‘There are too many people in the country’



Electronic dance stars Underworld like to say the town of Romford in east London, where they are based, is their New York. But frankly, on the wet Wednesday my train from Stratford chugs into the town, I am struggling to see the comparison. Unless it is something to do with being mugged. I witness a near fight between a shopkeeper and a man fleeing from his store within about a minute of setting foot in the high street.

Hitherto, Romford’s main claim to fame, aside from being home to Underworld, was probably its greyhound track. But now it has another. A recent YouGov survey named the London borough of Havering as the most Eurosceptic place in the country. Romford is the biggest town in the borough, and I have come to ask whether, as members of the EU over the past 40 years, we really have gone to the dogs.

The answer at Margaret Thatcher House, the headquarters of the town’s Conservative Association and the base during the run-up to the referendum in June for the cross-party leave campaign, is an unequivocal yes. Constituency secretary Sue Connelly is wonderfully plain-spoken. “We’ve got to get out of Europe as quickly as possible,” she says. “We want our country back.” Her loathing of David Cameron for backsliding on the EU (and much else besides) is palpable. “I can’t stand the man.” You sense Connelly is not a woman to cross lightly.

Osman Dervish and Sue Connelly of the Romford Conservative Association. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

She is at HQ to greet me with Terry Justice, the chairman of the Conservative association in neighbouring Dagenham. Justice (“What we don’t have a lot of,” he says when I ask him his name) is drinking tea from a union jack mug; I get mine in a mug with the flag of St George on it. The constituency HQ was reopened by Lady Thatcher in 2005 after an arson attack had caused extensive damage the year before. A large plaque commemorates her visit, and pictures of her adorn every wall. Thatcherism is alive and well in Romford, and leaving the EU is the central article of faith.

I ask Osman Dervish, the chairman of the Conservative Association in the town, whether he was surprised Romford had topped the poll for Euroscepticism. “Not at all,” he says. “It’s a traditional market town, with people who are proud of where they live and where they come from, proud of their tradition and heritage. A lot of them grew up in the East End and moved out here having made good. They are Mrs Thatcher’s children. Many of them support that idea of aspiration and moving up the property scale.”

Dervish’s family are originally from northern Cyprus, but he says that has no bearing on his attitude to the EU. “I love Europe. Without Europe as a strong continent of varied states, each with their own specialism, we wouldn’t have civilisation as we know it. This isn’t about where you’re from. It’s about the principle. The concept of the European Union as a free trade area has changed into something else, something anti-democratic.”

‘If she wants to get out, I’m with the Queen, so let’s go!’ Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Lawrence Webb, the leader of the six-strong Ukip group on Havering council, calls the area “Eurosceptic Central”. In January, he tabled a motion on the council declaring that the UK would be better off outside the EU; it was passed by 30 to 15, making Havering the first elected body in the UK to vote to leave. Romford’s MP, Andrew Rosindell, who achieved instant fame in the 2001 general election when he campaigned alongside a staffordshire bull terrier dressed in a union jack waistcoat (the dog, not the prospective MP, wore the coat), is probably the most fervent anti-EU Tory in the country. But Ukip still managed to poll more than 11,000 votes in Romford, coming a healthy second to the Conservatives. As YouGov’s poll suggests, this is a town where Euroscepticism knows no bounds.

Webb walks me around Romford’s market square, where a few hardy traders and shoppers are braving the drizzle. Tony Geary, who has a stall selling clothing and is chairman of the Romford Market Traders Forum, says he hasn’t quite decided how he will vote in the referendum, but is leaning towards leave. “I’m probably 70/30 to get out. We’ve allowed our borders to be open far too much. There are too many people in the country.” To clinch the point, he holds up a copy of that day’s Sun, the front page of which announces that the Queen backs Brexit. “If she wants to get out, I’m with the Queen, so let’s go!”

The politicos in Romford might obsess about the question of who governs Britain, but immigration is the key issue for the man and woman in the street. “We should definitely come out,” says Katrina Woods, who is shopping in the market square with her friend Jane Verner. “We’re overcrowded as it is. We’ve got no houses for our own children. Or look at the way they’re treating people in hospital. You go down the hospital and you’re waiting hours. You’ve got old people left on trolleys. They haven’t got beds for them.”

Verner says it’s probably already too late. You can’t send back the people who have already come in, they tend to be relatively young and have large families, the population is going to rise anyway. But Webb tells them getting out now will at least deprive 500 million other EU citizens of the right to come to the UK. “I don’t understand how you didn’t get in,” Verner tells him. “Everybody I know voted Ukip. It sounds like we’re being horrible. Those poor people – if it was us, we would want to get to somewhere better. But you just can’t keep taking them.” “I’m not prejudiced,” adds Woods. “I’ve got foreign in the family.”

When I ask for their names, they look anxious, fearing they have spoken too openly. But Webb reassures them. “Don’t worry,” he says, “nobody round here reads the Guardian.” Which, I discover later, is not quite true: Quadrant News in South Street has sold out – both the Guardians they get daily have gone. “They certainly soon go,” says the man behind the counter. It seems that even Eurosceptic Central has a few closet liberals.

‘What are we going to do if we leave the EU?’

