In my role as Britain editor of the New Statesman, I’ve spent a lot of time in places given crude short-hands by the political class: “left-behind neighbourhoods”, “Red Wall seats”, “post-industrial heartlands” and “rugby league towns”. I’ve certainly used the clichés myself, for those under-invested, unloved areas that became journalistically fashionable in the Brexit era.
Over these years, reporters like me have been accused of joining a “poverty safari”. I remember one trip to Skegness, a poor seaside town in Lincolnshire, and the nearby town of Boston, a constituency seen as ground zero for Britain’s backlash against EU migration. The first person I bumped into on the street was a columnist for the Economist.
So I’ve decided to pay a visit to Unbroken Britain instead. Call it a “prosperity safari”, where the plains are unpotholed and the oases are secondary schools rated “outstanding” by Ofsted. What is life like in a Britain insulated from the woes of the country so relentlessly documented by me and my ilk?
Well, much like everywhere else, it turns out. Or, at least, that’s what I found on a recent trip to the commuter town of Fleet, 40 minutes out of Waterloo, in Hart – a district recently listed as the best place in the UK to be born, grow up and grow old in. This is according to the new Better Lives Index by the International Longevity Centre, which has measured every UK local authority district according to a wide set of indicators, from pollution to housing affordability to child poverty. Hart, in Hampshire, tops a ranking intended “to capture a range of different measures of what the good life looks like locally”, according to the researcher behind the index, Ben Franklin.
Upon first glance, Hart seems as affluent as the index suggests. The good life is evident here. The road leading up to Fleet high street is lined with residential closes of double-fronted detached houses with four-car drives. Women in expensive athleisure walk even more expensive dogs. Retirees pick up orders from the butcher; one recommends their pork chops. Mums on maternity leave laugh over flat whites and blinking babies outside an independent café. In the library, becardiganed old men complete a 1,000-piece jigsaw entitled “By the Thames at Windsor”. There is a Gail’s.
To use another cliché, we are in “Blue Wall” territory: the Lib Dems won this constituency, North East Hampshire, from the Conservatives in 2024.
But as the morning wore on, and I spoke to more residents and covered more ground, a second Fleet emerged. One of bookies and boarded-up shops, St George’s Crosses flying from the lamp posts and deep unease. “Public transport is a lot worse than London – there’s only one bus an hour if you want to get somewhere,” said David, 50, who moved here with his three children for the good schools and to be closer to his in-laws. Katherine, 41, a stay-at-home mum with two young children, loved the green spaces but told me how expensive housing is here. (Hart’s house price-to-earnings ratio is one indicator that “trends in the opposite direction” to the good life, according to Franklin.) “There’s just not enough infrastructure, the doctor’s surgery is always too busy,” said Colin, a retired sales exec who has lived in the area for 45 years.
“I loved it when we moved here 40 years ago: it was like a little village,” said Val, 80, who used to work at the golf club. She felt “unhappy” with what she described as “the foreigners running shops” on the high street, including nail bars and Turkish barbers – claiming they were “pushing out old businesses” and “fronts” for illegitimate trade. How did she know? “You just never see anyone in them.” She also listed names of nearby new-build housing estates, saying “too much development” was appearing around the town.
A decade ago, these were the same complaints – about housing costs, public services, high streets and migration – I heard on that trip to Skegness, the largest town in the district of East Lindsey, which comes bottom in this year’s Better Lives Index. Back then, I reported on locals telling me about their struggles to book GP appointments, shoddy transport infrastructure and what they saw as the economic and cultural threat of a recent wave of migration – in that case, European citizens mainly from Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, many of whom worked on the surrounding farmland.
In many ways, Fleet and Skegness occupy parallel universes. In the former, you can expect to live until 84; in the latter, just 79. In the former, 70 per cent of over-16s are in work; in the latter, it’s 50 per cent. Seven per cent of children live in poverty in the former; 30 per cent do in the latter.
Yet, despite them being separated by reams of such data points, it seems to me that the anxieties of “Broken Britain” over the past decade have been catching up with Doing-OK Britain. This is a symptom of a collective low national mood, much like the postwar atmosphere identified by the playwright Noël Coward in his 1952 song “There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner”, which romps rather prophetically through the breadth of England’s angst: “They’re mad at Market Harborough/And livid at Leigh-on-Sea/In Tunbridge Wells/You can hear the yells/Of woe-begone bourgeoisie.”
[Further reading: The world has abandoned the hostages]
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This article appears in the 08 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The truth about small boats