The first time I visit Cookson Street, it is Saturday morning and, despite its reputation, there are no red lights: just a string of boarded-up shops and a building site at the end of the road. A new “Civil Service Hub” for 3,000 relocated government workers is nearing completion. Around the corner, a Royal British Legion club stands opposite a gay sauna. Which, I wonder, will the civil servants prefer?

Only one brothel is open and a car loiters outside. The driver leans over a baby in a car seat, watching the door. Is he waiting to go in, or for someone to come out? He drives off before I can ask.

The second time I visit Cookson Street, the groan of revellers near the North Pier lingers on the wind. Natalie’s is flanked by darkness; her LED lights in neon contrast with the squalid buildings on either side. Fluorescent blue picks out her pink door. I press the buzzer.

A lingeried woman, perhaps in her late-20s, appears at the door. She smiles vacantly, and guides me into a waiting room. The walls are crimson; the leather sofa is black; a vending machine vibrates in the corner, selling chocolate bars and crisps. “We do not tolerate harassment,” reads a poster, provided by the police. A CCTV camera flashes. There is a faint scent of hand sanitiser.

“Have you been here before?” the woman asks, before reeling off her prices. “It’s £40 for hand relief: £50 for topless hand relief; £60 for oral or sex; or it’s £70 for all three. And that’s for half an hour.” She summons two younger women from a backroom. They shuffle in nervously, introduce themselves in Lancashire accents, and ask me to choose.

I decline and explain I want to talk about their business, the punters, and whether the brothel — technically illegal in the UK — had been approved by the police. “NO,” a woman shouts from the backroom. “He needs to ask Joanne.” The two younger women quickly disappear; the third passes me a phone number.

Joanne Andrew has run a brothel out of 27 Cookson Street since at least 2010, when she was caught advertising it as a “beauty salon” on the local council’s website. As punishment, the council removed the listing, but the punters kept returning. For six years, they came and went — until a police raid discovered a 16-year-old runaway from Manchester hiding half-naked under a blanket. Pulled up in court and facing a closure order, Andrew apologised for not knowing the girl’s age: it was a “one-off mistake”, she told a judge. It wouldn’t happen again. She claimed she had a mortgage to pay, and worried what would happen to her “girls” if the brothel closed. This satisfied the judge who allowed Natalie’s to remain open. Since then, the police have carried out regular inspections, the most recent taking place earlier this year.

When I asked Lancashire Police about this visit, they — like Andrews — refused to comment. And who can blame them? Far easier to stay quiet — to accept that Blackpool’s vice and politics are too entwined to untangle. Far easier to pretend the underworld doesn’t exist.

Last year, it was revealed that 105 serving police officers were under investigation for corruption; this year, it was the turn of Blackpool’s representatives in Westminster. In Blackpool North, the MP stands accused of misusing taxpayers’ money, while his colleague in Fylde allegedly paid a teenage escort for sex and later used campaign funds to pay off “bad people” who had locked him in a flat. For now at least, neither has fallen as far as the MP for Blackpool South: in March, Scott Benton was forced to stand down after agreeing to lobby ministers in return for money from journalists posing as gambling industry investors.

There’s a by-election next month, but few believe change will follow: every year or so, political betrayal washes up on Blackpool’s shores, and lies there ignored. Three decades ago, Tony Blair chose the resort’s Winter Gardens as the demolition site of Clause IV, his party’s commitment to socialism, and in return promised to build an opulent supercasino; but the project was moved to Manchester, and finally binned. Then, 15 years later, Boris Johnson came to town and promised to Level It Up. The Government claims the resort has received more than £100 million of funding since 2019. But how did they spend it?

Today, eight of the country’s 10 most deprived council wards are in Blackpool. And on all counts, the southern ward of Bloomfield tops the list: 40% of children live in poverty here, 25% of adults are on out-of-work benefits, and nearly 20% suffer from GP-diagnosed depression. It is a petri dish for political negligence. There are no by-election placards; just the resigned and despairing.

Jimmy, David and Dylan are no exception. Perched outside a crumbling house on a crumbling street, a 10-minute walk from Blackpool’s South Pier, the trio of oversized urchins are smoking a “biff”.

“Do you want to see the seedy drug side or the seedy sex side?” Jimmy asks. He’s the eldest of the three, probably in his early-30s, and boasts that he knows all the “rough places”. He tells me, too, that “nobody messes” with his brother, while his nephew is on the run in Dubai and “looking at 30 years”.

Jimmy’s eyes flicker as he describes his own predicament. “I’ve got a problem with this bloke, Robert,” he says. “And I’m going to have to have it with him.” But Robert won’t fight “man-to-man” with his fists. “He’s driving about on one of those electric bikes with a bottle of acid for me. Do you know why he wants to do that?” Jimmy answers his own question. “Because he’s a soft cunt.”

On cue, a car screeches wildly down the road and skids to a halt on the pavement next to us. Jimmy’s smile has disappeared; his torso has tensed. He looks terrified.

“Look here you maggot,” the driver is livid. “What have you been saying about me?” Jimmy tries to dart around the car but is cut off. “You’ve been saying to people that you’re going to kill me,” the driver yells, reaching to get out. But Jimmy has disappeared down an alleyway — and the man can only fire off insults: “You’re a MUPPET. You’re a fucking muppet.” He turns to a teenager who has emerged from a nearby house. “Tell me where he lives,” he demands, speeding off as soon as the boy replies.

With Jimmy gone, the younger pair open up. David is 20; Dylan is 18. Both deal drugs and both are homeless. They have black rings around their eyes, filth under their fingernails, and the wispy moustaches of young men unable to grow a full beard. Occasionally, they admit, they rob tourists at knife-point.

David was “kicked out of care” when he was 18, and had nowhere to go. He worked as a roofer for a bit, living on-site, but then the jobs dried up. “I’m selling weed right now to get some p’s on the table.” On a good day, he’ll make around £70 — enough to pay for a twin room in a mouldering backstreet hotel. On a bad day, the pair spend the night wandering the streets, bitter gusts off the Irish Sea making sleep impossible.

