Father, we thank you for the food, please help us distribute it out.
We ask you to look after our people in our queue.
We hope that one day everything will go back to normal.
Amen. – Amen.
Right, OK, let's go.
This government, well, is a joke.
It's very difficult to survive.
This wasn't here. – People go hungry.
You don't feel there's anyone at the top to understand this. – I don't think they care.
They don't care about ...
They only care about big business.
We've been talking to big business, they don't feel really cared for either.
'In the race to become Prime Minister, the starting ...'
As the UK's conservative government has gone through a huge political convulsion, we've spent a lot
of the last month visiting seemingly middling comfortably off places, you wouldn't think of as
being disadvantaged or left behind but that tell us a lot about this country's endless state of crisis.
We're all feeling it at the moment.
When I do my weekly shopping, £400, it's gone up to £700. – That's nearly double!
That's nearly double, bud.
So how's life? – Life is all right after Covid.
It's not too bad I wouldn't say.
How's life at the minute? I mean money-wise and all that stuff. – It's OK.
Is it?
Do you rent where you live? – Yes.
And has your rent gone up? – Yes.
How much? – Around £200.
A month? – Yes.
After Covid, like, everything changed.
What? It's difficult? – Very difficult.
You have to count every penny? – Yes, yeah.
Really? – Yes.
What do you do? – I work as an accountant.
This is a dead zone, man. – I think we just have to show as part of the story how quiet it is.
This is what affluence looks like in modern Britain, man.
He was getting bread from there, should we just go in and ask him?
That is interesting.
Today, Friday, Mondays and Tuesdays, we provide free hot food.
We now get up to 40 individuals that are queuing out there from about 10 o'clock in the morning, ready for us to open at 12.
And what about housing?
And your sense of looking ahead?
Are you finding things more difficult than you were six months, a year ago?
Oh, bloody hell, no comparison.
And I'm not even putting the heating all at the moment, I'm wearing an extra fleece.
I'm watching two hours of television, max. – God, so if you're watching it that closely
that you're rationing the amount of TV you watch? – Yeah.
I would think of Basingstoke as being sort of comfortably off affluent sort of place.
It was. I moved down here in 1994
to work for Motorola and at that time you had IBM, Eli Lilly, Motorola and that dwindled down.
Look at the town centre, look at here, you know, the amount of places that were closed.
When we were on Twitter and said we were coming to Basingstoke, someone called Damon
said, 'my hometown, it feels like every time I go back another charity shop was opened'.
'The one-time dream of trying to twin the town with Dallas seriously is now a distant memory.'
Wow, look, that is empty.
Is that empty as well?
We're in Basing View. This was a sort of purpose-built business district of
Basingstoke that at one time were full of people working in big offices and
this are now completely empty.
It's like a sort of ghost corner of town.
This is one thing we resolved we were never going to do again.
What? Come to conference? – Precisely.
We can't keep away, man.
No, I could. I really much could keep away.
This is if somebody sat down and tried to create the oddest environment imaginable.
Everyone's talking about and everyone's talking about ... they're talking about the plan, they're talking about not ...
There's very little natural life. Everyone, just about all the men anyway,
is wearing a suit and nobody's having what you and I would understand to be normal conversations.
This country is great at getting out of problems like this, UK always bounces back.
And then to cap it all, these messages are put up to make sure they sort of burrow into your brain, 'get in Britain moving'.
It's the weirdest thing.
We've just spent a lot of time in Basingstoke because that was that ...
I'm from Basingstoke. – Are you?
Yeah. – It's full of empty shops and empty offices.
And that's after 12 years of conservative government, right? – So, it's quite a complex story and, I mean, I'm from
Basingstoke, so I know, I'm a Basingstoke councillor.
Basing View, Festival Place,
the cameras and the Leisure Park are a completely disastrous, outrageous, literally, failure.
I've never been in the cabinet, I'm a back bencher.
Would it be different if you were in charge? – Of course it would.
I'll not allow the anti-growth coalition to hold us back.
Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP,
the talking heads, the Brexit deniers, Extinction Rebellion ...
Most political speeches cause a fuss for about two or three hours and then vanish into nothing,
but it feels like that one's pulled off the trick already, kind of accelerated prime ministership, isn't it?
Everything happens 10 times as quick as usual.
Always at these things, there is a sense of a yawning gap between what
happens in there and the outside world but now it feels like the Grand Canyon.
Usually, even the most workman-like political speeches say, 'well the other
day in Sutton Coldfield I met Stan. Stan runs a butcher's shop' nothing like that at all.
'Sad day for rugby in England ...
... other news and Liz Truss has told the Conservative Party Conference she's ready ...'
There's got a particularly bad dose of the British malaise
today because this is a city that's just lost its Rugby Union Club I think that's probably
registering more than Liz Truss' speech around these parts ... anyway there's a chip shop here.
The usual for you?
... we discuss Putin, we discuss everything.
We talk about politics ... – Politics, everything
If the chippy wasn't here, how would you feel? – If the chippy wasn't here, where would I go?
This is the oldest fish and chip shop in ...
92 years and never been closed.
Everything that you need to run a fish and chip shop has gone up hugely in price.
