How Farage won my town...Starmer should be worried

Almost exactly 20 years ago, on 14 June 2004, I sat in my mum's living room, turned on the TV and watched footage of my hometown, Boston, in Lincolnshire, burning. The previous day, more than 100 people had rioted in the town, reports said.

- ZOË BEATY

Hours after England crashed out of the Euros, tightening racial tension over immigration in the market town snapped, and erupted. Police cars were set on fire. Nearly every shop window was smashed. At school the next day we tried to grasp what had happened and deduce which of us now had family members on the run from the law.

The riots were a response to a rumour, allegedly spread by the BNP, that the council was banning the flying of English flags during the football tournament. It was entirely false but that didn't matter, and soon enough national news reports on Boston showed a portrait of a town alight with anger, a poster child of English nationalism, growing racism, discomfort and unrest.

In the years that followed I watched my home town attract more headlines for high rates of teenage pregnancy, as the murder capital of the UK, the least integrated town in the country, the most obese and one of the poorest.

By the time Brexit came around more than a decade later, Boston's migrant population - who almost exclusively do necessary "back-breaking" field and factory work in Lincolnshire's vast food and agriculture industry - had grown by more than 460 per cent and the borough was synonymous with anti-immigration rhetoric. It resulted in the highest leave vote in the country in the referendum: just over 75 per cent, with a turnout of 74.2 per cent. Boston and neighbouring Skegness became known as Farageland.

Then came this week's headline. While the majority of the country was swept up in Labour's landslide victory, in Thursday's general election Richard Tice, chair of Reform UK, won one of five seats for the party in the constituency of Boston and Skegness, ending a 27-year Conservative hold.