Dylan was 16 when he was kicked out by his mother, and doesn’t know why. He lived on a friend’s sofa for a few months, and was passed between family-members. But eventually they tired of him, and he knew couldn’t go home. “My brother is a paedo,” he says matter-of-factly. “He’s been done for it… If I go near that gaff, that’ll be me done. I know I’ll just go for him.”

When they’re not dealing, the boys — they’re still boys — hang out on the resort’s Central Pier, where a security guard brings them food and lets them charge their phones. Sometimes they smoke a “biff”; other times they glare at tourists. Both claim to have girlfriends who don’t know they’re homeless. “They just think we sell a bit of weed,” Dylan says. David starts to tell me about his last girlfriend who had two miscarriages, before catching himself. “It’s just one of those things,” he shrugs.

By contrast, they seem to feed giddily off the violence they see. “A few months ago, I saw someone get run over, stabbed, and then run over again,” Dylan says. David interrupts: “I’ve seen someone with their intestines hanging out.” He then pulls up his jacket to reveal scars down his arms. He first got stabbed when he was in care, he explains. Not to be outdone, Dylan lifts his shirt proudly: his pale stomach is pockmarked by knife wounds.

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“We’ve all seen shit,” Dylan adds. “We’ve all been forced to live through it… I watched one of my friends kill himself.” The friend, inconsolable after an argument with his mother, was on FaceTime to Dylan when he pulled out a knife and plunged it into his chest. Dylan sprinted to his house, but arrived too late. A coroner blamed “unmanaged ADHD”. The boy was 15.

A few hundred metres away, up towards the promenade, Martin is sitting in his toy shop. Surrounded by puzzles and dolls and brightly coloured beach balls, he is unforgiving of Blackpool’s young criminals. Just three weeks after the store opened, a group of teenagers smashed through its windows and ran off with its contents. Every now and then, one will return. Today, the shop is empty. It’s been a slow start to the year, he explains.

Martin dismisses those who claim it’s hard to find a job in Blackpool. “If you want work, you just need to ask around,” he says. “There’s always a job somewhere.” The problem, according to everyone I speak to, is that crime has anchored itself in Blackpool — and few can escape it. Martin describes how a nearby flat was colonised by dealers and turned into a drug den. Just a few weeks ago, somebody was killed around the corner: he says a heroin addict went to attack her boyfriend with a knife, who then took it off her and stabbed her 18 times.

A few doors down from where the attack took place, Jenny is having a cigarette on her porch. She claims a prying neighbour spotted a wall caked in blood, but isn’t sure she believes it: “Surely it would’ve been reported in the papers?”

Born in Huddersfield and now in her 50s, Jenny has worked behind almost every bar in Blackpool, but is currently unemployed. She suffers from spinal degeneration, pulmonary disease, bipolar disorder and anxiety. “There’s nothing rare about that here,” she adds. “Everyone has a story behind it though.”

And hers? “My dad was a Glaswegian gangster and one of Britain’s longest-serving prisoners, and my step-dad beat the seven bells out of me.” She breezily describes her father’s downfall: “He killed a child molester and then they put him in a prison full of child molesters. So he went ahead and killed a few more…”

For Jenny, moving to Blackpool provided an escape and a livelihood for her and her children. But it was a limited one. She points to Central Drive to chart the resort’s decline. It used to be the proud backbone of Blackpool. Today, it is an assortment of derelict buildings, its main attraction — a joke shop from the Seventies — finally collapsing in December.

Eastern European gangs now operate out of the creaking houses, selling drugs and trafficked women on soiled mattresses. A Romanian newsagent stands accused of trying to solicit schoolgirls. Jenny tells me how a bunch of local lads went down to “kick the shit out of them”.

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When I visit at night, lights flicker behind torn blackout curtains. A few young men skulk up the street and into a disintegrating building. Just the sort of place where a 16-year-old runaway could be hidden; or a young man stabbed; or an MP held ransom. A patrol car turns on to the road, and then off again. “Everyone knows about what’s going on,” a neighbour says. “But the police do nothing.” Some residents blame their councillors, others their MP. All are resigned to the fact that nobody will step in. “It feels like they’re letting the Romanies and Romanians take over,” says one woman.

Back on the promenade, a Romany disagrees. Jade claims to read hundreds of palms each week, but, like every business owner here, has to contend with thieving gangs and delinquents. They descend in balaclavas during the day, many as young as 11. “You can’t do anything because they’re underage,” she adds.

Vice is written into Blackpool’s stars, Jade says. And then dragged down to earth: to the brothels and backrooms, to the drug dens and open streets. For decades, politicians offered platitudes and promises — and look at what they delivered: a party town thrown into the abyss. “People just don’t have enough money,” she sighs. “Businesses are closing and there’s more homeless on the streets. It all adds to this restless atmosphere.”

She’ll always have her regulars, though. Even in turmoil, people want to have their palms read; to be told that they matter, that they have a future. As if to prove her point, a woman sticks her head through the curtain and demands a reading. “Just don’t tell me if I’m going to die,” she pleads.

The fortune-teller laughs. “But of course you are.”

***

Some names have been changed.

Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.

Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.

I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.

What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

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The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”

The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”

I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”

For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”

I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.

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The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”

“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”

Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.

The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.

At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.

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At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”

But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.

During my investigation, I accompanied police officers to an amusement arcade where Charlene had been last seen. The detectives were looking out for any of the men under suspicion for her disappearance. During that two hour visit, over 30 convicted male sex offenders were later identified from CCTV footage. That’s one premises, in one night, in one town.

Blackpool, one of the most deprived parts of England, is rife with child abuse and home to a higher number of convicted child sex offenders than anywhere else in the country. It is thought that predatory men gravitate there to seek out vulnerable children. They don’t have to look far — there are three times the national average of children in care in Blackpool.

