Hope is lacking and change is desperately needed: British cities devastated by Conservative rule | 2024 general election

Outside the Birmingham Central Mosque, about 30 people stood, a crowd as diverse as the city’s population. It was food bank day. Inside a portable building in the car park, a team of four energetic women were efficiently sorting boxes of food and eventually handing out what they needed to those at the front of the line.

We chatted for a bit while they worked. One of them said the line was getting longer.

I mentioned the election and the idea that things could change. Another volunteer said that the Conservatives were in power now. What would change if Labour were in power? There was praise for independent candidates running in seemingly safe Labour seats across the city, on a platform that mixed anger at Keir Starmer’s response to the horrors in Gaza with opposition to local cuts.

Food bank volunteers at Birmingham Central Mosque. Photo: John Domokos/The Guardian

The situation seemed more complicated than all predictions of a Labor landslide victory.

I fell into conversation with Robert, who was waiting at the entrance to the mosque for 20 minutes. “I’m a student nurse,” he said. Making a living can be difficult. You know? These days, many nursing students go to food banks.

He was once a journalist, but he says the pandemic has prompted a rethink. So here he is. At 54, trained to care for people with mental health issues, he waits for a carrier bag filled with essentials every week. He says my money has to go to my mortgage first. If that doesn’t pay, I’ll be homeless.

He thought for a moment. Nurses are the most trusted profession, but they are not valued. Getting training is hard. You receive a subsidy of about $11,000. Isn't that a large amount of money to make a living at?

Rob and Max (left) vote Labor, but neither is very optimistic. Photo: The Guardian

He brought up the election. He said he would vote Labour to oust the Conservatives. That led to the next question. Did he think things would be better if Labour won?

You have to believe that they will. I know a lot of people think it's all a big deal. But we have to trust that they will invest more money into the NHS and social care. Basic things like that.

Behind him was a woman named Max, who said she was adjusting to her new precarious life. Until six months ago, she worked as a care assistant. Now she was devoting all her time to caring for her disabled husband.

What nearly broke her was the seven-week wait she had to endure before her first payment on universal credit. Birmingham asked her how she was doing, and she let out a dry laugh. Look at the state of the roads, she said. They're closing the libraries. They're privatizing all the swimming pools. There's nothing left.

When I mentioned voting, she laughed again. 'I will vote,' she said. I just haven't made up my mind yet. Labor or green. I just want anything to get them out. She meant the Tories, but anyone coming in will have a long, long walk. She pointed around. To rectify the situation.

This may sound like a voice coming from the margins of society. Birmingham's Labor-run council is effectively bankrupt in 2023 due to the cost of a long delay in meeting equal pay obligations, a problematic new IT system and long-term cuts in funding from Whitehall. We need to somehow save $300 million over the next two years.

But upon closer inspection, the public's skeptical and distant view of the city's plight and politics was consistent with what I had heard across the country.

I need to sell things. You have to leave it at the pawn shop.

By the time election day finally arrives, my work on the Guardians Anywhere But Westminster video series and Politics Weekly UK podcast will have taken me to around 15 parliamentary constituencies, from Wolverhampton West to Coatbridge, Belshill in Lanarkshire, Redcar and Milton Keynes Central. The essence of what I came up with is very simple. Even after the Conservatives returned to power in 2010, countless places have not yet begun to escape the reality of neglect and deprivation, and even in areas that used to be more comfortable, endless social fractures are now sprouting.

A week before I left for Birmingham, I spent three days in Surrey. In Woking, people kept talking about the incredible stupidity of the Conservative Party, who ran the council until they were ousted in 2022.

They approved $1.8 billion in loans, most of them to fund property deals that would create massive chunks of skyscrapers towering over once-modest Surrey suburbs. Eventually another local government bankruptcy followed and a drastic program of cuts followed. Now, surprisingly, there are no Conservative councilors in the borough and the Liberal Democrats have the potential to overturn the Tory majority of almost 10,000.

I spent the morning at the Lighthouse, a local project that supports, encourages and empowers anyone in need. During a community lunch, there was talk of discontinuing local bus services for people with disabilities. Even in a seemingly comfortable corner of his home country, one man said he had to sell to survive. Pawn it. Make money.

In Guildford, I met Zoe Franklin, the local Liberal Democrat candidate who is growing increasingly confident. She told me something I had never heard before. This is a very wealthy place, she said. But in fact, people have become much more aware of the poverty in Guildford during the pandemic.

Zoe Franklin is the Liberal Democrat candidate for Guildford. Photo: The Guardian

She stood for parliament in 2017 and 2019. Now she says the fact that her party looks set to win is not just about the remaining voters being alienated by the Brexit-engineering Conservatives, or the awkward balance between the new populist Tories and an increasingly diverse and liberal city, but the fact that people are disgusted by the government’s callous approach to human suffering. People have started donating to food banks. People are volunteering at food banks, she says, sounding a little surprised. “I’ve seen a huge change.”

