Chris Wray stands on land his family has farmed for five generations and says something that would have been unthinkable when Britain voted for Brexit. 'I can't afford to employ my own kids,' says the 46-year-old father of four. For most people, it would be a statement about money. For a farming family, it sounds more like the opening line of an obituary. His great-grandparents farmed these fields. His grandparents expanded the business. His parents handed it on, believing their son would do the same. Yet ten years after Brexit, standing in a rain-soaked yard outside Boston and looking across 700 acres that have sustained his family through wars, recessions and changing governments, Wray can no longer say with confidence that his children will inherit not just the land but a viable living from it. 'My life was all planned out for me,' he says. 'But I can't say the same for my children.'
Boston voted harder for Brexit than anywhere else in Britain. More than 75 per cent of residents backed Leave in June 2016, turning this Lincolnshire market town into the symbol of a political revolt built on frustration, anger and a belief that the country had lost control of its borders, its economy and its future. For years beforehand, following the expansion of the EU in 2004, workers from Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Latvia and elsewhere arrived in large numbers to fill labour shortages across agriculture, food processing and logistics. The pace of change was dramatic. Different languages became commonplace on the high street, new businesses opened, and neighbourhoods shifted rapidly, leaving many residents feeling their town was changing faster than they could influence. The resentment was real, as was the sense that Westminster neither understood nor cared. Into that frustration stepped Nigel Farage, UKIP and the wider Leave movement with a message that was simple and relentlessly repeated. End free movement. Take back control. Put British workers first. Britain would prosper.
“Boston's highest Brexit-supporting farmers now can't afford to employ their own children, a decade on from the vote.”
Ten years later, the gap between what was promised and what was delivered has become impossible to ignore. The irony is sharpest in agriculture. The workers who became the focus of so much political anger were also sustaining the industries Boston depended on. They picked vegetables in the surrounding fields, worked in food processing plants, and filled the labour gaps that now yawn open. Farmers have lost the EU subsidies and much of the migrant labour that sustained them. Now they survive on solar energy, their own Reform MP fights against – the story continues.
On the same anniversary, former prime minister Boris Johnson wrote in his column that he looks back on the vote with 'undiminished joy – and continuing amazement'. Any politician who campaigned to rejoin the EU, he argued, would 'have to be out of their tiny mind'. Yet on the rain-soaked fields of Boston, the question is no longer about political strategy but about survival: whether, on land worked by the same family for more than a century, there will be a sixth generation at all.