The Palm Bay estate in Cliftonville is a picture of English respectability in white paint and red brick. Detached bungalows with modest front lawns stretch inland from the Kentish coast in neat rows. It is not a wealthy area but it projects a doughty resistance to the decay that is visible elsewhere in Margate, the resort of which it is a suburb. These middle-class homes stand in prim Edwardian rebuke to the grimy Victorian terraces and crumbling Regency façades of the town centre.

Cliftonville worries about encroaching decline and has expressed that anxiety in recent county council elections by voting for the UK Independence Party. At a sedate meeting in a seafront hotel, an audience of mostly grey-haired and exclusively white-skinned residents listens politely to an address by a local Conservative MP, Laura Sandys. The most contentious issue to arise is housing – not the shortage that exercises Westminster policymakers, but the opposite. There is fear of construction developments and suspicion that refurbishment of derelict properties (of which Margate has a surfeit) will benefit undesirable newcomers.

“You can make the properties as nice as you like,” says a woman in her fifties. “The problem is the quality and calibre of people going in them.” Another resident explains afterwards, over tea and biscuits, that Margate has been overrun by “the dregs from London” – a category that captures immigrants, benefit claimants and drug addicts believed to have been dumped on the coast by councils in the capital.

Sandys is a popular MP but she is standing down at the next election. An opinion poll by Survation last year put Ukip in second place in her constituency, South Thanet, with 30 per cent of the vote – 5 points behind Labour. It is one of the seats that Nigel Farage is rumoured to be considering as an entry point to parliament in next year’s general election.

Like many coastal towns in eastern England, Margate has an immigrant population. There are Slovakian, Czech and Roma communities, although it would be a stretch to say they have drastically altered the complexion of the place. It is no inundation. Resentment here is about something more profound than fear of jobs being taken by outsiders or distaste at the sound of alien consonants in the bus queue. It expresses a feeling that all the important decisions are being made elsewhere; that someone in the capital has decided what kind of town this should be and that dissent is ignored or, worse, belittled as the mark of backward provinciality.