Aberystwyth: ‘an enriched, cosmopolitan community’. Photograph: Gareth Phillips/The Guardian

As well as identifying the most Eurosceptic place in Britain, the YouGov poll also named the most Europhiliac – the county of Ceredigion in mid Wales. The largest town in Ceredigion is Aberystwyth, which has a population of around 13,000, plus another 11,000 students at the university, and after my day in Romford that is where I head, on a train that trundles amiably through the lovely countryside of mid Wales. The slate-grey skies of east London have turned blue; lambs gambol in the fields; the river Dyfi winds its way gently towards Aberdovey; the inviting beach at Borth hints at the possibilities of summer. It isn’t just in attitudes to the EU that these places differ; they are worlds apart.

I go to meet Mark Williams, the Lib Dem MP for Ceredigion (one of the eight to hang on to their seats in 2015). When I arrive at his office near the promenade in Aberystwyth, he is just finishing a meeting with a former lady mayoress who tells me she was instrumental in twinning the town with Kronberg im Taunus in Germany (an odd twin since it is several hundred miles from the coast). Aberystwyth, she says, is proud of its twin cities in Germany, France and Patagonia. In Romford, no one had mentioned being twinned with anyone, and I fantasise that it stands proudly alone. But I discover later that it is twinned – with Ludwigshafen am Rhein in Germany and Hesdin in France. Havering council even trumpets the connection as helping “to foster understanding and tolerance by giving people from participating towns the chance to learn about another culture, language, history and way of life”.

Williams explains why his constituency is the most Europhile in Britain. “The influence of the universities [Lampeter to the south as well as Aberystwyth itself] is significant. We have been an enriched, cosmopolitan community for a very long time, and there are enduring links with the universities.” Williams studied politics at Aberystwyth in the 1980s and fell in love with the town. “Second,” he says, “there is a hard financial realisation that this constituency and west Wales more generally are heavily dependent [on the EU] financially. Cardies [the residents of the old county of Cardiganshire] have a reputation for being mindful of the pennies, so this is an essential argument. We’ve been eligible for convergence funding for the past 17 years, and you can’t go to any village or community in this constituency where there isn’t the European emblem up somewhere for a project that’s been directly funded by the EU.”

Mark Williams MP. Photograph: Gareth Phillips/The Guardian

He says the enthusiasm for Brussels reflects a feeling that the UK government has let west Wales down. “People see Europe as having looked after them, where sometimes Whitehall has failed. That is a question the no campaigners are going to have to answer – what happens next? A sunny day in Aberystwyth and people forget there are significant pockets of deprivation across this area.”

The people who stand to lose most if the UK withdraws from the EU are the farmers, who depend on European subsidies to see them through. “Small family farms in the uplands operate very much on the margins,” says Williams. “They don’t want to operate under a subsidy regime, but we are where we are, and if that rug was taken away it would rip out the rural economy on which this area relies.”

At the headquarters of the Farmers’ Union of Wales a few miles outside Aberystwyth, the union’s president Glyn Roberts says leaving the EU would be a disaster for local farming. “About 30% of Welsh lamb is exported to Europe,” he explains, “and if we lose that market it would have a devastating effect on our prices. At the moment we have free trade with Europe and don’t pay any tariffs. But if we exit Europe, we will pay tariffs yet still have to operate within the rules and regulations [of the EU].” It would, he says, be the worst of all worlds.

As well as the impact on exports, Roberts says the withdrawal of subsidies would undermine the whole rural economy. “History says that whatever party is governing in Westminster, they won’t be giving farmers the same amount of money as Europe does. The agricultural vote counts for less in Britain than in Europe. Some people criticise the French, but for agriculture those French farmers are our friends.”

Students Dan Hooper and Rebecca Hopkins. Photograph: Gareth Phillips/The Guardian

Nicholas Fenwick, the FUW’s head of policy, says the average Welsh farmer receives around £11,000 a year through the common agricultural policy – equivalent to four-fifths of a farmer’s income. But a farm contributes an average of about £100,000 a year to the local economy, and two out of every five businesses in rural Wales are involved in farming. “Without agriculture,” says Fenwick, “everything’s gone.”

Out on the sunny streets of Aberystwyth – where I get shat on by the town’s killer seagulls no fewer than three times – there is widespread support for staying in the EU, especially among the young. “There’s a lot of poverty around here,” says Kirk Holland, another former student who has stayed on in the town, “and we get a lot of subsidies from the EU.” He says he will vote to stay in, not least because he doesn’t trust the Westminster government on human rights.

“I’m pro-EU,” says law student Rebecca Hopkins. “What are we going to do if we leave the EU? We lose trade, we lose immigrants, we lose everything. People shit on the immigrants that come here from the EU, but they give a lot more than they take. Ukip are clinging to a dead, decaying idea of nationalism. We’re not Great Britain any more. We don’t rule the world. We’re just a tiny island that needs to make positive relations.” Her expletive is unfortunate, as a few minutes earlier her companion Dan Hooper had been splatted on the side of the head by a seagull. “Don’t wipe it off,” she instructs him. “Let it dry.”

The super-confident Hopkins is unusual among the people I speak to. Most, in both Aberystwyth and Romford, are trying to protect something. In Wales, the farmers are seeking to maintain the subsidies that underpin the local economy. In Romford, the old East Enders are hankering after a close-knit, defiantly English way of life that is almost defunct. The two sides are approaching the referendum defensively, voting in a bid to maintain the world they know. It is why the debate is being played out in the language of fear rather than hope. Only the students, who have no economic interests to defend and welcome a cosmopolitan future, reach beyond the negativity. There will be a lot of metaphorical seagull crap thrown over the next few months, and the best advice may indeed be to ignore it.