Side by Side

I wonder what the voters in Clacton-on-Sea make of Nigel Farage in his pink shirt, silk tie, velvet collared covert coat and immaculate hair?

All I know is they voted for him as their MP and Clacton, specifically Jaywick, in Essex has come out top of a survey as the most deprived area in England. It is in the top decile in all the seven indicators used to measure deprivation: employment, income, health, crime, access to housing, and environment.

Go just nine miles NW and there is fashionable, Frinton-on-Sea; so select it didn’t have a supermarket until 1976 and it took until 2000 for a pub to open. I picnicked as a child on the Greensward at Frinton and can attest to its gentility. Beach huts at FoS cost around £40,000, but Frinton itself is not representative of the wider area. Tendring is 26/296 in the deprivation table, that’s the top 20% in a list where coming bottom is better than being at the top – so Alice in Wonderland.

In London the streets are not paved with gold. There is a mix of circumstances within boroughs so even Westminster is 94/296 with 9% of neighbourhoods highly deprived. The picture is similar where I live: Hammersmith and Fulham. (The least deprived part of London is Harrow.)

There is an important message in these statistics. Although England has deprived areas, in general there is a mix of poverty and affluence almost side-by-side. Compare this to France where there are banlieues; low income suburbs with an immigrant population, poverty, unemployment, crime and violence. Periodically there is serious rioting. The same used to be true in Manhattan where there were no-go neighbourhoods, I remember straying into Hell’s Kitchen in 1983. In London I see every day a multi-cultural city of vastly differing degrees of affluence living together, usually contentedly and always offering social mobility in the game of Snakes and Ladders that’s life.