The Talbot pub, Blackpool

A town ripe for political revolt

Reform UK now has its first pub, The Talbot. In the film, we talk to the locals and how the pub embodies something important that’s often missed about Reform: hope, optimism, the idea that an alternative exists. 

I spent a week in Blackpool, trying to understand this town, which has ended up the rough end of pretty much everything going wrong in the UK today. I left with the impression that this is a kind of terra incognita for the UK political landscape. The tools we use to diagnose places - income distribution, etc - come nowhere close to summing up what is going wrong.

I went to a youth centre, a beacon of hope run by inspiring local people. Outside its door was a phone box used by local drug dealers to drop their wares: local police were informed, but are ignored. I went to another youth club in a council estate where I met several children who had never been to its Promenade seafront. They regard it as a seedy dump, full of horrible jobs none of them would like to take. I met so many kids who left school without any GCSEs that I ran the figures: Blackpool is the worst in the country with 30pc of pupils leaving without a pass mark in any GCSE. It has one of the country’s worst levels of drug and alcohol dependency.

I spoke to young people there who saw no point in getting an education, because they saw around them that this did not lead to a better life. Spending time with the social and youth workers in Blackpool showed me what happens when work disappears from entire communities. And what’s missing here is any hope that things will meaningfully improve. If I were bringing up a family here, then I can see why a vote for radical change - and a party that showed enough of an interest to open up a pub - would hold an appeal.