To find optimism, I often go to Milton Keynes – and if that triggers a smirk, it is probably proof that you have never been there. Long known as England’s pre-eminent new town, it was granted city status two years ago, which matched not just its size and diversity but a modern optimism that you do not have to try hard to find. For sure, it has problems with poverty, inequality and homelessness. But it also pulses with a fascinating sense of the future.
On election day I was in one of Milton Keynes’s more deprived neighbourhoods, talking to people as they came in and out of the local polling station. And at about 4pm I spoke to Sandra, a young woman who had just finished her A-levels and was voting for the first time. What, I wondered, had she been thinking about as she decided who to support. “Workers’ rights, jobs, education, not serving in the army like Mr Sunak wants,” she said.
And what kind of country did she want to live in? “A country where people’s voices are listened to,” she said. She then paused. “I don’t know how to say it. Equal. Fair. A society like that. Where you have a voice. A say, you know?” In the early autumn, she was going to Birmingham University to begin six years of studying medicine. “I just want to make a difference,” she told me.
It soon became clear that she had voted Labour. The three new constituencies in and around Milton Keynes all had notional Tory majorities, and at dawn the following morning I watched them all turn red: a watershed moment of what Keir Starmer calls “ordinary hope”, in a place that was founded 57 years ago on roughly the same spirit.
I was there with my Guardian colleague........