I see Reform UK have launched their North East local election campaign with a familiar rallying cry: Keir Starmer, small boats, national decline, civilisation on the brink. All the usual bedside reading.
This did leave me with a small geographical puzzle. I had not realised that the small boats were now crossing the North Sea and landing somewhere off Hartlepool. One imagines them battling past oil rigs and Norwegian ferries before washing up near Sunderland, to be greeted by a bewildered planning committee.
In reality, of course, the boats are in the Channel. They set off from France and land in Kent. The North East is several hundred miles away, separated by most of England and a certain lack of coastline facing Calais. Inconvenient details.
All this comes just as the UK has signed yet another agreement with France to try to curb those crossings. The broad shape is familiar: more money for French policing, more effort to stop departures, more political theatre on both sides of the Channel. The practical problem remains stubborn. It is one thing to promise “control”, quite another to achieve it on a stretch of coastline riddled with dunes, inlets and improvised launch points.
Spotting small groups slipping out of sandhills and making a short dash to the water is intrinsically difficult. By contrast, once a boat is detected in or approaching UK territorial waters, the legal position hardens. Under maritime search and rescue obligations and basic principles of jurisdiction, those on board become the UK’s responsibility. In other words, by the time the problem is visible, it is already yours. Any politician implying this is straightforward is either simplifying or selling something.
But Reform are not really fighting a local election in the old fashioned sense. Bins, potholes, adult social care, planning disputes about a conservatory that has ambitions beyond its station. That is all rather municipal. Instead, they are staging a national mood piece and inviting voters to treat the ballot paper as a verdict on Starmer, immigration and the general sense that things are not what they were.
It is not stupid. It is quite shrewd. If you cannot win the argument on who will run the council competently, you change the subject to something bigger, louder and preferably angrier. Voters are then asked to express a feeling rather than make a judgement. Much easier.
The difficulty comes when one asks the awkward follow up. Suppose Reform win a clutch of councils in the North East. What, precisely, do they propose to do on day one? Dispatch the highways department to the English Channel? Install coastal patrols on the Tyne? Issue strongly worded letters to the French from County Hall?
The answer, insofar as one can detect it through the fog of rhetoric, is the usual grab bag. Cut waste. Freeze or reduce council tax. Be tougher on antisocial behaviour. Oppose developments that annoy people while supporting developments that also annoy people, but in a different way. Efficiency will be discovered, presumably down the back of the municipal sofa. None of which has the slightest practical bearing on Channel crossings.
None of this is unique to the North East. It is a travelling script, equally at home in Essex or Exeter. Place names are swapped out, indignation remains constant.
So yes, the film Get Carter may be closer to a policy than anything currently on offer. Not because it solves anything, but because at least it has the virtue of being set in the right place.
In the end, the boats are in the Channel, the councils are in the North East, and the connection between the two is not geography but politics. One is a complex, stubborn operational problem on a distant coastline. The other is a set of local elections. Treating them as the same thing may be electorally convenient, but it does not make it true.
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