A US-style migration debate is taking over Britain’s election - with a Trump acolyte leading the charge

At the end of Clacton Pier, where the salty North Sea breeze tangles with the sickly stench of the nearby amusement hall, a row of amateur fishermen gaze way off past the horizon, towards Europe.

At the end of Clacton Pier, where the salty North Sea breeze tangles with the sickly stench of the nearby amusement hall, a row of amateur fishermen gaze way off past the horizon, towards Europe. The lights and the noise here start early every day. Seagulls dart down from the sky; arcade games blare over each other; Radiohead, the Nineties alternative band, wails gloomily from a tinny speaker, until an employee notices, and puts on a dance anthem instead. The funfair is always in town, but the people have stopped coming. “We seem to be a bit forgotten down here in Clacton,” Danny Botterell, a small business owner, tells CNN of his aging seaside home, which can no longer rely on visitors from London. He looks towards an empty seafront. “It’s a bit like God’s waiting room.” But Clacton is the front line of Britain’s migration debate. And there is still one man who can draw a crowd: Nigel Farage, the rabble-rousing architect of Brexit and figurehead of the country’s populist right, who told hundreds on the pier last week that he was running to be their member of parliament in next month’s general election. Farage has pushed the boundaries of Britain’s conversation on migration for a decade, and more recently sought to do the same in the United States, campaigning regularly alongside former President Donald Trump. He has returned to hammer the ruling Conservatives from the right once more, as though little has changed since the tempestuous EU referendum campaign eight years ago that resulted in the UK’s departure from the bloc. “We know Nigel likes to get his point across, and shout,” Botterell says. “That’s a massive positive.” Like many here, he expects Farage to “speak the truth.”