The sex trade – both legal and illegal – is rife. The proliferation of lap dance clubs and bars catering to groups of men on stag weekends has given the town a reputation as a haven for sex tourists. Queen Street, which is a focus for Blackpool’s night life, has also seen an increase in underage prostitution. Last year there were 87 visits by police and local authority inspectors to premises where children were believed to be sexually exploited.

Lisa* is a serving police officer in Blackpool and tells me that the town is known as a “safe haven for nonces”.

“They come out of prison and come here,” Lisa tells me. “They know they’ll get a friendly reception in a place jam packed with vulnerable children, and barely any support from social services.” It would be hard to deny that Blackpool can be a miserable place for children, particularly those in low-income families, to be raised.

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But there is one thing I didn’t know about Blackpool, which I learned from listening to Inside the Gender Clinic, a podcast  about the much maligned Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. The  majority of referrals to the clinic are not, as one might assume, from the South, or from Brighton, but from Blackpool. This is surely the last place you’d expect to see so many trans-identified children. After all, the voices we so often hear on this issue in the media tend to belong to upper middle-class kids raised in liberal families.

So why might this be so?

Claire*, who grew up in Blackpool, is working for a charity that supports female victims of male violence. She tells me that the links between the rise in young females being referred to gender identity clinics and the realities of growing up in places like Blackpool are obvious. She cites high levels of poverty and the normalisation of the exploitation of women and girls in the sex trade.

As a child, Claire, who was raised in Blackpool, was subject to men’s violence and consequently wanted to “opt out of girlhood”. She says: “The option to be removed from the harms of men would be appealing to most survivors. I am furious that we are allowing girls who need care and support to go down irreversible paths.”

I have long argued that the majority of girls presenting as gender dysphoric have experienced childhood trauma. What if the availability of breast binders, puberty blockers and instant affirmation as trans is a handy way for traumatised sexual abuse victims to dissociate from the abused body?

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One study, published back in 1994, looked at the issue of transsexualism and the connections with dissociation and child abuse. It found that of the 45 female to male transsexuals interviewed, more than 60% reported one or more types of severe child abuse. The sample group also disclosed symptoms and responses that are known to be typical effects of child abuse, such as fear, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, aggression and suicidal thoughts. The author suggests that transsexualism “may be an adaptive extreme associative survival response to severe child abuse”.

Kirsty Entwhistle is a former GIDS employee who turned whistleblower in 2019 when she wrote an open letter to Polly Carmichael, head of GIDS. Entwhistle was a clinical psychologist at the Leeds GIDS clinic between 2017 and 2018 and was struck by the similarities between some of the disturbed young girls who were demanding puberty blockers with those she had encountered while working in a children’s home in Rochdale in 2003.

Entwhistle became aware that some of the girls were being sexually abused and pimped by gangs of men in what became known as the “Rochdale grooming gang scandal”. At GIDS, she saw much of the same behaviour from some of the girls presenting as trans and demanding puberty blockers, with some threatening to harm themselves if they were refused hormones.

She said: “I knew that the kids would harm themselves to access something that is actually harmful to them. Just because a young person kicks and screams and tries to burn the house down, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for them.”

Female to male trans teenagers from Blackpool interviewed for the podcast on GIDS speak of teachers giving young girls breast binders without the knowledge of their parents; of a GP prescribing testosterone to a teenage girl who hadn’t even been seen by a counsellor or attended the gender clinic; and a school support worker who helped a young girl change her name by deed poll to that of a boy.

In Blackpool, local LGBT+ support services have been given funding specifically to work with “trans children’ as young as 10. UR Potential runs, Butterfly Trans Youth for ‘LGBTQ+ and non-binary young people’ in Blackpool, plus a trans-only young people’s group.

In June 2016, UR Potential CEO Linda Markey said: “We are receiving more and more referrals about transgender young people from schools, colleges and organisations who work with young people. Some young transgender people are as young as 12. Schools are struggling to meet the demand for support and staff need specific training.”

Many professionals responsible for child protection, such as teachers, counsellors and social workers, seem to be keen to offer support to young people with gender dysphoria, but what of the sexually abused girls? What is happening to protect them from this tsunami of male violence? Could it be that for many abused and neglected girls, presenting as transgender can be a form of attention seeking and validation?

Until recently, Norma* was a secondary school teacher in Blackpool. She tells me she saw transgender ideology creeping in among young girls: “I tried to raise the alarm of the potential harms surrounding gender non-conforming young women and girls to safeguarding leads. This was met with naivety of the realities of the situation and their insistence on using ‘he/him’ pronouns with no scrutiny as to any other issues.”

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At one Blackpool school, several students in three consecutive years transitioned around the same time; while kids need support in dealing with the distress of gender dysphoria, immediately affirming them as the opposite sex is not helping.

Abused, damaged and traumatised girls have long self-harmed by cutting or starving themselves in an attempt to escape their bodies. Hadley Freeman has written eloquently about the glaringly obvious links between teenaged girls’ trauma and trans identification. So why are these agencies and charities so ready to suggest puberty blockers rather than properly scrutinising what makes a teenager believe she’s a boy?

Blackpool seems to offer a clear example of how vulnerable, damaged children are being drawn to gender ideology because it offers a “one stop shop” solution to the pain of living as a female in a hellish world of abuse. “These girls have been horrifically betrayed,” says Norma. “Why are we sending them for irreversible, damaging treatment, when what they need is protection from sexual violation and abuse?”

From her bench facing the sea, one elderly lady rearranged her sleeping bag and sat up to light her first cigarette of the day; another rough sleeper was angry as he stumbled, yelling into the waves: “Yer English, yer oughter to be ashamed of yersain.”

