If Reform UK can be said to have a spiritual home, then Essex, one of the “home counties” bordering Greater London, is surely it.
Essex elected two Reform MPs in the 2024 general election and gained a defecting Tory MP earlier this year. One of the two elected MPs was party leader Nigel Farage, arguably Britain’s most recognizable politician after the prime minister, in the seaside seat of Clacton. The other was an entirely unknown and unvetted “paper candidate,” who had agreed to put his name on the ballot in his local constituency of Basildon, but was not expected to do any campaigning, let alone actually win the seat. Farage’s party has been topping national opinion polls for just over a year now, but Essex was well ahead of the curve in its hunger for Reform.
“Essex Man” conjures up all kinds of associations in the British imagination, most of them not very flattering. He is from the white working class or lower-middle class, holding all the wrong opinions, expressing them in the wrong accents.
But while there are some very poor parts of Essex—the village of Jaywick, in Farage’s Clacton constituency, is England’s most deprived area—what makes it unusual is that the wealthier areas are Reform-curious, too. The county is full of working-class men and women “done good,” often with family roots in the East End of London. The stereotype has it that they like to splash their cash on big houses with gaudy furnishings, brash designer clothing, and more cosmetic surgery, beauty treatments, and “Turkey teeth” than a human should be able to survive. Think Mar-a-Lago meets Downton Abbey, and you’ll understand why Essex feels so culturally anomalous, and why its people generate so much pearl-clutching and loathing among Britain’s liberal establishment.
The wealthy of Essex are the children and grandchildren of the Thatcher Revolution. Her “big bang” deregulation of financial services opened up the once stuffy old boys’ club of the City of London to a new breed of financier: a class of men who would once have worked on market stalls found their skill set and sales patter ideally suited to trading stocks, shares, and commodities. Even in 2026, the London Metals Exchange, which handles the world’s largest market in metals futures, still operates with men shouting orders and prices down landline phones, almost invariably in an Essex or cockney accent. Suddenly, a detached house in a semi-rural neighborhood was something affordable to this cohort of working-class Londoners, and invariably they’d look to Essex.
But there were push factors as well as pulls that led vast numbers of East Enders to move to Essex. White flight has played a major role. Already by 2001, long before Britain had anything resembling the mass migration we see today, the East London borough of Newham had become majority-minority. Newham was soon joined by nearby boroughs like Tower Hamlets. Those who could afford a place in the Essex countryside or in leafier towns like Epping moved there. Those who couldn’t often moved to the “new towns” constructed after the war, like Basildon or Harlow.
But if Essex Man left London to escape rapid demographic change, then that is no longer an option. Mass immigration is changing Britain well beyond the major cities. Illegal migration is a particular flashpoint. Last year, nationwide protests against asylum hotels were sparked in Essex after a migrant who had been living in Epping’s Bell Hotel for just six days sexually assaulted a teenager and an adult woman who came to help her. Although it is undoubtedly true that far-right elements sought to exploit the demonstrations, the majority of protesters were concerned locals, mainly women. It was the birth of the Pink Ladies’ movement, where mums and grannies wore pink, fearful for their own and their daughters’ safety, organized protests, meetings, and WhatsApp groups across the country.
The contrast between the Pink Ladies and the kind of activism their neighbors get up to in the other home counties could hardly be more stark. Whereas these Essex women are battling against illegal migration and rape gangs, every quaint town square in Surrey now plays host to yummy mummies and housewives sounding off on the cultural elites’ favored issue du jour, from urging a reversal of Brexit to supporting Palestine Action. In the past decade or so, both counties would have reliably voted Conservative, but while the old money has defected to the centrist, socially progressive Liberal Democrats or to the Green Party, Essex men and women are turning rightward to Reform.
So where did it go wrong for the Conservatives? The terms “Essex Man” and “Basildon Man” came out of the 1980s and ’90s, when political scientists were struggling to get to grips with why so many working-class voters were refusing to align with what was deemed to be their class interest. Those who moved up the class ranks, who made money in the City, were expected to defect to the Conservatives, as befitting their new social status and tax bracket. But why did the less wealthy Essex men and women prefer Maggie Thatcher’s red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism to the socialism of the Labour Party that their parents and grandparents embraced?
The key factor that always eluded the Labour Party of that era was aspiration. They wanted to climb up the social ladder, but on the strength of their own grit, not with the help of state handouts. These were people who had already shown initiative by moving out of London in the first place. Rightly or wrongly, they believed Essex’s postwar “new towns” to be the future. They had “got on their bikes” in search of opportunities, long before the Thatcherite minister Norman Tebbit notoriously urged the masses of unemployed Britons to do the same. Thatcher tapped into this aspiration and individualism with her right-to-buy scheme, which allowed tenants of council houses to purchase the property they lived in at a discounted rate, putting millions of working-class people on the housing ladder. The policy was pioneered in Romford, a commuter town in—you guessed it—Essex, which now hosts a Reform MP, Andrew Rosindell, who defected from the Conservatives last month.
Even now, Labour and its outriders greet the loss of these voters with a mixture of bafflement and scorn. In the 1980s, it was said these “thugs” had been brainwashed by the tabloid newspapers into embracing the hated Tories. In modern times, the culprits are social media and so-called disinformation. Or it’s just that these people are “racist” or “far right.” Some on the left now refer to the white working class as “gammon”—a form of cured pork—likening the pink meat to the flushed faces of men and women who are said to be irrationally angry at modern life in Britain.
Thanks to this hate-hate relationship between Essex Man and the left, nobody now expects Keir Starmer’s Labour to ever win him back. Instead, in 2026, the question on everyone’s lips is: Why has he now stopped voting Tory?
There has always been a tension between the Tory “wets”—more centrist, more socially liberal, oriented toward the posher and more privileged—and the right, Brexity, more Reform-aligned wing. But since David Cameron took power in 2010, the wets have been wildly overrepresented. With the exception of Brexit, honoring the 2016 referendum to leave the EU, the policy program of recent Conservative administrations has been a centrist’s wet dream. After all, it was the Conservatives who signed Britain’s business-crushing Net Zero targets into law, let welfare spending soar to uncontrollable heights, raised taxes to the highest level since the Second World War, effectively decriminalized minor offences like shoplifting, and even came within an inch of allowing transgender self-identification. Above all, it was they who unleashed the largest influx of migration the UK has ever seen. In the so-called “Boriswave” (named after then–Prime Minister Boris Johnson), at least 2.6 million people arrived in Britain legally between 2020 and 2023—a staggering betrayal of the party’s promises to the electorate to bring migration down.
In office, the Tories were far more interested in chasing the approval of the chattering classes than in keeping the working- and lower-middle-class voters who are now defecting in droves to Reform. Infamously, one liberal Tory grandee reacted to the Conservatives’ loss of Essex’s Clacton to UKIP, the precursor party to Reform, not with alarm but with relief. The Tories should “turn their backs” on such ghastly places, he wrote in the Times. This was “tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.”
Essex Man didn’t abandon the Tories—the Tories abandoned him. And now, as the Reform revolution spreads well beyond Essex, they and the Labour government are reaping the whirlwind.
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