Broadstairs: no home but the struggle
Bleak House
As part of at least 80 or so ‘stop the coup’ demonstrations held in the UK on 31st August it is reported that around 100 protesters gathered in Broadstairs at the office of the South Thanet Tory Party.
The report indicates that the Labour Party were involved and its worth remembering that even in areas where the Tories generally dominate politically Labour remains organised and active. That is more than can be said quite often in Labour dominated areas of the Tories
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/thanet/news/protestors-gather-to-stop-the-coup-211456/
Without therefore visiting the enormous condescension of posterity on left of centre politics in somewhere like Broadstairs the fact that a sizeable protest took place underlines the strength and breadth of feeling about the actions of Johnson in proroguing Parliament.
Broadstairs is perhaps known firstly as the location of Dickens’ Bleak House and secondly, more recently, for an association with the late Tory leader Ted Heath who, from memory, used to sail his yacht, the Morning Cloud, in the area.
Trying to find an historic association with the left is rather more difficult than it is for nearby Ramsgate and Margate, where both Marx and Engels stayed.
However Volume 50 of Marx and Engels Collected Works reveals a letter written by Engels in Eastbourne (his favourite seaside residence) on 14th August 1894 to one of the leaders of the German SDP Eduard Bernstein ‘in Broadstairs’. Engels adds a PS ‘are the Mendelsons also in Broadstairs?’. Mendelson was a Polish social democrat (i.e. Second International Marxist).
What the attraction of Broadstairs to European social-democratic politicians at the end of the nineteenth century was I have yet to discover, but it throws an interesting sidelight on Brexit debates.
Update
Checking the Clarion for 1894 (now on-line at the British Library for those with a readers pass) the Christmas edition for 1894 (24th December) does mention Broadstairs, essentially as a place where people might go to see naval ships and drink Dickens punch (in other words as a holiday venue). It may be assumed that the left were at least aware of the potential of Broadstairs in this respect at the end of the nineteenth century
This is the legacy of the local anti-UKIP campaign that stuffed Farage and has morphed into a highly effective health campaign against the centralisation of stroke services. There has been an active Left in Thanet for a long time and it has been boosted by older London Left figures who have retired to the area.