If you want to spot Father Christmas this year, head down to a food bank in Dover. There, he takes the form of a 50-year-old woman with purple hair called Sam. She’s just finished work for the day, driving disabled children to a nearby school, and is still wearing her crimson costume. With the line refusing to budge, she nips outside for a cigarette – and greets me with a grin. “Welcome to Dover,” she bellows. “Welcome to Shitville. Make sure you wipe your feet on your way out.”
Dover has had many nicknames, but Shitville is a new one. For centuries it was “the Lock and Key of England”, the garrison town that guarded the realm against Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror and Napoleon. During the Second World War, it was rechristened “Hellfire Corner”, a magnet for Hitler’s bombs and a symbol of Britain’s wartime bravery. Back then, Dover was a busy port town awash with patriotism. Now, not so much.
Signs of the town’s decline seem chiselled into the landscape, from the chalky river “Dour” that trickles through the town centre, to its pinched, enclosed position, quarantined inside a narrow valley in Kent’s white cliffs. Just along from a bookshop on the high street, a Big Issue salesman explains why his predecessor recently left: “Not many people here can afford to buy it.”
These days, Dover is free from both Napoleon’s flat-bottomed boats and the Luftwaffe. But it is the epicentre of a very different type of battle – one fought not with guns and artillery but op-eds and bureaucracy. A month before Christmas Day, hailing the advent season in an article for the Mail on Sunday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared war on “benefits Britain”. He promised a blitz on “anyone who tries to game the system”, and to get the country back to work. Chief in his sights are those unable to work due to “long-term sickness”, the leading cause of “economic inactivity” in Britain – the 9.3 million unemployed people aged 16 to 64 who don’t have jobs and aren’t looking for one. On paper at least, Dover is the sickest town in Britain. Here: 18.7 per cent of the town’s working-age population is economically inactive due to long-term illness. The figure was just 2.6 per cent in 2019.
Look solely at those dates, and one might think this is little more than a Covid hangover: after all, a rise in long-term sickness after a pandemic is to be expected. But this narrative masks a more unsettling reality. While many countries in Europe saw economic inactivity rise post-pandemic, all except Britain have seen the rate of inactivity return to normal or below. Some new illness appears to be ravaging these shores and, once again, Dover finds itself on the front line.
“Who wouldn’t claim benefits if they were on offer?” It’s 10am on a Monday morning, and Rick, 58, has stepped out of the Eight Bells for some fresh air. He visits the Wetherspoons most mornings “because it’s a nice place to meet with friends” – it’s warm and jolly and the coffee refills are free all day. Along with almost 13,000 other residents of Dover, Rick is classified as economically inactive because of poor health. “I’m on Universal Credit and claiming for my mental health,” he explains. That brings in £1,100 a month, £400 of which goes towards rent in his sheltered accommodation. “I was making more when I worked at the B&M up the road,” he says. But after paying council tax and bills, he was taking home less. Like most of the men who meet at the Bells for their morning shift, he’s looked for better work but failed to find it. “Everything around here is now zero-hours,” he says. “If you can make more money without having to do that, it’s just logical.”
Back at the food bank, Father Christmas sighs when I mention this. “I’d be better off not working a few hours each morning and just claiming full benefits,” says Sam, who lives on less than £1,000 a month, after her modest income is topped up with universal credit. “But I don’t want to give up driving the kids – especially with Christmas around the corner.” She doesn’t know how much wealthier she’d be if she stopped working; in some cases, it can add up to £1,200 a year. “The system is broken,” she adds, and retakes her place in the queue.
If Sam is right and the system is broken then perhaps it was made that way. In April 2017, when the Conservative government tried to save money by cutting benefits for people with a “limited capability for work” due to a temporary health condition, it inadvertently created an incentive to register as long-term sick instead. Rather than streamlining the process it removed all nuance – and nudged people to claim more. Then, when the pandemic hit, the benefits system was overrun by claims, and the government was forced to wave the majority through. The result: almost 700,000 more people signed off work than if the approval rate had stayed the same.
There is, however, another reason for Britain’s long-term sickness crisis, and it can’t be explained by bureaucratic failure. What if Britain, and Dover in particular, really is just getting sicker? Over the past decade, behind closed doors, some doctors have struck upon a new diagnosis for Britain’s dejected citizens: a disease called “Shit-life syndrome” (SLS), similar to Appalachia’s diseases of despair. If it sounds unflattering, that’s because it’s rooted in frustration. It’s a baldly empathetic attempt to holistically explain why so many Brits feel sick – and why those in deprived regions have a life expectancy a full decade lower than those in the wealthiest.
