East Thanet: Inside the battle for coastal ex-UKIP stronghold not won since 2005

The parliamentary constituency of East Thanet will be contested for the first time this year. It’s the successor seat of South Thanet, where Nigel Farage sought election in 2015.

Farage was unsuccessful, but UKIP took control of Thanet District Council. A decade is a long time in politics, however. At the local elections in 2023, the council swung to Labour control, and newly constituted East Thanet, taking in the seaside towns of Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate, is now a Labour target.

I’ve met many apathetic and hostile voters

The most recent MRP points to a comfortable win for Labour’s Polly Billington, predicting that she’ll take 43% of the vote. In that poll the Tories and Reform are on 24% and 20% respectively. Billington, however, tells me that despite the positive polling many people in the constituency are “still genuinely undecided”.

This, of course, is the line of all Labour candidates in the last few weeks of an election, not wanting to show any signs of complacency. Having been out on the doorsteps in East Thanet quite a bit through the campaign, however, to an often apathetic and hostile response, I’d hazard that while a bet on Billington is still an extremely sound one,it’s more true here than in many other places.

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“I think the greatest risk is a combination of despair that nothing can change, and complacency that Labour’s going to get in anyway,” Billington tells me.

“And that’s a terrible combination because the despair means that people don’t believe that anything could be different and people will stay at home, or people will say well we’re going to get in anyway so we can stay at home.”

Waste leaves people ‘paddling through poo’

Billington, a former BBC journalist, has had a long career in the Labour Party. She worked for Ed Miliband and in 2015 she was Labour’s candidate in Thurrock, losing by 536 votes. Billington founded UK100, an organisation that helps local authorities work together to hit environmental targets, and has been involved in SERA since the 1980s.

If she’s elected (and if she gains ministerial office), joined-up thinking about the environment is likely to be the order of the day. She tells LabourList about her concerns for the area: “Our economy is fundamentally about people wanting to come to the seaside. And yet we have a situation where we can’t reliably go into the sea without finding ourselves, as somebody said, paddling through poo. That’s an economic threat; it’s not just an environmental threat, it’s an economic threat and a health threat”.

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Despite her impressive track record, Billington’s aspiring MP CV lacks one often-prized trait: she’s not local to the area.

She was a Hackney councillor when she was selected in early 2023 – and at the hustings I attended in Margate suffered somewhat from being seen as the favourite. Clear, articulate and even occasionally impassioned (particularly while defending Labour’s private school VAT policy) in her answers, she was notably more polished than the others.

Immigration comes up, but less than public services

Her Conservative opponent was absent from the hustings: Billington is facing off against Helen Harrison, who earlier this year failed to succeed her partner Peter Bone as the MP for Wellingborough, losing to Labour’s Gen Kitchen in the February by-election.

The polling and prospects would likely be a little different had the incumbent Tory MP Craig Mackinlay, who lost all his limbs to sepsis last year, decided to stand again.

Present on stage and jibing at Harrison’s absence was the Reform candidate Paul Webb, who looks set to finish with a very respectable vote share. I asked the Labour mayor of Margate, Jack Packman, who has experience taking on UKIP at a local level, whether he thinks the Reform vote will stick around after this election.

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“Moving forward I think there will be an appetite for Reform,” he tells me, “but not to the extent we had with UKIP, because I think people are realising now what a Labour administration can do, what 3 Labour councillors can do for the ward.”

He describes Labour “taking back control” from UKIP in Dane Valley, the ward he represents, as a “great achievement”. Out on the doorsteps as we campaign, immigration comes up (canvassers are given a special leaflet on channel crossings), but perhaps less than you might think – broken public services take precedence.

Voters approve of new Labour authority’s council housing drive

I live on the Isle of Thanet (sadly the Wantsum channel, separating the isle from the mainland, silted up several hundred years ago, and now it’s technically only a peninsula…), but out of the district’s Labour target seat.

Residing just over the border into the neighbouring Herne Bay and Sandwich constituency, I cast my postal vote for Labour’s candidate Helen Whitehead, deputy leader and cabinet member for housing on Thanet District Council. While the polls in my seat have been less favourable (the MRP I cited above predicts the 80-year-old Tory incumbent Roger Gale holding his seat; he’s been MP for the area since 1983, and is well liked locally), a Labour win is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility.

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Whitehead tells me that the campaign has been “very, very positive… the greeting that we’re getting on the doors is amazing – the overall message is that people really want change”. The work she and her colleagues have been doing on the council is also cutting through on the doors, she says.

“There’s been a lot of positive talk about the council housing increase, in terms of how much we’ve been able to provide … we’re up to 209 acquired or provided in the last year.” The average over the decade before that, she tells me, was 18 a year.

Sun, sea and socialism

While she says the newly Labour council has been “making great strides” on housing, Jenny Matterface, who represents Beacon Road ward in Broadstairs, highlights the intense effect of austerity on the area, where wealth mixes with “very high levels of deprivation”.

At the foodbank where she volunteers, more and more people using its services are in employment but can’t make ends meet; NHS waiting lists are spiralling, and dentist waiting lists are even worse. Broadstairs branch secretary Dick Symonds tells me an issue more specific to the area has been coming up on the doors for him: the fate of Manston Airport, a small airport, presently closed, that’s a hot topic local concern.

Thanet is a swing-y place; Labour held South Thanet between 1997 and 2010, and it looks to hold East Thanet again now. While demographic shifts – including people like me, moving down from London – will bolster the Labour vote in years to come, the question seems to me to be not whether we will win East Thanet, but whether we will keep it.

I’ll also be keeping my eye on Herne Bay and Sandwich on election night, which could be one of the edge-of-the-good-polling shock Labour wins. If so, the order of the day on the isle will be, as the mugs in the local party office tell us: sun, sea, and socialism.

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