He has a point. Britain’s biggest seaside resort is home to a sharp and uncomfortable paradox: while it accommodates millions of visitors every year, several of its wards are among the most deprived in the country and with the worst life expectancy. This is a place which, for all its beauty and associations with pleasure and fun, results in shortened lives blighted by debt, ill health and substance abuse.

When William Beveridge set out to eradicate five “Giant Evils” from Britain, “want” was first on his list. In the early Forties, as the social reformer gathered his data and prepared his plans, this priority seemed straightforward: people needed basics such as food, shelter, warmth and clothing. His plans for a social security system “from cradle to grave” would ensure that no one would go short. But 80 years on, Blackpool provides a grim example of deprivation not seen since the Thirties. Food banks report a 54% increase in the need for food parcels in the last year, dependence on charity has become normal for hundreds of families in the town, and the rise in energy prices brings particular hardship in a place with poor housing stock, well-known for its bitter winds and rain sweeping in off the sea.

Further up the coast, in Morecambe, a similar story is playing out. The North Lancashire Citizen Advice Bureau (CAB) has seen a massive rise in clients desperate for help — in some places, a staggering 566% increase in the last year. The most common issue is struggling with utility bills, followed closely by problems with debt. Households get caught in a pattern of borrowing and relying on charity because levels of benefit are not sufficient, suggests Joanna Young, the CAB’s head of research for North Lancashire. She adds that their clients talk of how one “mini-crisis” — it can be as routine as the need for a new pair of school shoes — can set a family back for months. Precarity has become a way of life.

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What would Beveridge make of places such as Blackpool and Morecambe? No doubt he would view his dream as a failure, despite a huge increase in the country’s GDP in the intervening 80 years. But what would also have surprised Beveridge are the causes of that poverty, and the fact that at least some can be traced right back to gaps and mistakes in his original plans.

Beveridge was no socialist, and he believed that work was the true solution to poverty (after all, he listed “idleness” as one of the other five Giants). But, as Professor Jonathan Bradshaw has noted, he overlooked the issue of low pay. Roughly 40% of the CAB’s clients in North Lancashire are in work — and this figure is supported by nationwide data, such as research by Joseph Rowntree Foundation which found that three out of four children living in poverty have a working parent. Chronic low pay particularly affects coastal resorts because so much of their employment is in the worst-affected sectors such as care and hospitality; the average wage in Blackpool is a third below the national figure. The result is a coastal pattern of some of the lowest average wages, highest levels of indebtedness and insolvencies. And this was already getting worse well before the devastating economic damage of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.

But Blackpool and Morecambe do not just illustrate the failure of Beveridge’s ambition; they also demonstrate forms of “want” that he never envisaged. Beveridge’s interpretation of poverty was strictly material, but in the 21st century the relevance and importance of another form of poverty has become starkly apparent. Blackpool and Morecambe are just two of the dozens of seaside resorts struggling with what are known as the “diseases of despair”.

Seaside towns have been left to cope with a disproportionate number of the most troubled in society. When relationships break down, when prisoners are released, when people with substance abuse issues want a new start, the childhood memories of a seaside resort can appear to offer hope, and every year thousands arrive on the coast looking for a new start. A major driver is housing costs: as they have soared out of affordable reach in most cities, many of the poorest and most vulnerable are effectively forced out. They get on a train to the end of the line. In the South-East, this includes towns such as Clacton (where the neighbouring resort of Jaywick has held the designation of the poorest place in the UK since 2010), Hastings, and the Thanet resorts of Margate and Ramsgate. Similarly, rising prices in Manchester and Preston ensure that people end up drifting to Blackpool and Morecambe. And this holds for countless other resort towns, from Scarborough to Skegness, Ilfracombe to Weston-Super-Mare and Rhyl in North Wales.

When I visited Blackpool in September, I spoke to Ian Treasure, who has worked on a number of local projects for rough sleepers. As we passed along the streets adjoining the promenade, he pointed out the tell-tale signs of “Houses in Multiple Occupation” which dominate the area. Long lines of door bells and rows of bins mark out the bedsits created out of the former hotels. The cheap housing stock is often bought up by absentee landlords and divided up into accommodation which can be rented for a fraction of the cost. This is what draws the approximately 8,000 people who arrive in Blackpool every year; a large proportion of whom are on benefits and are disproportionately male and single. They bring with them many of their demons, lack of trust and relationship. What ties they may have had – family or friends – are left behind, making this type of coastal poverty often lonely and unsupported.

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These forms of emotional and relationship poverty were not something Beveridge grasped in the Forties, but with them comes poor mental health, and in the case of Blackpool, some of the highest suicide and self-harm rates in the country. Four Blackpool wards have the lowest life expectancy in the country at 66.6 years, compared to a UK average of 82.3 years. As the Chief Medical Officer’s annual 2021 report on seaside towns makes clear, Blackpool has “the single most vulnerable population in the country in the most inappropriate accommodation”.

Yet the growth of this desperate poverty has only accelerated in recent years; during the pandemic, the buy-to-let market in Blackpool boomed, encouraged by the relaxation on stamp duty and promises of high investment yields from tenants on housing benefits. Elsewhere, Beveridge would have been appalled by the misuse of public funds; his central argument in support of the welfare state was that it would make the population healthier and better educated in order to underpin economic growth. In contrast, Blackpool (and many other coastal towns) has resulted in the opposite; a system of farming the most vulnerable in society at government expense, with the profits sucked out by landlords who do not live in the area.

As if this were not enough, many seaside towns also face another of the great social challenges of our time — one which Beveridge did not envisage, and which is, in many ways, the result of his great achievement, the founding of the NHS. That is, the fact that we are living longer, and that many choose to spend their retirement years in coastal towns; Minehead in West Somerset and Skegness and its neighbouring Lincolnshire coast resorts have some of the most elderly populations in the UK. This will be the great test of the NHS over the coming decades; our longer lives require the management of complex chronic health conditions, leading to greater demands for health and social care. Yet vacancies for doctors and nurses are higher on such poorly connected coasts, while the ratio of elderly to people of working age is worsening, raising concerns over who will care for the growing number of octogenarians by the end of this decade.

