Lacking hope, desperate for change: the UK towns devastated by Tory rule

There were about 30 people standing outside Birmingham Central Mosque, and they formed as diverse a crowd as the city’s population. It was food bank day: inside a portable building in the car park, a team of four spirited women were efficiently sorting through crates of groceries and handing those who had finally reached the front of the line what they needed.

As they did their work, we had a snatched conversation. “The queues are getting longer,” one of them said.

I mentioned the election, and the idea that things may change. “We’re under the Conservatives now,” said another volunteer. “If we’re under Labour, what’s going to change?” There was admiring talk of the independent candidates running in outwardly safe Labour seats across the city, on platforms that mix outrage about Keir Starmer’s response to the horrors in Gaza with opposition to local cuts.

Here, it seemed, the situation was more complicated than all those predictions about a thoroughgoing Labour landslide.

At the mosque’s entrance, I fell into conversation with Robert, who had been waiting for 20 minutes. “I’m a student nurse,” he said. “It can be hard to make ends meet, you know? A lot of student nurses go to food banks now.”

He had once been a journalist, he told me, but the pandemic had triggered a rethink. So here he was: 54, training to look after people with mental health problems, and awaiting his carrier-bag of weekly essentials. “My money has to go on my mortgage first,” he said. “If that doesn’t get paid, I’ll be homeless.”

He thought for a moment. “Nurses are the most trusted profession, but they’re not valued. It’s tough getting through the training. You get, like, an £11,000 grant. It’s not a huge amount to live on, is it?”

I brought up the election. “I’ll be voting Labour to get the Conservatives out,” he said, which led on to my next question: in the event of a Labour win, did he think things would get better?

“I have to believe they will. I know a lot of people think it’s all much of a muchness. But I have to believe that they’ll put more money into the NHS and social care: those kind of basic things.”

Behind him in the queue was a woman called Max, who said she was adjusting to a newly precarious life. Until six months ago, she had been a care support worker; now she was devoting all her time to looking after her disabled husband.

What had almost broken her was the seven-week wait she had endured before her first payment of universal credit. I asked her how Birmingham was doing, and she emitted a dry laugh. “Look at the state of the roads,” she said. “They’re shutting libraries. Privatising all the swimming pools. There’s nothing left.”

When I mentioned voting, she laughed again. “I will vote,” she said. “I just haven’t quite made my mind up yet. Labour or Green. I just want whatever’ll get them out” – she meant the Tories – “but whoever gets in has got a long, long walk.” She gestured around her. “To put things right.”

These might sound like voices from the social edge. Birmingham’s Labour-run council effectively went bankrupt in 2023, thanks to the long-festering cost of meeting its duties on equal pay, a troubled new IT system, and long years of cuts in the money it received from Whitehall; over the next two years, it must somehow achieve savings of £300m.

But up close, the city’s predicament – and people’s sceptical, distanced view of politics – were of a piece with what I have heard all over the country.

‘You have to sell things. Put them in the pawnbrokers’

By the time election day finally arrives, work on the Guardian’s Anywhere But Westminster video series and our Politics Weekly UK podcast will have taken me to about 15 parliamentary constituencies, from Wolverhampton West to Coatbridge and Belshill in Lanarkshire, Redcar to Milton Keynes Central. At its heart, what I have been reminded of is simple enough. Long after the Tories retook power back in 2010, countless places have yet to even begin to move on from a reality of neglect and deprivation – and plenty of more comfortably-off areas are now sprouting no end of social cracks.

The week before my trip to Birmingham, I spent three days in Surrey. In Woking, people talked again and again about the mind-boggling stupidities committed by the Conservatives who had run its council until being kicked out of office in 2022.

They had signed off £1.8bn in loans, mostly to invest in property deals that produced the clump of vast skyscrapers now towering over what used to be a modest-looking Surrey suburb; eventually, a programme of swingeing cuts followed yet another municipal bankruptcy. Now, amazingly, the borough does not have a single Conservative councillor – and the Lib Dems fancy their chances of overturning a Tory majority of nearly 10,000.

I spent a morning at the Lighthouse, a local project that is there to “support, encourage and empower anyone who finds themselves in need.” In the midst of a community lunch, the talk was of cuts to a local bus service for disabled people. Even in this seemingly comfortable corner of the home counties, to live, one man told me, “you have to sell things. Put them in the pawnbrokers. Make some money.”

In Guildford, I met Zoe Franklin, the increasingly confident local Lib Dem candidate. She told me a story I had not heard before. “This is a very affluent place,” she said. “But actually, people became so much more aware of the poverty in Guildford during the pandemic.”

She stood for parliament in 2017 and 2019; now, she said, the fact that her party was seemingly about to win was not just about the alienation of a remain-voting local population by the Conservative architects of Brexit, nor the awkward fit between the new populist Toryism and increasingly diverse and liberal town, but the fact that people were repelled by the government’s callous approach to human suffering. “People have started giving to the foodbanks; people are volunteering for the food banks,” she said, sounding slightly amazed. “I’ve seen a massive shift.”

