Like the water lapping the yellow sands on Southend’s Jubilee beach, the county of Essex has been a sea of blue since 2010. Standing on the sands looking out towards the pier, Bayo Alaba is one of the Labour candidates hoping the tide is turning in seats such as Southend East and Rochford. Long neglected by Labour, it is now one of the key Tory strongholds that could go red, with Alaba emblematic of a new kind of Labour candidate, a businessman and former Parachute regiment soldier who spent the D-day anniversary doing a sponsored jump for the Royal British Legion. “This has been a Labour ambition that has never been realised,” Alaba says. “We are backing ourselves. We can talk to people here, we can support their lives and community. Southend is full of working people, independently minded, and they are frustrated with the state of their city.” “Essex man” is a totemic concept for the Tories, patriotic, self-made, first associated with backing Margaret Thatcher. Labour held a clutch of seats during the Tony Blair years, but since the party lost power none have gone red again.
But now the county is firmly in the sights of Labour strategists. For Keir Starmer to better Tony Blair’s 1997 majority, the only way is Essex. The Labour leader has visited Thurrock twice in the last month and shadow cabinet ministers have flocked to Harlow, Southend and Colchester. Polls suggest that as many as nine seats could be won, but voters on many of the doorsteps are still telling candidates they are undecided. Starmer launched his “Six First Steps” in Purfleet, the seat of the Conservative Jackie Doyle-Price, which Labour looks near certain to take. Labour’s Thurrock candidate, Jen Craft, has been campaigning with Starmer, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall in the past fortnight. Her espresso machine is named Angela after an energy boost from the Labour deputy leader, Angela Rayner.
“If we win this, we win the country,” Craft says, among teetering piles of leaflets in her office in Grays, the town where she grew up. “People want to know that they’ll be in safe hands with us. They’re not looking for bells and whistles. I’m realistic about what we can offer, but they want to know that they’re going to be safe.” In south Essex, Labour made significant gains in the recent local elections and activist numbers have swelled. More than anything, it is the cost of living strain, sky-high mortgages and some of the worst GP waiting lists that are driving Conservative-to-Labour switches. Craft has raised her family in Grays and was a civil servant until taking a career break to look after her daughter, who has Down’s syndrome. She says she can relate strongly with people navigating impenetrable systems to get help for their loved ones – and families suddenly finding themselves struggling with everyday costs. “They’ve perhaps bought their first house but their mortgages completely skyrocketed,” Craft says. “They’ve not made risky financial decisions. It’s just the old certainties they had completely falling away.” Thurrock has attracted first-time buyers from London to new-build homes with neat lawns, as well as longstanding working-class communities near Tilbury, where some still farm small pieces of land under the shadow of a gargantuan Amazon fulfilment centre.
Despite the warehouse and the nearby docks, unemployment is nearly twice the national average. Thurrock council in effect declared bankruptcy in December 2022 after running up a £500m deficit. There are significant numbers of people on the doorsteps saying they are switching directly to Labour from the Conservatives. Thurrock had one of the highest votes to leave the EU but several residents mentioned their anger at Boris Johnson. “We have always voted Conservative as a family,” says Pauline Harris, 80, standing on her neat doorstep in Tilbury, who says she is switching to Labour “But we just don’t feel represented locally. We can’t help a lot of what has gone on with the pandemic and wars, but we’ve had nothing here for years.” Terry Aldwinckle, 43, says he is furious about rampant antisocial behaviour, which he says include brazen drug deals and fly-tipping. He says he will vote Labour, but is adamant that a change is needed in the way of doing politics. “We don’t want someone to come in and then not be back here, because that’s what’s been happening. Never been back and never done anything.” A few miles up the A13 is Basildon, part of the seat into which the Tory chair, Richard Holden, was controversially parachuted from his previous North Durham seat. It is also the home of one of the veterans of Labour in Essex who would sit in Starmer’s cabinet, Angela Smith, the shadow leader of the Lords and the former MP for Basildon, first elected in 1997.
This election does not feel like 1997 for Lady Smith, even though the gains could be greater. “We have a huge job to convince people that politics can be a force for good,” she says, walking down Basildon’s high street. “But they do say things have got to change. “Talking about seats in Southend being in play for us is extraordinary – we’ve never held those seats. These are places that are going to be incredibly close. If people believe the polls and think everything is going to be fine then maybe they won’t vote. I almost think it’s part of the Tory strategy to suppress the vote.” Activists do have some quiet hopes for even greater gains. There are whispers of South Basildon, perhaps even the Brexit general Mark Francois’s seat in Rayleigh and Wickford. James Cleverly, the home secretary, is rumoured to be feeling the heat in Braintree, though Labour locals are not quite setting their sights that high. For the nervous candidates hoping to make historic inroads in places such as Southend, never before held by Labour, there are still a huge number of unknowns that could make a key difference to the size of Labour’s majority. Labour missed out on control of Harlow council by 35 votes at the May election. Reform is concentrating on Nigel Farage in Clacton but the party could eat some votes of undecideds across the county. The numbers in many of the seats are very tight.
In Southend, Alaba is getting extra firepower from HQ, knocking on doors with the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy. He is keen to raise the profile of the town and to win the votes of longtime residents and bougie younger families who are moving out to the coast from London. It is a tough crowd in the homes that rise up the hill from the sea behind the Kursaal, a former amusement park that is now derelict apart from a Tesco. The majority tell Alaba they are undecided, or motivated not to vote, though none are prepared to say they are voting Conservative. The degradation of community assets such as the Grade II-listed Kursaal as well as raw sewage in the sea by Southend’s beaches are fuelling irritation and apathy. “People have felt before that they supported the party that they see. We haven’t always been that,” Alaba says. “We aren’t lecturing them. It’s important first that we listen, people feel heard. Politics has been poor and if we can reconnect, we can be a safe place for people to park their boat.”