The big picture here is the power of geography to determine lives. The British economy is driven by the vitality of cities and this has shaped infrastructure investment (disproportionately concentrated in London). Meanwhile, the periphery is neglected, only useful as a form of cheap investment or a zone to dump those whose needs are no longer accommodated elsewhere. The challenges for the coasts’ overstretched councils and health authorities are Sisyphean, with little recognition of their unique nature in Westminster or Whitehall. The Levelling Up agenda of recent years may have dominated the headlines, yet it has showed scant insight into these areas’ plight given its preoccupation with driving up productivity — always a challenge in care and hospitality. Eighty years on, the entire of Britain needs another Beveridge. But perhaps more than anywhere else, its forgotten seaside towns need a Beveridge who can actually get the job done.

Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.

Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.

I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.

What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

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The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”

The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”

I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”

For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”

I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.

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The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”

“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”

Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.

The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.

At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.

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At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”

But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.

This was also the first conference since Margaret Thatcher had been ousted as leader and — after sixteen years — many of the party faithful were far from reconciled to their loss. It should have been a tub-thumping, morale-boosting rally to send her successor, John Major, out on the campaign trail. Instead it saw the opening shots fired in a civil war that would go on to wreck that fourth term, drive the Tories out of power, and put the country on the road to Brexit. Because this was the conference when talk of a referendum on Europe began to take hold of the Right.

At the time, the European Economic Community (EEC) was entering a state of transition. In December 1991, the leaders of the twelve member-states would meet in Maastricht to negotiate the future path, and the following February meet again to sign the treaty that was to create the European Union (EU). This was a new incarnation of the great project, designed, as it said, “to advance European integration”.

The bit of that “integration” that was causing concern among some at Blackpool was the near-certainty that it would include a commitment to a single currency across all the EU nations. And the person most concerned was Thatcher herself. It was she who led the call for a referendum on the subject of what would one day become known as the euro.

In fact, she’d floated the idea before, nearly a year earlier, in the last throes of her premiership; it was part of her pitch against the leadership challenge of the Europhile Michael Heseltine. Amid the personal psychodrama of those final days, however, something as mundane as monetary union made little impression, and the referendum proposal wasn’t a big story. But if the public didn’t notice, her colleagues did, and it was one of the reasons why some cabinet colleagues turned against her; in characteristic fashion, she hadn’t consulted any of them about the proposal before announcing it.

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Apart from anything, it was out of political character for Thatcher. One of her first tasks as Tory leader had been to respond to the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EEC, called by Harold Wilson’s government in 1975. She had been forthright in her condemnation of the vote, accusing Wilson of trying to “pass the buck” and seeking to “bind and fetter” parliamentary democracy. And she stayed true to her word: during her eleven-and-a-half years in Downing Street, she did not hold a single referendum.

But now, the scale of the changes being suggested in the European negotiations, and in particular the spectre of a single currency, had banished those reservations. This was too big a step, too much of a threat to parliamentary democracy itself, to be undertaken without the approval of the people.

That was the message she brought to Blackpool. She didn’t address the conference directly — she didn’t need to: just her presence on the platform ensured a five-minute standing ovation. But she did speak to the press to make her position clear. And Norman Tebbit and Cecil Parkinson, two of her most loyal lieutenants in the glory days, publicly supported the idea.

“If the decision is a case of changing the relationship between parliament and the people then there is a case for the people to be consulted,” argued the latter. Most significantly, Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, also hinted that he was in favour of a referendum. “I will not allow a single currency to be imposed on this country,” he insisted . “We don’t want laws to be made and taxes to be raised in Brussels for which the British people have not voted.”

The clamour became so great that the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, felt obliged to intervene. “It is not on,” he said. “It is simply not a subject for a referendum.”

Yet a split opened up at that Conservative Party conference, and in the following months it widened further. The headlines in the build-up to the Maastricht negotiations were dreadful: “Maggie blasts ‘arrogant’ PM”; “Thatcher urged to back Premier and halt Europe feud”; “Tebbit fans the flames in civil war over Europe”. This had become a personal and open fight between the Prime Minister and his predecessor: “Iron Lady v Quiet Man,” as the Daily Mail summarised it.

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It was against this background that Major insisted on Britain not participating in two of the key elements of the Maastricht Treaty. There was the Social Chapter — which set out common employment protections — and there was the single currency.

Even with Britain’s half-hearted involvement, Maastricht was a big deal. It conferred citizenship of the EU on all those within it, ensuring the right to live, work and vote equally in any of the member states. It strengthened the European Parliament, extended co-operation on policing, justice and foreign policy, and reduced the need for unanimous decision-making. It created the European Central Bank. This was “a new and decisive stage,” said Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, “which within a few years will lead to the creation of what the founding fathers of modern Europe dreamed of after the last war: the United States of Europe”.

The Conservative manifesto at the 1992 election boasted that “The Maastricht Treaty was a success both for Britain and for the rest of Europe”, and even if many Tory MPs didn’t agree, the fact that Major won an unexpected victory meant that he had a mandate; the calls for a referendum receded.

Instead, the fight was resumed in the Commons, where the treaty had to be ratified and where the Conservative majority of 21 was far from comfortable. Major faced opposition not only from Labour, demanding he sign up to the Social Chapter, but from those on his backbenches who objected to the whole thing. In a long series of votes, extending through to the summer of 1993, there were repeated rebellions by Tory MPs against their own government.

Thatcher’s private response to the treaty was that “the country is being sold down the river,” and although she had stepped down as an MP at the election, she was now in the Lords and still commanded much support. She spoke out against Maastricht in public, and urged on rebel MPs in private. Meanwhile, her predecessor Edward Heath, who was still in the Commons, weighed in on Major’s side, and the ensuing bitterness soured the party for years to come.

