On budget day, what can Luton and Hull teach us?

So, in the aftermath of my Luton and Hull odysseys, what are my conclusions?

Firstly this doesn’t feel like 1979 or 1997. There’s no identifiable “change momentum”. Plenty are fed up with Labour, but plenty fail to grasp any meaningful Tory alternative. You have to prompt people to talk about the Lib Dems.

Both communities felt “hung”. Poised between the positives and negatives that are there to be seen in both urban centres. On the estates in both Luton AND Hull I found resignation and little interest either in the election itself, or participating in it.

The entrepreneurs were more engaged but interestingly split. The Tory dalliance with quickly paying down the deficit has worried them. Many have benefited from public spending and don’t want to see it ended.

The BNP as a protest vote is seeping along beneath the surface. Immigration is the quickly latched onto in the blame game. Crime for many young people is a dependency, drugs too.

I found the whole experience of being cast off into towns we never visit to talk to people we rarely meet somewhat like going on a foreign trip.

For all its faults, London is an energized vibrant and increasingly successful multicultural City. But it is not UK PLC. There is an unease in centers like Luton and Hull – both a social and an economic unease, and they are inextricably linked.

Too often we have glibly exclaimed that we don’t know how the other half live. We are right, we don’t.

For forty years I have been involved with a London based charity project working with homeless teenagers from all over Britain.

Even that experience has not prepare me for the appalling lack of hope and opportunity that lies in large pockets of British conurbations beyond the M25 – even one so close to it as Luton.