A suspended Reform MP, malaise and discontent on the English seaside
Great Yarmouth and other eastern coastal towns went light blue last summer. With Rupert Lowe now suspended, we ask what the future holds....
A lot of people have lost faith in Great Yarmouth. Walking down the deserted Regent Road in winter, from the town centre to the famous old seafront strip, Marine Parade, the deprivation is clear.
The general malaise is masked during summer when the east Norfolk town — formerly a thriving fishing port-turned-bustling Victorian seaside resort, and still a popular destination for British holidaymakers — comes to life. But there's no disguise out of season; approaching locals in the street, they quickly make clear their concerns about closed-down shops, refuse collection, anti-social behaviour, and crime.
It's a familiar story across the UK. These issues, plaguing downtrodden town centres all over the country, ultimately boil down to years of austerity and under-investment in communities from successive Tory governments coupled with rapidly changing consumer habits post-pandemic. But a different narrative about who is really to blame for these problems has bedded in.
“Take a look around,” says Lee, a shopkeeper on Regent Road. “The road's dead, when it should be busy. There's a lot of stealing from my shop, non-stop trouble, rubbish everywhere. I live in [adjacent town] Gorleston so we don't see as much, but my opinion changed four years ago when I took this shop on.
“We're all afraid of saying anything because it might appear racist, but there are far too many foreign people here that are causing a lot of problems.”
When you take away someone’s belief in the place they live in, you lay the groundwork for radicalisation. And when progressives lose the argument and subscribe to the right-wing view on the roots of this deprivation, it creates a vacuum waiting to be filled.
That's what has happened in Great Yarmouth; at the 2024 General Election, the town was one of five UK constituencies to elect a Reform Party MP. Rupert Lowe, a former City trader and Brexit Party MEP worth a reported £30m, was voted into the House of Commons as Yarmouth's representative, after running on a platform centred around anti-immigration.
Last week, Lowe was suspended by Reform and reported to police over allegations of workplace bullying and violent threats made against party chairman Zia Yusuf. His constituents — many of whom he quickly got onside by pledging to donate his salary to charitable causes each month — were surprised by the news.
As Westminster Editor of The Lead Zoe Grunewald points out, the fracturing of Reform’s five MPs underpins the innate existential threat that the party faces: if you preach extremism, you will inevitably find yourself outflanked by extremists. Lowe is undoubtedly one of the most right-ward facing members of the party, having previously defended former EDL leader Tommy Robinson and parroted far-right talking points on mass deportations. His suspension has thrown the party into chaos and the future of Reform UK - for the first time - looks distinctly fractured.
Changing tides
This century, Great Yarmouth has been shaped profoundly by immigration. The town has had a strong Portuguese community since local firm Bernard Matthews started recruiting directly from Portugal in the early 2000s, while the 2004 enlargement of the EU saw many workers from countries like Lithuania, Latvia, and Hungary move to Norfolk to work in agricultural jobs rarely filled by British workers. The low price of accommodation in Great Yarmouth has increased the appeal for migrant workers and their families.
The social fabric of the town is changing, with residents from Eastern Europe and Portugal opening up shops and small businesses. But the number of foreign-born people living in Great Yarmouth is still relatively low. According to the 2021 census, 88.5 per cent of Great Yarmouth residents were born in England, with the second-most common country of birth being Lithuania (1.6 per cent). Only 7.3 per cent of Great Yarmouth residents did not identify with a UK national identity (compared to 9.7 per cent nationally).
Many of the people who have moved to Yarmouth have integrated into the town and contributed immensely over the years. According to Labour councillor Trevor Wainwright, who we meet at Great Yarmouth Town Hall, "We need better messaging about what immigrants contribute to society," to counter the popular story that has taken root. Unfortunately, there's already a clear divide opening up between the locals and the more recent arrivals.
"The town has gone downhill in the last five years," says Kathleen Robinson, a middle-aged resident we chat to in St. George's Park. "The holidaymakers only see the seafront, they don't see the rest of it. There's all the drug dealing that's going on, and there's not enough police in the town. Not to mention the word I'm not allowed to say: the foreigners that have come in. Everybody knows they're gonna thieve from the shop, and if you're not careful, you'll lose your wallet or your phone… I've nearly lost my phone to them a couple of times."