I mean Brexit is the main problem, I think,
because lots of these things we import from Europe ... – Go on, give me an example.
Cod.
The price of cod is double, it is coming from Denmark.
Are you going to remain in business?
It must be almost impossible.
it will be impossible, it will be impossible ...
The cost of living crisis, do people mention that a lot? Does it come up in conversation?
Yeah, we talk about prices but, you know, in England these people are just talking they're
not making any changing.
But yeah, it's true, honestly. – But we never do anything about it?
What's been done now in the last few months to solve this madness? Can you tell me? Let's see.
Three shops already closed in this area. – Chip shops?
Because of the cost.
It's upsetting.
Very good chips.
We'll spread the word.
The bottom's falling out of everything, hasn't it?
'Senior figures in the conservative party are trying to gather the support ...'
Liz Truss has now resigned after 44 days as the prime minister and we've come back to Basingstoke.
... promises to say something very sort of strong and powerful about the state of the country
and also why politics is such a chaotic state because it's not just about or mainly about even
intrigue at the top and who's up news down is it as ever there are very deep things going on here.
I feel like I've been walking around this place for about 10 years.
We don't just go looking for empty shops but there's usually a bit more going on, there's a lot more going here.
We make things that go in and out up and down round and round.
So this all for the film industry.
These have got a corrosion resistant coating on them.
It's a service that you can only get in Germany.
It should take four weeks, it took six months
because the German company don't know and don't want to fill in the paperwork the UK Customs
required to get it back into the country.
Your cost must have gone up. – Of course it has gone up.
A couple years ago basically a £1,000
of shipment now it's a £3,000. – Are you a smaller business than
you would have been had Brexit not happened?
Great question.
Potentially, yes.
We haven't grown as much as I would expect.
People saying that the key to revive in the economy was deregulation
and getting rid of red tape, you know, diminishing people's rights in the workplace and all the rest
of it, I mean, if that happened would that make things better for you?
Well that comes back of a moral issue, doesn't it? Do you really want to treat people like dirt or do
you actually respect people?
We take on apprentices, we respect people here,
we train them, we develop them ...
Successive governments have always been about self-interest in short term.
OK? And I actually think now that osmosis gone through to industry and I think industry
managers are now scared or bullied to make the right decisions because people are only
worried about profits in the very short term.
It's a cheeky question, have you ever voted conservative in the past?
I have in the past. – Would you vote conservative next time?
No!
I don't think they understand the gravity of the crisis here about just how much we
have hit the wall, right.
And they haven't got any convincing answers to it.
Standing there saying growth, growth, growth, isn't the answer.
Neither is, let's get out of the EU.
This country's sort of falling over is something that's been slowly
build it for what at least 10 years ... – And the rest.
15, 20, 40. This is a long story.
This government, well, is a joke.
With all the cutbacks for children's care.
I foster children, it's very difficult to survive.
I'm in a three bedroom house on my own and I had to pay 150 a month for two bedrooms I don't even go in they won't move me
because of rent ...
So they just got me in a vicious circle.
Our land lady has put our rent up.
The rent's gone up recently?
Financially, how are you coping?
Scrapping the pennies.
Really? – Yeah.
All of those things that we talked to people about down the years, like,
the fact the benefit system doesn't work, the housing is in such a mess and all that,
it sort of turned ...
This way.
Wow, this thing needs like a paint, doesn't it?
That's the state of sort of suburban supposedly affluent Britain, isn't it?
A massive branch of Waitrose one minute in that direction
and here you've got a decaying underpass straight out of the late 1970s.
Excuse me, sorry to disturb you, how's life at the minute?
Tough. – Tough? Go on.
Yeah ... without hot water or heating for seven months. – How come?
Because that way I'm not using any gas.
So then I can build up a bit of a buffer for the winter. I'm stuck in a whole situation,
I had four boys and they've left home and I'm being hammered by the bedroom tax.
It's quite a thing in Basingstoke, the bedroom tax.
My neighbour over the back, she's got the same issue as me,
her boys have left home and she's being hammered with bedroom tax.
I mean I have to go ... I've been to M&S at three o'clock every day because that's when they do their reductions.
That's how I eat I have whatever they're reducing that day.
Do you think of Basingstoke being quite a comfortably off sort of town, you know?
A lot of it is, but a lot of it isn't.
That's the sort of central symbolic fact of here, innit? Is that we've had so many conversations with
people who are living in the midst of acute housing problems, you know, their lives are so
unaffordable, they haven't had the heating on or hot water for months say, at the same
time as every time you set off and begin to walk around this place, all you encounter is empty space.
This is a real watershed moment for this country, isn't it? In various ways.
The thing is we know what's finished but I don't know if we know
what's coming along.
I don't understand this, do you?
There's an exit sign there. – Where? Down here?
'Proceed to the route'. – Yeah, proceed to the route, tell me about it.
I've got mad. – this is a metaphor for modern Britain.
'The financial markets have reacted
calmly to the news that Mr Sunak will be Britain's 57th prime minister.'
'An economic package prepared by Jeremy Hunt is due to be outlined in Parliament next month.'