The silverware that occupies a huge cabinet in the bar of the Royal Temple Yacht Club in Ramsgate was gleaming in the evening sun as the audience climbed the stairs to a Vote Leave event in an upper room. There is no more fertile territory in the country for Brexit than this seaside town of 40,000 people, in a constituency that almost elected Ukip leader Nigel Farage as its MP last year.
Farage lost out by fewer than 3,000 votes to Conservative Craig McKinlay, who is campaigning for Brexit, and the two Eurosceptics won 70 per cent of the vote between them.
Vote Leave canvassers say a similar proportion of those they meet locally agree with them and the level of interest is so high that some canvassers have run out of leaflets.
Interest is not so intense, however, to motivate many people to come to hear former Northern Ireland secretary Owen Patterson make the case for Brexit. By the time he arrives, there is an audience of 28, most of them comfortably over 65, looking like a centre-page spread in a Land's End catalogue.
"Most people we know are Vote Leave but of course we are elderly people," Tony Peers tells me.
“I think my sons will probably stay in. I threaten them with disinheriting them.”
Peers has been campaigning for a vote on Britain’s EU membership since the 1990s, when he joined James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party. With some polls showing Leave in the lead this week, he thinks victory is within reach.
“I think it’s 50-50 at the moment but I’m hoping it will pan out at 55-45 for Leave. I just hope the British people have the common sense to do it,” he said.
Zena Cohen describes the EU as a sinking ship that anyone would be mad to be part of, particularly in view of the current condition of some euro-zone countries.
"I can remember going to Greece in 1975. It was a lovely place and they were proud people. But what are they now? They're just beggars now, basically," she said.
State of distress
As we wait for Patterson in a room decorated with a portrait of
Queen Elizabeth
in her youth and pictures of vessels in various states of distress, retired psychologist
Daniel Heinemann
tells me he came partly to see who else was here.
“Why do I want to leave? Because I want to have our sovereignty back. I remember what it was like before and it was different. We’re losing our values – decency, honesty, justice, fairness,” he said.
“I can’t be against immigration. I’ve got a wife who’s not British. I’m a Jew in origin. I’m not against immigration as such but I’m against allowing immigrants to change our values and there are too many of them.”
Heinemann's wife, Carmel, who was born in the Philippines, is more trenchant about immigration, complaining that EU migrants are taking all the jobs locally.
“In Ramsgate itself – it’s a very small town – there are two Polish supermarkets. We have enough supermarkets in England, we don’t need Polish ones,” she said.
Political project
Patterson rattled through the case for leaving the EU, which he says was a political project from the outset, before taking a swipe at EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström.
“We are the fifth-largest economy in the world. Is it sensible that we are represented by a 28th of a Swedish psychiatric nurse whose last job was teaching sociology at Gothenburg University?
“She is probably an absolutely brilliant, brilliant personality in her field. She may be a massive intellect and she’s probably an absolutely charming person. I’ve no idea. But would you really choose to have someone with her background to represent us, the fifth-largest economy in the world?” he said.
The first questioner asked how Britain could prevent EU migrants coming across the Irish Border after Brexit.
Patterson didn’t answer it, instead declaring that the Common Travel Area between Britain and Ireland was “a massive selfish and strategic interest for everyone” and would survive. And technological advances meant that physical customs checks on the Border would be unnecessary too.
The questioner listened politely but seemed less than impressed.
“I still like the idea of a fence,” he said.