Pressed on this, Kathleen doesn't provide any details about which nationalities this thieving is being blamed on, and evidently the local Romanian and Albanian populations (often viewed as the town's least well-integrated groups) aren't the only people committing crimes.
The Eastern European residents we approach in town are unfortunately either unable or unwilling to speak to us, but conversations with locals often end up circling back to this divide, with many raising the disorder and violence of the increasingly notorious King Street area, a road with a large number of Eastern European shops, cafes, and barbers.
"King Street is the dangerous bit of town," says Watty, a Portuguese citizen (originally from the country's former south-east Asian colony Timor-Leste) who moved here a decade ago. "The situation during the night can be scary, but I think it's not just [Yarmouth], it's everywhere."
There is a flipside; Rachel, a mum on the school run who we speak to briefly, says "I know a lot of people from around here that don't work as hard as people who move here. I don't think it's just [immigration] to blame, and I think a lot of locals would agree." The 2024 collective vote share of Labour, Green, and Liberal Democrat (15,797) trumped Reform's share (14,385), with room to breathe, suggesting that Rachel is right: there are plenty of people here open to a more inclusive message on immigration than the one offered by Reform.
First, though, it's about debunking myths. "The crime statistics are no different to anywhere else in the country, but it's about perception," Trevor tells me. "People see the Eastern European migrants hanging around outside their shops and sometimes get the wrong impression. But that's just their culture, they tend to spend more time outside in the street."
"Whether it's former pit villages, post-industrial towns or seaside towns like Great Yarmouth, you see the high street falling apart, living standards worsening, and bills and rents going up. Then Reform comes along, a party without any baggage, and says 'We've got the solution, it's all of these immigrants'."
According to Police.UK, Yarmouth's crime rate is fairly average when compared nationally, although several of the towns with a similar rate are considerably bigger (such as Rotherham, Chesterfield, and Barnsley). Perhaps the size of Great Yarmouth means the crime that does take place in the town is more noticeable.
The problem is, "it's hard to convince people that crime, or not being able to see a doctor, isn't the immigrant's fault," says Trevor. "It's 14 years of austerity. And the care homes, the hospitals, public transport, if it wasn't for immigrants working within these services, they would collapse overnight."
Reform's success in 2024 was largely a response to this long period of national decline, so it's no surprise they did best in some of the country's most deprived areas. With defected Tory MP Lee Anderson already in Parliament, the four new Reform MPs were all elected in towns on England's eastern seaboard with high levels of deprivation: Clacton-on-sea, Great Yarmouth, Boston and Skegness, and South Basildon and Thurrock, which lies on the Thames Estuary, right next to the Essex coastline.
The phrase 'left-behind' has become slightly cliched, but these places undeniably fall into that category. According to UKandEU, thirteen of Great Yarmouth's neighbourhoods are ranked in the top 10 per cent of areas of relative deprivation nationally, and the proportion of residents aged 16-64 years who claim benefits/Universal Credit is over double the national average.
"Millions of people are feeling worse off," says campaigner and journalist Taj Ali, speaking to me after his own trip to east Norfolk. "Whether it's former pit villages, post-industrial towns or seaside towns like Great Yarmouth, you see the high street falling apart, living standards worsening, and bills and rents going up. Then Reform comes along, a party without any baggage, and says 'We've got the solution, it's all of these immigrants'."
"Labour doesn't dismantle the argument, and they don't even tackle the economic insecurity that's driving people to Reform," he adds. "We've had anti-racist organising in this country for many years, but it's got to be coupled with addressing material need as well. There's a very small number of migrants in Great Yarmouth, but because it's a seaside town and those migrants and asylum seekers have bad housing situations and no communal areas, they spend time on the high street, so people's perceptions are that there's been a massive increase in migration."
The aforementioned feeling of being left behind can also germinate easily when you're looking out to sea from the end of a railway line, with few people passing through, and half of the radius for job recruitment engulfed by the sea. These out-of-reach coastal towns are often the first places to turn to populist alternatives.
"When Brexit was the main issue, we had a UKIP surge in Yarmouth, and we had a contingent of UKIP councillors at one time," Trevor reflects. "We were confident of winning the [2024] general election, but that evaporated in the six weeks before the election. Nigel Farage appeared in Yarmouth at a rally, people who were firmly Labour started saying they hadn't made their minds up, and we saw it change in front of our eyes."
