IT IS only 40 minutes from Tilbury to Fenchurch Street station, on the edge of the City. But most residents of the town, one of England’s poorest places, are as likely to commute to the capital as fly to the moon. “It’s all offices there,” said Vicky, a 32-year-old carer for the mentally ill. “For people like us, it’s a bit daunting. You sort of think everyone’s more intellectual than you.”

Asked what her school grades were, Vicky says she “wouldn’t know, to be honest.” Education is not something the working-class people of Tilbury have traditionally gone for. You didn’t need O-levels to heave sacks of malt and bales of tea in Tilbury Docks, an outpost of the Port of London in the Thames estuary which was, until the 1980s, the biggest employer. The dockers’ wives were too busy raising children to have a career. Then came shipping containers and dock mechanisation. By the mid-1980s almost a fifth of the town’s men were on the dole, sending Tilbury into a downward spiral from which it has yet to emerge.

The result, in Britain’s prosperous south-east, is a polyp of hard-up, mostly white, grumpy people. During a day wandering Tilbury’s run-down rows of public housing and depressing high street, with its boarded-up premises and betting shops, your columnist heard almost nothing nice said about the place. People who had lived in Tilbury for generations described it as “hopeless”, “a third-world place” and, in the favourite local phrase, “a shithole and beyond”. Tilbury’s Labour Party candidate, Polly Billington, calls it a “northern town in the south”. It is no wonder that the comic Sacha Baron Cohen, currently making a mocking film about the northern town of Grimsby, is shooting it in Tilbury.

This also makes the town fashionable in Westminster, where the travails of Britain’s white working class are causing concern. Underscoring how stubbornly they languish, a recent parliamentary study confirmed that poor white British children do worse in school than those of any other group save Romany gypsies. But this fresh attention to the issue is also because it is election season and winning working-class love is, for differing reasons, a preoccupation of all the main parties. For David Cameron’s ruling Conservatives, getting such Britons off welfare and into work is a fiscal and moral mission and a test of Britain’s ability to endure austerity. For Labour, they represent an identity crisis.

Though increasingly drawn from and oriented towards middle England, where most voters reside, Britain’s main opposition still finds its cherished moral authority in a romantic association with the working-class people for whom it was formed. That is why Labour’s unexpected losses to the populist UK Independence party (UKIP) in recent local elections, in hard-up places such as Tilbury, sent the party’s leader Ed Miliband scuttling to Thurrock, the Tory-held marginal in which the town falls. There is now an argument within Labour over how to avoid a repeat of this disaster in next year’s general election, for which Thurrock is UKIP’s number two target seat; some want to ape UKIP with a more populist, especially anti-immigration, message.

That would be popular in Tilbury. Parking himself in the front-room of a house in Poynder Road, a row of modest 1930s houses, your columnist listened at length to the views of his hosts, a pair of hospitable Labour activists, and their neighbours. They were united in resentment of the immigrants, mostly west Africans and Poles, recently come to the town. “Why aren’t they all on a slow boat to China?” asked one, who, like most, asked not to be named. Another noted that Tilbury’s last pub, the Anchor, had become a Nigerian church—yet the problem, it was obvious, was not the Nigerians or their church, but the collapse of the local economy and morale that had led to this indignity.

Some of the ill will was generated by the usual autochthonous meanness—especially over the immigrants’ equal right to public housing. Yet mainly it arose from a deep and justified sense of inferiority. Immigrants are prominent commuters from Tilbury station, admitted one, “because they’re better educated than us” and, said another, “because they work damn hard”. Let UKIP cram the slow boat to the gunwales: it will not salve this insecurity. Indeed, xenophobia is not its only indicator in Poynder Road. Its residents seem to fear everything—including muggers, drug-pushers, paedophiles, air pollution and rising damp, also of being taken for fools by the politicians they once voted for and the tabloid newspapers they once read. “My son’s 31 and he won’t go out after 8pm because he doesn’t know who’s about,” shivered one. Tilbury is a rough place; but these exaggerated fears are of the world itself—“Everything’s gone downhill,” Bagehot was told several times, and then beseeched, “Hasn’t it?”

Sitting on the dock of the bay

Why has this slab of British society, representing a third of the population, proved so unable to adapt? Bad schools and a traditional disdain for education are part of the answer: asked whether they considered their children’s schooling to be of the utmost importance, Poynder Road’s older residents seemed surprised by the notion. But even this is more symptom than cause of a societal recidivism in which economic change, the enfeebling crutch of welfarism and clinging to working-class tradition all play a part. “People around here, they’d give you their last penny if you needed it,” said one misty-eyed resident—who then proceeded to bad-mouth Tilbury and his neighbours.

Beside the better schools the town is getting, the answers to Tilbury’s and Britain’s white left-behinds are not obvious. Yet they surely lie within their own hearts. State aid, of which they have had plenty, cannot fix a cultural failing. And those, mainly on the left, who think otherwise should consider the enormous opportunity, in their proximity to London, poor, grumbling Tilburians are squandering. What they need to get aboard the train to Britain’s future, even more than a fare, is self-confidence. It is a shame; but no pandering or populism can provide that.