Viewed through the prism of SLS, many people in sick communities – from Blackpool down to Dover – do have genuine mental or physical health problems. But these are a result of a cocktail of economic, social and emotional factors, in particular poor living conditions and crime. In other words, changes to the benefits system don’t explain the steep rise in economic inactivity caused by long-term illness. Rather, this inactivity is merely a symptom of something bigger, which won’t be solved by medical intervention. Call it what you like – decay, implosion, atomisation – but this malaise often has the same result. In Dover, the rate of deaths of despair – caused by suicide, alcoholic liver disease and drug misuse – has almost doubled in seven years. After all, if people are too sick, or too disenchanted, to participate in their community, how can they ever flourish?
Unlike the tourist-friendly spots of nearby Deal (“Hackney-on-Sea”) and Folkestone (“the best place to live in the south-east”), Dover’s regeneration looks more like degeneration. No shiny promenade or shellfish shacks here. Dover’s beach, awkwardly contained between two cargo terminals, is cut off from the town by a dual carriageway. When I visit, via a dank underpass, the only other sightseers are three men lounging under a bus shelter. Two are drinking cans of beer; the third is trying to sleep, his tattooed head propped up by a suitcase. “Poor bloke’s wife has just kicked him out,” one explains.
“I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never seen it so bad,” says Julie, 42, the owner of Clarkwrights Mobility Emporium, on the other side of the underpass. She talks of her own maladies – arthritis and fibromyalgia – before describing the sort of low-level crime that simmers in anchorless communities: “People have even started stealing mobility scooters. And nobody bats an eyelid.” Dover’s most cinematic misdemeanours do make it into the news: a few years ago, local actress Miriam Margolyes told The Graham Norton Show in 2020 how her buy-to-let clifftop cottage was used by gangsters as a helicopter drop-off point for millions of pounds’ worth of cocaine. More often, though, crime in Dover is simply forgotten.
Last year, a fortnight before Christmas, a Dovorian called Derek O’Hare was fatally stabbed seven times in the stairwell of his sheltered accommodation. “Hardly anyone seemed to care,” says Rod, 75, who lives on the same street and used to work with Derek in the town’s port. “We’re losing this place.”
Before he was killed, Derek himself said much the same in a long Facebook post about the decline of his neighbourhood. He described a road covered in dirt and gardens shrouded in rubbish, and offered a touching solution: “Why not have a crew off people who like gardening grow flowers or vegetables in there gardens so as we all can look at nice things as we walk around what was a nice estate [sic]”? When I visited his block of flats, the nice things were still missing. On the top floor, the ceiling had partially collapsed, letting rain drip into the hallway.
“Nobody pays any attention to crime,” says Rod, who suspects a drug dealer recently moved in next door. “Nobody pays any attention to anything.” Like many in Dover, he blames ineffectual politicians and mass immigration. “A few Christmases ago, I got fed up and went down to the beach at 4am and filmed migrants coming in,” he says. Without prompting, he goes on to describe how processed bread is making young people weak. “That’s why no one can work these days,” he adds.
Conspiratorial? Yes, but really Rod is just another avatar for the sort of mistrust that hangs over towns like Dover. Its recent MPs – a Tory sex pest, the sex pest’s wife and now a Labour replacement who voted to scrap winter fuel payments – have done little to remedy this. What’s left is a community that feels abandoned, its social bonds calcifying until they break. Inactivity becomes the norm, and the collective sickness becomes terminal.
To see this in real time, climb to the top of Western Heights, a chalk cliff peppered with gun batteries, still standing watch over the town below and eyeing distant France through the mist. It would’ve been the perfect place to watch Dover’s pre-Christmas lantern parade a few weeks ago, if it hadn’t been cancelled because of stormy weather.
At the hill’s peak, you’ll find a Napoleonic-era citadel that was turned into a prison for young offenders, before becoming an immigration removal centre in 2002. It changed hands again 18 years later, when the Ministry of Justice sold it to a tech entrepreneur who, with funding from the Gulf, planned to create “Britain’s first Silicon Valley village” – a centre for innovation that, finally, would bring jobs and prosperity in Dover. Yet last month, the foreign investment was pulled, the idea was ditched, and the citadel was put back on the market.
Today, it lies empty and misused. The only sign of recent work can be found outside the citadel’s entrance. There, scrawled in red graffiti, a local has left their own festive message. “The rich don’t care about you,” it says. “Eat the rich.”
[See also: Rowan Williams: the meaning of ecstasy]
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