Since being elected, Rupert Lowe has made plenty of headlines, ranking second on a recent Telegraph list of spoken contributions in Parliament before his recent clash with his party's top brass. Throughout this high-profile parliamentary spell, he's repeatedly focused on national issues rather than more regionally-specific issues. How does that play with locals?
"I think he's doing his best, and he seems to care about the town," says Jason, a middle-aged man who believes people in Great Yarmouth "trust Reform more than they trust Labour." Lee, the shopkeeper, has "zero hope in the Labour government" but also "can't see any changes whatsoever" since Lowe's election. The fact that the town's new MP lives in the Cotswolds and rarely visits east Norfolk might have something to do with that.
"Rupert Lowe is a multimillionaire, not a man of the people!" says Trevor. "He's only been here three or four times since he was elected, but he comes down, takes a load of photos for social media and convinces everyone he cares." While Lowe is vocal about Yarmouth's decline, Trevor has been trying to argue that his 'hung' council (split equally between Labour and Conservative) has made progress in recent years.
"I was first elected in 2002 to the Borough Council, and since then there's been a huge amount of positive change in Yarmouth," he says. "Hundreds of millions of pounds of investment have come into the borough, for things like the Market Place, the new Marina Centre, The Place (an old department store re-opening as a university hub)... offshore wind energy, the new bridge… but there seems to get this impression that everything is decaying, everything's getting worse."
Tavern talk
It's quiz night at the Blackfriars Tavern and the place is packed, so I'm out the back with a gravelly-voiced bitter drinker called Jonathan Griffiths-Hughes, who's working on a long-term manufacturing project in Great Yarmouth.
"Exclusion makes people bitter," he says. "I did a job in Middlesbrough [another town with a strong Reform presence] where I saw this massive BMW advertising board completely burnt out by locals. I asked my host 'What's that all about? It's mindless', and he said 'No it's not, because people are driving past something they will never be able to afford.'"
That resentment towards the wealthy and powerful, that feeling that things will never get better for people in towns like Great Yarmouth, Middlesbrough, Hull and Hartlepool, was a key driver behind the racist riots of August 2024. Of course, there was plenty of disgusting prejudice and hate at play, fuelled by what sociologist Les Back identified as a "colonial and imperial sense of both entitlement and power" in British society. But it's no coincidence that more affluent communities, where people feel they have a greater stake in society, didn't riot.
In addition, research highlighted by The Lead shows that Reform's appeal stems not just from anti-immigration policy, but from a vague notion of anti-establishmentism and rejection of the two-party system. Reform have wrapped up both these corners of the vote; to beat them, progressives need to combat their messaging on immigration (rather than buckling to it), whilst also making practical improvements to towns like Yarmouth. So what are the jobs of the future here?
"We're a services economy, so bring services here, call centres, things you can train the local population in," says Jonathan. "High-tech jobs bring a population from the outside and widen the divide, but if you can provide jobs that are above the living wage and above people's current expectations, you can start to grow a community with more pride."
Without increased pride, towns like Great Yarmouth won't be restored to their former glories. And there's plenty to be proud about, according to Trevor. "There are huge opportunities in Yarmouth," he says. "Tourism is becoming more a 52-week-a-year thing, and with more investment at Britannia Pier and down the seafront, we can have jobs that last 52 weeks and aren't seasonal."
"There are also huge opportunities in the offshore wind energy sector, with 200 skilled and unskilled jobs being created," he adds. "House building — which Rupert Lowe opposes, he's against any housebuilding in Great Yarmouth — creates jobs for plasterers, plumbers, electricians, carpet layers, and they all put money into the local economy."
In his eyes, the best way to beat Reform is "to prove that things are changing." And clearly, material improvements are desperately needed, across the deprived eastern seaboard. But even if Starmer's Labour government can make these changes (which in five years, is a big 'if'), not combining this strategy with a more positive message on immigration is a massive gamble.
Regenerating towns like Great Yarmouth will take time. And if things stay the same, the far-right's message will only grow more powerful. To turn the tide on England's eastern seaboard, a new narrative is needed.
About the author: Fred Garratt-Stanley is a freelance journalist who writes about culture, politics, football, and pubs. He's based in London and has written for a wide range of publications including The Lead, The Guardian, NME, Huck, and Pellicle.
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