CLACTON, England — UKIP may have won a pyrrhic victory in Britain's Brexit heartland.

Along England's east coast, people who previously cast their ballots for the UK Independence Party, and who voted overwhelmingly for Britain to leave the European Union last year as UKIP vocally urged, look set to flock to the Tories come June's election.

In part, UKIP has lost its raison d'etre and imploded since the Brexit referendum in June — with Nigel Farage stepping down as party leader, unleashing a rather undignified scramble for the top spot.

But polling as well as dozens of conversations with voters in East Anglia reveal that, beyond control of immigration and a rejection of Brussels, many of England’s east coast Brexiteers are moved politically by a yearning for the past and a desire for working class prosperity, social protections and cultural conservatism — an agenda which brought UKIP some success and which has now been pilfered by Prime Minister Theresa May.

Symbolic win

Perhaps more than any other in the country, the Clacton constituency, which sits on the Essex coast north-east of London, represents the seismic shift in British politics over the last few years.

Not too long ago, it was UKIP eating Tory votes.

In 2014, two Conservative MPs — Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless — defected to UKIP. While both resigned their seats and won the subsequent by-elections, only Carswell survived the general election the following year. It was a symbolic defeat that arguably precipitated Brexit and the downfall of then-Prime Minister David Cameron.

Yet, with Brexit underway and May in as prime minister, the Tories look likely to retake the seat.

This region "now looks set to give Theresa May and the Conservative Party very high levels of support,” said Matthew Goodwin, a professor and polling expert at the University of Kent.

Paul Oakley, a senior UKIP executive committee member and the party's candidate in Clacton, thinks his party can take the seat where 70 per cent of voters backed leaving the European Union but, throughout the country in local elections earlier this month, the Tories made big gains — in part by hoovering up UKIP votes.

And if the Conservatives can take this beacon of Euroskepticism, Clacton once more becomes symbolic — but this time as an emblem of the realignment on the political right which looks set to deliver a thumping Conservative victory on June 8.

Rejection of Cameron

The Conservative candidate, the former actor Giles Watling, a Remainer who unsuccessfully stood against Carswell twice after the latter's UKIP defection, says the “enormous amount of anger” he detected among voters in 2015 appears to have dissipated.

“I think — extraordinarily enough — [the referendum vote] was not about Brexit. A lot of people were trying to hit out at Cameron’s government,” Watling said.

In a working class area, the perceived elitism of Cameron's Eton-heavy cabinet did not go over well and May, despite having served as Cameron's home secretary for six years, has successfully distanced herself from her predecessor, sacking some of his most high-profile allies and pursuing a more interventionist policy agenda designed to woo Britain’s working class. May’s appeal to “England first” is also going over well in this area.

“There are many patriotic people in the Clacton constituency,” Watling said.

Lisa Barrett, 32, who works at the Unique café in Clacton town center, voted for the first time ever in last year’s referendum. She did so in the belief that the binary referendum was more consequential than a general election and that it could return decision-making to the U.K. Mostly, though, it was a visceral vote.

“It is mainly the fact I didn’t like Cameron," she said. "I really didn’t like [George] Osborne. He has a really dark soul that man.”

If she votes in the election, she will probably go for Labour — believing its leader Jeremy Corbyn to be a “better man.”

But there are few Labour voters like Barrett, which is curious given that Clacton doesn't appear to be natural Tory territory. More than one in 10 people claim employment support or other benefits and average wages of £440 a week are well below the national average of £530.

But it is a sign of how far British politics has shifted that Labour has little hope in a constituency that appears to be mostly a contest between UKIP and the Tories.

Carswell, who left UKIP in March, will not stand again, but he, too, detects a shift brought on by the change of leadership.

“A lot of these people would feel bad about voting for a local Tory grandee — a lot of them have never been Tory before," he said. "They don’t really see themselves as voting Conservative but they are voting for Mrs. May."

Clean break

For voters in Clacton, and further up the coast in Great Yarmouth, there is little discussion about 'soft' or 'hard' Brexit.

As one prominent Brexiteer Conservative candidate, who did not want to be named, put it: “99.9 percent who voted Brexit have no idea about these different kinds of Brexit.”

But voters will be glad to know that they are “no longer being told what to do by the EU," he said.

In the 2015 general election, Labour took just 14.4 percent of the vote.

Local Labour officials may know their enemy but they are not showing up to the fight — Clacton and Harwich are not targeted seats.

In Waveney, another Brexit-heavy constituency, the Conservative candidate Peter Aldous agrees that there isn't a lot of talk about the types of Brexit — people simply want a “clean break," he said.

UKIP is a "spent force," said Ivan Henderson, who held the seat (on old electoral boundaries) between 1997 and 2005 — the last Labour MP to do so. It is "back to the old days of Labour knowing who their main enemy is — that is the Conservative Party," he said.

Local Labour officials may know their enemy but they are not showing up to the fight — Clacton and Harwich are not targeted seats.

It's not hard to see why.

In the 2015 general election, Labour took just 14.4 percent of the vote, with the Conservative Party and UKIP taking more than 80 percent between them. And it is unlikely to have gotten any better since then, given the Labour disarray that openly pits Corbyn against some of his MPs.

Fear of the future

In a launderette near the seafront in Clacton, a woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she still hadn't decided who she would vote for. In 2015, she backed Carswell and UKIP, not because she sees Brexit as an opportunity to ditch regulations and push libertarian economics. Rather, she wants a return to the past where the milkman delivered the milk to the door and meat was bought at the butcher's counter.

“Modern technology is wiping out all the jobs,” she said.

Her discomfort with modern Britain is typical of many Leave voters.

A YouGov poll conducted in February found that 48 percent of pro-Brexit voters wanted a return to selling goods in pounds and ounces, 42 percent wanted to bring back corporal punishment in schools and 30 percent wanted traditional incandescent light bulbs — far higher percentages in all categories than among Remain voters.

She voted to leave the EU but, although the vote went her way, she is skeptical that her life will change. “Does it really matter who is in power?" she said. "They are all the same."