“In the voting lobbies it was not unknown for one Conservative MP to spit at another,” remembered Michael Spicer, one of the rebel MPs. “Physical violence occurred during the course of one or two crucial votes.” He also recalled a senior MP being dragged by his hair into the government’s lobby. Nicholas Soames, a Major loyalist, was particularly unimpressed by the married rebels Ann and Nicholas Winterton: “You’re cunts,” he told them after yet another vote, “and ugly ones to boot.”

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In scenes of great excitement, the final vote to ratify the treaty was lost in July 1993 by eight votes and Major responded by calling a vote of confidence in his own government. This was an unmistakeable sign of weakness and failure, the first time since the war a government had resorted to such a desperate measure. But Major was weak, and he was failing.

As a procedure, however, it was clever. If he lost the vote, Major said, he would call a general election, and there was a strong chance that the Tories would lose over a hundred seats. The rebels had little choice — “The PM’s got the Party by the goolies,” as one of them, Teresa Gorman, put it — and the confidence vote was won with relative ease. The Government was to limp on impotently for another four years.

But the party was badly damaged. And the unsatisfactory ending of the episode failed to bring closure.

As the Maastricht debate approached its end-game, a by-election in Newbury saw a safe Tory seat fall to the Liberal Democrats on a massive 28-point swing, a reflection of how low Major’s government had fallen. Little noticed was the fourth-place finish of Alan Sked, representing the Anti-Federalist League. He got just 600 votes, but this was the first stirring of what became UKIP, launched by Sked later in 1993.

And this was also the by-election where veteran anti-European Enoch Powell made one of his last-ever public appearances. He was driven to a rally at Newbury Racecourse by a young city trader named Nigel Farage, who later cited the experience as the moment that inspired his own political career. It wasn’t obvious at the time, but that European referendum floated by Margaret Thatcher was destined to return.

“On July the 15th we had no bookings. And that’s unusual – we usually start taking bookings in January or February. But we still managed to fill the rooms for most of July and August.”

“The tourists, they still come when the weather’s fine. No one ever complains. We had hand sanitizers at the front door and we just carried on… There’s some hotels making people bring their own sheets and all that sort of stuff. You know, that’s ridiculous.”

Bournemouth beach today is fairly busy, but the scene is a far cry from late June, when, as we tentatively edged out of lockdown, trains down from London disgorged thousands of day-trippers who fanned out along the hot sand like so many ants.

The culmination of two months of strict lockdown and that record-breaking heatwave produced behaviour which left zealous social-distancers apoplectic. Beachgoers were depicted as fecklessly risking the nation’s health for the sake of meretricious revelry.

Yet what followed was rather anti-climactic: there was no ‘second wave’ in Bournemouth, nor, aside from a few hotspots in the north and the midlands, anywhere else.

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“There are some people that wouldn’t surprise me if they’re still in lockdown in 10 years’ time…”  Button continues. “There’s a certain mentality, it’s just ridiculous. You can’t live like that.”

The lack of a second wave has allowed Bournemouth — along with most other seaside towns — to return to something resembling a pre-COVID-19 normality. And the priority for the hospitality industry has been to salvage what’s left of summer before the nights start drawing in and the weather turns crisp. Abundant sunshine in July and heavy discounts offered by the Government’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme have left things looking more hopeful than they did earlier in the year. Bournemouth has seen a 23% rise in evening visitor numbers in early August compared to July — the biggest increase anywhere in the country. When I was in town, everything was booked out.

***

The cool northerly breeze along Bournemouth’s promenade disguises the strength of the late-summer sun. Seagulls zip noisily around over the pretty beach huts and children squeal around in sun hats. But another inevitability of the British seaside holiday is the unpredictability of the weather. I spent an entire day shuttered in the Elstead Hotel as Storm Francis battered the south coast. “The chief lie about beach holidays in photograph albums is that they only show the good-weather days,” wrote Ysenda Maxtone Graham in British Summertime Begins. The key to getting through these long and wet summer days, ameliorated somewhat in the internet age by the advent of smartphones, is “knowing how to sink into yourself”, as she puts it.

But with the advent of budget airlines, sojourns to the British seaside dwindled in popularity. Merriment was overshadowed with a gloomy penumbra of dilapidation and decline. “The high summer of the English holiday resort is over,” declared Bill Cormack in his 1998 book A History of Holidays: 1812-1990. And who would argue with that?

Bournemouth is relatively prosperous compared with many of Britain’s struggling seaside towns, which are some of the most deprived areas of the UK. I grew up 64 miles away, near Weston-Super-Mare, a town better known locally today for re-housing drug addicts than for seaside merriment. Parts of town really are no-go areas at night if you want to avoid getting your head kicked in. Further down the coast is Minehead in West Somerset – officially the worst district in England to grow up poor, coming a humiliating 326th out of 326 in the government’s social mobility index.

This is the relatively prosperous south of England. In the north, Blackpool has become a byword for squalor and deprivation. A couple of blocks away from the town’s famous Golden Mile, Edwardian hotels and boarding houses ruefully bear down on some of the poorest areas in England. Blackpool was described in 1789 as an ‘abode of health and amusement’. Nowadays, half the town’s population smokes and there is an off licencefor every 250 residents. During lockdown, Blackpool had the highest rate of unemployment benefit claimants in the country as the town’s tourism industry, which attracts £1.5 billion in visitor spend per year and employs many of the town’s residents, was completely shuttered.

Bournemouth attracts a different crowd from Blackpool; it doesn’t have the same louche and high camp atmosphere. You can still find the seaside crooners filling up antiquated music halls, but there are fewer Donald McGill-style postcards with their bawdy jokes about “newly-weds making fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging houses,” as George Orwell put it.