During the election, most of the prominent politicians running for office did not talk much about poverty. And given that this was the first election since COVID, their silence on the legacy of the pandemic was almost surprising. Everywhere I went, people were passionate about what they had endured during all the lockdowns and what they are still going through.

Businesses are closed, many children and young people are still recovering from loneliness and lost time, and feelings of shared trauma are at the heart of people’s tired and depressed mood.

I don't trust any of them

There is another theme that has hardly resonated in the major party election campaigns. The cuts to national services continue, but Labour has not provided an immediate answer, while the Conservatives continue to turn a blind eye to the problems they have created. When I mentioned local austerity at the last election, many people blamed local authorities or spoke of it as an inevitable fact of life. Now, the collapse of the Conservative Party seems to have finally revealed who is responsible, leading to a moment of reckoning that encompasses the party that has been out of power for almost a decade.

If and when? If the Conservatives lose, it will certainly be a judgment on the narrow, stale Britain that George Osborne left behind. Closed children's centers and libraries, public transport as well as overgrown lawn edges strewn with rubbish and never repaired.

In Stoke-on-Trent, Labor looks likely to win the city's three seats after sweeping the Conservatives last time, and has arrived in Tunstall after traveling through the six villages that make up the city. There, a remarkable old civic building stood sentinel amidst a very familiar sense of anxiety and sadness. One woman I met said she was worried about anti-social behavior, drug addicts and too few police officers in her neighborhood. She also said she's having a hard time coping with the recent rent increase.

What did she think of the election so far? The night before, she watched one of the seemingly endless TV debates. I was completely disappointed by what I saw last night. I don't believe any of them.

Who did she support in 2019? I voted for Boris, she said. She's a Conservative. This is my first time. Because he promised everything he promised. And he didn't do any of it.

Tunstall voters backed Boris in 2019 but were left disappointed. Photo: The Guardian

Although figures are difficult to track, Stoke-on-Trent appears to have pledged $56 million in Level Up funding, of which only around $20 million has been spent to date. Plus, city people talk about obvious facts that put the numbers into perspective. That means more than 170 million has been cut from the funding Stoke City Council receives from Whitehall since 2010. I think this is proof that there is a bigger picture that people see. This seems to have further tainted their views on politics. Hype and noise, but precious little change.

I don't agree with Starmer's policies, but I will vote Labour to oust the Conservatives.

In a country that has been deeply skeptical of politics to begin with, the result is a mixture of sharp antipathy toward politicians and deep distrust that anything will improve anytime soon. Perhaps understandably, Labor has responded to the sentiment by insisting that people should wait until things get better, and proposing mostly small, symbolic policies. The result is a political feedback loop. Starmer and his people know full well that people are skeptical about the possibility of meaningful change, but voters feel that way in part because they haven't had much on offer.

In some places, the resulting vacuum is being filled by the formidable presence of Reform UK. In late June, I was in Boston, Lincolnshire, a large market town whose vast agricultural industry and food processing plants still attract people from central and eastern Europe. Inadequate housing and stretched public services dominate the local conversation. The Reform candidate is Richard Tice, the party’s co-founder and former leader. He is a regular voice for multiculturalism and the harms of net zero, promising a freeze on what he calls non-essential immigration.

I spoke to two women who said they had not yet decided who they would vote for and who were complaining about the state of Boston’s roads, the number of empty stores, and the fate of the old department store that closed during the pandemic after 216 years in business, only to reopen under a new name due to skyrocketing energy costs, and then closed again.

Suddenly, one of them mentioned Brexit. We can no longer be British, she said. We can no longer fly the flag.

Who was it that stopped people from doing that? She said it was the Awake Brigade. You always read about it.

Level Up promised a lot in Boston, but many people who live there believe it delivered little. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

These are not new lines at all. These are just another feature of a country that has been going round and round for at least a decade. And I thought Boston was the same way. Boston was desperate for care, attention, and money, but no one I spoke to expected that any of that would happen any time soon, no matter who won the election.

Ten minutes later, I met Jess, a 20-something barista who worked lunch hours at a chain coffee shop. She spoke briefly about her bias and racism, about poverty and homelessness at a local level, and about people who desperately needed help with their mental health but she was unable to get any help.

She said: “I don't agree with most of Keir Starmer's policies but I will vote Labour to get the Tories out.”

It happened again. There is a sense that this election, no doubt momentous, may be a tentative signpost to a better path. In Britain in 2024, this could be the best thing. It is hard to be optimistic when the country is exhausted and feeling serially disappointed. It is even harder to generate enthusiasm for politics when there is not only hardship but hunger all around.

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