt against the regime for losing the Mandate of Heaven, we’ll have to see what they can do in the next few years. I’m not as concerned as the author or some of the commenters here. Of course, I may be wrong.
The role of quantitative easing is to finance budget deficits when the tax base is too low. It funds welfare and while the bond market is dysfunctional it is a free ride off the surplus countries. The last thing that is needed is populists or ignorant members of the public interfering with it with their views reflecting their vested interests. Its adverse distributional consequences are best deal with by using fiscal policy to tax the windfall gains it produces.
It is fascinating to me as growth has slowed over the last 45 years (blame EU loony Tories Brown all deserve credit) in the UK and indeed seems to have got slower by the decade if I could put a chart here I’d demonstrate…. Yet we saw Labour win 2 re-ections and accepted from a coalition Conservatives win 3 re-elections twice.
a 10 years line is better i.e mapping last 10 years but this does it note fewer but deeper recessions and no actual booms lately
I was minded by the Labour leaders debate where I saved time and did not watch and read someone comment on the Trans discussion and I said did anyone ask their economic ideology or discuss economics? Nope. Not a factor.
As Austerity (OK pedants it’s not what you define as austerity but to question terms is a fallacy argument as you know what I mean) showed in 2010-Pandemic really people do not blame slow growth more unevenly spread necessarily even if decent economics would make things better. 1% or 2% growth can be seen on a graph and maybe if you live in side by side countries that differed but clearly does not hit people in the eyes. TBF some of it is timing Clinton was a disaster and led to 2008 but he was long gone and his pointless budget surpluses (seriously they served no purpose in the 90s USA) etc were not obvious to all but economics professors.