Of course, Bournemouth attracts its share of stag-dos. My half-brother’s was here seven years ago, an inebriated affair during which the stag took the lines of a famous 1912 seaside music hall ditty to heart: Have you ever noticed when you’re by the sea/the things you can do there with impunity? I saw just one solitary stag party this time: a group of middle-aged men in dress shirts zipped past me one afternoon on a ‘Beer Bike’, a pedal-powered watering hole on wheels.

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Part of Bournemouth’s trouble is its image problem. “Bournemouth has compared itself to Blackpool and Brighton, right? But we’re trying to change that and say, look guys you should start comparing yourself to the south of France or California,” says Andy Lennox who runs two Zim Braai restaurants in Bournemouth, and who also founded The Wonky Table, a network of around 500 local hospitality firms.

Some will sneer at Lennox’s enthusiasm for Bournemouth; there’s peculiar prejudice common in some quarters of Britain which assumes that foreign automatically equals superior. Yet there is no reason France or Italy should produce an innately better vacation than the south coast of England, pace the vagaries of our climate. Holidaying in Britain can be just as pleasant as jetting off to Bordeaux or Tuscany, providing you’re not hamstrung by haughty disdain for your fellow countrymen.

With international travel pretty much off the agenda for the foreseeable future, and with the Government encouraging ‘staycations’, the next 12 to 18 months represent a once in a generation opportunity to reverse a decades-long decline in places such as Bournemouth, Blackpool and Morecambe. Global passenger traffic is not expected to return to pre-COVID-19 levels until 2024, according to airline industry organisations.

But first, these towns need to survive the coming months. “It’s going to be a very, very tough winter,” says Lennox. “Anybody who’s a good operator right now is sitting there going, ‘Okay cool, batten down the hatches and wait for what’s coming’.”

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During the colder months, targeted Government support for seaside industries will be needed more than ever. The Eat Out to Help Out scheme was a great success, says Lennox. And it did manage to assuage some of the financial losses experienced by the hospitality sector during the initial stages of lockdown, when around 80% of firms closed their doors and about 1.4 million workers were furloughed.

“It’s been the most effective campaign the Government has ever done,” he says. “They’ve galvanised an industry by pumping £500 million in, but they’re also getting the tax returns off the back of that as well. They’re also going to potentially get more companies returning quicker to a profit, which will increase corporation tax.”

A policy that was portentously dismissed by the Guardian less than a month ago as “junk… served up by a politician who should know much better” has generated restaurant footfall that is 17% up on the same period last year. Lennox now wants it extended for October and November, the “quietest time of the year”.

But as well as largesse from the Chancellor, towns like Bournemouth will need visitors. Indeed, perhaps the events of this year will open more people’s eyes to the abundance of possibility not contingent on an annoyance-ridden trip overseas. Lamenting a lost summer when we are surrounded by 7,723 miles of handsome coastline seems at best myopic and not a little ignorant: nobody in Britain is ever more than a couple of hours drive away from a beach of some sort.

***

Out on Bournemouth beach four hulking cruise ships are perched, immobile, on the horizon. According to locals, it is cheaper for cruise operators to moor these moribund vessels here than 25 miles away in Southampton. Cruise ships were mothballed in March and are unlikely to return to service until some point next year. Strangely beautiful by dint of their size, at night the ships shine like strings of fairy lights across the murky water.

Their presence feels rather symbolic. They represent travel in all its liberating potential, a prospect tantalisingly out of reach as a pandemic hems us in.

But as with the lockdown, this unexpected constriction can suffocate you — or encourage you to find pleasure in the small worlds whose enjoyments you may previously have neglected or overlooked. British life, and the British seaside in particular, is brimming with many such ordinary pleasures: the carousels and shabby Edwardian shelters, the soggy fish and chips, the sticks of luminous rock, the ice cream parlours, the slot machines, the Regency facades, the exhilarating range of candy flosses.

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By Tom Chivers

In the words of Albert Camus – who understood better than many Anglo-intellectuals the enjoyment to be found in a simple, unpretentious life – we should perhaps view our current predicament as “a lucid invitation to live and to create in the very midst of the desert”.

I head back out to the beach to catch the last of the late summer sun. Sitting in a deck chair, I take a look around: a young boy delights in what is obviously a first taste of ice cream. The froth from the incoming tide splashes across a woman’s picnic; she doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care.

Over the course of the past six months it has at times felt as though the world were on fire, with the progress of past decades slowly but inexorably turning to ashes. But right now, in the warming light of the mid-afternoon sun, nobody has a care in the world.

The statistics are bleak: rough sleeper numbers in England rose in 2017 for the seventh consecutive year. The ‘official’ tally – the number of people likely to be out on the streets on any one night – was put at 4,751. But the real figure is likely to be far higher once the ‘hidden homeless’ – people whose homeless situation is concealed by the fact they are squatting or sofa surfing or living in extremely over-crowded accommodation – are factored in.[1.  The charity Crisis has estimated that there are around 9,100 hidden homeless (and 9,100 visible rough sleepers) in the UK as a whole] On average, a homeless man dies at the age of 47 (for women it’s 43). And they are nine times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the population.

It is, though, the human stories that brings the full horror of the crisis to life. While living in Blackpool two years ago, I met Gary, a 42-year-old former painter and decorator. Gary was sleeping rough in a doorway a few blocks from Blackpool’s famous promenade. He was also receiving chemotherapy for Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. After every session in the cancer clinic, Gary would have to sit out the ill-effects of the poison in a filthy restaurant doorway. In the evenings, he would make his way to the nearby library to wash in one of the ‘20p hotels’ – or the public toilets to you and me.

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The street brought physical challenges beyond having to deal with cancer: he was regularly the victim of random outbursts of violence from drinkers who would spill out from the nearby bars and clubs in the early hours of the morning, as well as abuse from angry passers-by. Rough sleepers are far more likely to be attacked by strangers than any other members of the public. Over a third of them have been deliberately hit, kicked or had things thrown at them, while nearly one in ten has been urinated upon.

