In a fine autumnal drizzle, families wait patiently to pick up boxes of tins, pasta and other essentials from one of Swindon’s eight food banks. There are nervous mothers with pushchairs and young people with debilitating work injuries. There are embarrassed parents with teenage children to help carry their food packages.
“It’s going to be a struggle. We can only afford £60 a fortnight on food and prices are going up,” says Kerry Lewis, 29, who stands to lose £20 a week on her universal credit payments from 6 October, along with almost 6 million other people. “You’re trying to put your kids first, making sure they have enough to eat and are warm – so you have to put yourself last all the time. We go without food but we won’t let our kids see it.”
Westminster politics can seem very far away from damp, desperate food bank queues, but Swindon is where general elections are won or lost. The former railway town’s two bellwether parliamentary constituencies are crucial political battlegrounds for Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer.
Both were Labour seats before the 2010 election but have remained Conservative ever since. Labour ran the Tories close in the south of the town in 2017, coming within about 2,500 votes of taking it from former justice minister Robert Buckland. In 2019 the gap between the two parties widened to more than 6,000 votes.
Lewis and her partner feel abandoned by the government. But they are not inspired by Starmer’s Labour party, which has campaigned against the cut to universal credit but stopped short of pledging to reverse it in government. “The government doesn’t care. I normally vote Labour. But I don’t know what [Starmer] stands for,” says Lewis.
Although Swindon has an apparently buoyant economy, with employers such as Intel, Zurich Insurance and Nationwide attracted by its location on the M4 corridor, Cher Smith, who runs a local food charity, says many locals feel left behind. “We are a boom town. But there is a dark side for the people that actually live here and don’t have the skills to get the jobs on offer. We have 12 of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country,” she says. “The well-paid executives don’t live here or spend their salaries here – that’s why the heart of Swindon is dying.”
In the shadow of Zurich’s impressive new office complex and a promised £77m cultural quarter, the town’s bleak pedestrianised shopping centre is peppered with boarded-up pubs and empty shops. Older Swindonians remember a more vibrant place. “It’s very sad,” says Sheila Theobald, 73, glancing around. “Lots of the big shops have closed down because of the pandemic and online shopping. There are no individual shops.”
But there are some encouraging signs here for Starmer. Theobald, whose Labour-voting family worked in the long-gone rail yards that gave birth to the town, is willing to give the Labour leader a hearing after years of voting Conservative. “We are Conservative people but he is going the right way. We wouldn’t dismiss [Starmer],” she says. “I liked what I heard [from his conference speech]. He was honest about his roots. He sounded more of the people.”
Small businesses in the town are also facing a difficult winter, with wholesale prices rising and delivery delays causing shortages. Yet in Swindon’s Blues Cafe Bar, the owner Manjit Lalli is upbeat. A Brexit supporter, Lalli backed Boris Johnson in the 2019 election after supporting Labour most of his life. “The government has been really fantastic,” he says, after the lunchtime rush is over. “Due to furlough, I’ve not had to lay anyone off. They are all back now.” Lalli is not planning to raise his prices despite meat suppliers charging more. “A bag of sausages has gone up from £7 to £12,” he says. “I’m going to try to wait three to four months, then I’ll only put the prices up if I have to.”
For some, the state of Swindon’s town centre reflects the state of the country. “This one small town is a really good snapshot of what’s happening across the whole country. It reflects the state of the nation,” says Laura Kayente, 40, who works in finance. “We’re in a bit of a quagmire.”
She is fed up with ministers evading responsibility. “Previously I’ve been Conservative but they have demonstrated they would rather blame other people when things go wrong rather than accepting responsibility,” she says.
