‘I love the names so much: idli, puttu, varuval, idiappam… It’s like a lullaby sung by Tinky Winky’
So Farage has Thanet in his beady sights, dividing the isle as efficiently as a Japanese-bladed knife. With his usual clammy bonhomie, he promises to sprinkle fairydust over an area that contains some of the greatest social deprivation in the UK. We’ll see, eh? There was an infographic kicking around Twitter recently that showed a curious divide: places with high immigration were least inclined to vote Ukip; those with a comparatively low percentage most likely to follow the “pound-shop Enoch Powell”, with the pieces fitting together, rarely overlapping, neat as a jigsaw.
Cliftonville is on the latter part of that map, a forgotten bit of Margate. Once a fashionable Victorian resort, it’s now largely tatty and sad, many of its handsome seafront buildings butchered to become Houses in Multiple Occupation. Immigration is comparatively low here, but poverty and insularity have created a culture that feeds Ukippery.
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