For precisely that reason, Gary had positioned himself beneath a CCTV camera: “If a camera’s there they can see anything that happens; they know what’s going on,” Gary told me. “People spitting on you, or people throwing bottles at you drunk at night… I’ve been spat on, I’ve been attacked. They just don’t see you. They just don’t believe in you.”

Blackpool had changed a great deal since it was described in 1789 as an “abode of health and amusement”[2.  William Hutton, A Description of Blackpool in Lancashire Frequented for Sea Bathing, Pearson and Rollason, 1789.]. In 2016, in Central Drive, a long undulating road that runs past Blackpool FC’s stadium, almost twice as many people were on some form of unemployment benefit as were in full-time employment. Half the children here were living in poverty. And then there was the homelessness. The number of rough sleepers in Blackpool was higher than in some London boroughs. Around 2,500 local households every year were seeking help from the council because they had either lost their accommodation or were at risk of losing it.

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The situation has worsened in the intervening years, with rough sleeper numbers rising by 15% in 2017 compared with the previous year. The rise and fall in the numbers rough sleeping tends to ebb and flow with the fortunes of the wider economy, though not always. Government decisions – in this instance a reluctance to build new homes – play a part. According to the National Audit Office (NAO), the ending of private sector tenancies is now the main cause of homelessness in England. Outside of the North and the east Midlands, private sector rents have shot up by three times as much as wages in England since 2010.

The Government’s “light touch” approach to the effect of its welfare reforms has exacerbated matters. A recent investigation by The Observer found that since Universal Credit can take up to eight weeks to come through, a large number of people were in arrears before they received their first payment. They would, as a result, be turfed out of accommodation. And it’s near impossible to find another place once a private landlord has blacklisted you for non-payment of rent.

The freeze on housing benefit hasn’t helped. With private rentals unaffordable, over-stretched hostels are overburdened and are also closing their doors. According to Homeless Link, there were 16% fewer bed spaces for single homeless people in England in 2015 than there were in 2010.

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People end up on the streets for all manner of reasons, though poverty is the most important driver. Gary was there because he fell through the bureaucratic cracks. Following his cancer diagnosis, he tried to kill himself. He survived, albeit with serious injuries which resulted in a long spell in hospital. He failed to submit a claim for social security from his hospital bed, which left him destitute once he recovered.

“I never put in a form straight away when I came out of hospital because I didn’t think I needed to,” Gary explained. “I’m supposed to be under social services, seeing healthcare [people] every day, twice a day… And I guess they told me wrong, because it doesn’t work like that nowadays. And I’ve never claimed benefits before so I don’t know.”

Personal issues can also play a part. Many rough sleepers have alcohol or drug dependencies or mental illness. They may have fled violence at home. But once on the streets, it’s almost impossible to get off. And the large increase in the number of homeless over time is testament to the power wider societal factors have in pushing people to the margins. It’s no coincidence that there are growing numbers of people bedding down outside at a time of austerity, precarious work and cuts to local authority budgets.

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When the American novelist Jack London ventured among the beggars and tramps of the east end of London a hundred years ago, he set out to record the lives of men and women he described as the “refuse of a human sty”. The characters who featured in The People of the Abyss, his masterpiece of reportage, were considered not quite human, at least not by Victorian high society.

As London wrote, they were “a different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance”. In other words they were the ‘undeserving poor’, a section of the lower orders that was treated as beyond contempt by the Victorian middle and upper classes.

These attitudes aren’t confined to the past. According to research published in 2017 by the London housing and support charity Evolve, more than a quarter (29%) of Londoners believe that people sleeping rough are to blame for their predicament.

Moreover, three quarters (74%) believe that rough sleepers could get themselves off the streets if they wanted to. In other words, we still view extreme poverty through a lens tinted by the Victorian age, when Henry Mayhew, pioneer of 19th-century social research on the poor, subtitled the fourth volume of his book London Labour and the London poor, “Those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work”.

A similar moral distinction is made by those who take the view that the homeless are an irritant or menace, out under the stars on a whim. A century ago, Jack London noticed that it was “a law of the powers that be that the homeless shall not sleep at night”. In recent years, various architectural innovations, such as anti-homeless spikes and “bum-proof benches” have been employed to discourage what is deemed to be anti-social behaviour, whether that’s loitering or rough-sleeping, in public as well as on private land.

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In modern Britain, though, you don’t need to have made feckless choices to end up on the streets, behaving “anti-socially”. The sudden loss of a job or a change in personal circumstances could make the difference. When I was in Blackpool, one in three families was one month’s pay away from losing their homes. One 19-year-old woman told me how she was paid just 62p an hour in error by the employment agency she worked for. It took her six weeks to get back the money she was owed, and she was certain that this would have resulted in time spent on the streets had it not been for emergency support she received from a relative.

Gary did at one time lead an existence most politicians would describe as “respectable”. He had a roof over his head and a reasonable wage coming in. Yet that “respectability” disappeared through several strokes of bad luck. Gary, when I met him, had been reduced to a “heap”, as he described himself, by a life-altering diagnosis and the failure to submit the correct piece of paper from his hospital bed.

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“It’s degrading.” he told me morosely, as he described how he spends every day sitting on a filthy slab of pavement hoping to extract some sliver of generosity from passers-by.

We can’t ignore the fact that the problem of homelessness has risen drastically under successive Tory governments. Some politicians seem to have grasped the scale of the problem: this year Theresa May introduced the Homelessness Reduction Act, which imposes a duty on local authorities to take “all reasonable steps” to prevent homelessness. It remains to be seen how effective it will prove.

But it can’t be denied that part of the problem lies in the public’s attitude. A widespread indifference has allowed the crisis to reach this point. If the homeless are lucky, we step over them. If they aren’t, they are belittled, assaulted and urinated upon. Until they are seen as less fortunate versions of ourselves, people who unintentionally ended up at the margins of society, then Gary and the thousands of people like him will remain a faceless statistic, the unwanted detritus of an atomised society.