During the campaign, most of the high-profile politicians vying for office have not talked much about poverty. And given that this is the first post-Covid election, their silence about the legacy of the pandemic seems almost as remarkable. Everywhere I have gone, people have animatedly explained what they endured during all those lockdowns, and still suffer even now.

Businesses have closed down, and a lot of children and young people have yet to recover from all that loneliness and lost time; a feeling of shared trauma is right at the heart of people’s tired and downcast mood.

‘I don’t trust any of ‘em’

There is one other subject that finds little echo in the main parties’ campaigning. Cuts to people’s services are grinding on, but Labour offers no immediate answers, while the Tories continue to avert their eyes from problems they created. At the last election, when I mentioned local austerity, a lot of people either blamed their councils, or talked as if it was just an unavoidable fact of life. Now, the Conservatives’ fall from grace seems to have finally highlighted who is responsible, leading to a moment of reckoning that will encompass the Conservatives who left office almost a decade ago.

If – when? – the Tories lose, it will surely be a judgment on the pinched, threadbare Britain George Osborne left behind: not just its shut-down children’s centres and libraries and parlous public transport, but overgrown grass verges strewn with litter, and the slides and swings that are never repaired.

In Stoke-on-Trent, where Labour looks set to take the city’s three seats after a clean Tory sweep last time, a trip through the six towns that make up the city led me to Tunstall – where stunning old civic architecture stands sentry amid a very familiar sense of anxiety and sadness. One woman I met said she worried about antisocial behaviour, “druggies”, and how few police she saw in her neighbourhood; she was also finding it hard to cope with a recent rise in her rent.

What did she think of the election so far? The previous evening, she had seen one of the seemingly endless TV debates. “What I saw of it last night, I was dead disappointed,” she said. “I don’t trust any of ’em.”

Who had she supported in 2019? “I voted for Boris,” she said. “Conservative. First time. Because he promised all the things he promised. And he didn’t fulfil any of them.”

It is hard to keep track of the relevant figures, but Stoke-on-Trent seems to have been promised £56m in Levelling Up funds, but only about £20m of that money has so far been spent. People in the city, moreover, talk about a plain fact that puts those numbers in perspective: the fact that since 2010, more than £170m has been cut from the money Stoke city council used to get from Whitehall. Here, it seemed, is proof of the big picture people see, which seems to have further poisoned their view of politics: hype and noise, but precious little change.

‘I don’t agree with … Starmer’s policies, but I’ll vote Labour to get the Tories out’

In a country that was deeply sceptical about politics to start with, the result is a mixture of biting antipathy towards politicians and deep disbelief that anything will soon improve. Perhaps understandably, the Labour party has met that mood with the insistence people will have to wait for things to get better, and mostly offered small and symbolic policies. The resultis a political feedback loop: Starmer and his people well know that people are doubtful about the chances of meaningful change, but voters feel that way partly because they have not been offered much.

In some places, the resulting vacuum is being filled by the ghoulish presence of Reform UK. Towards the end of June, I was in Boston in Lincolnshire, the sizeable market town whose huge agriculture industry and food-processing plants still attract people from central and eastern Europe, set on working hard and somehow making their way – while social tensions made worse by inadequate housing and stretched public services dominate much of the local conversation. The Reform candidate there is the party’s co-founder and former leader, Richard Tice, who -amid his usual mood music about multiculturalism and the supposed evils of net zero – promises a freeze in what he calls “non-essential immigration”.

I talked to two women who said they had yet to decide who to vote for and who complained about the state of the town: the condition of Boston’s roads, the number of empty shops and the fate of its old department store: Oldrids, which had closed down during the pandemic after 216 years of trading, only to reopen under a new name and then shut again, thanks to steeply rising energy bills.

Out of nowhere, one of them mentioned Brexit. “We’re not allowed to be British any more,” she then said. “We’re not allowed to fly the flag.”

Who was stopping people doing that? “The woke brigade,” she said. “You read about it all the time.”

These are hardly new lines: they are another feature of a country that has been going round in circles for at least 10 years. And the same, it seemed to me, was true of Boston. It was crying out for care, attention and money, but no one I spoke to expected any of those things to materialise anytime soon, no matter who won the election.

Ten minutes later, I met Jess, a twentysomething barista in a chain coffee shop who was on her lunch break. She talked for a short while about the town’s problems with prejudice and racism, local levels of poverty and homelessness, and people she had met who desperately needed help with their mental health, but couldn’t get any.

“I don’t agree with a lot of Keir Starmer’s policies, but I’ll vote Labour to get the Tories out,” she said.

Here it was again: a sense that this undoubtedly momentous election might also be just a tentative signpost on the way to things getting better. In the UK of 2024, this may be as good as it gets. It is hard for a country to be optimistic when it feels exhausted and serially let down; harder still, perhaps, to work up much enthusiasm for politics when all around is not just hardship, but hunger.