Cheshire seems like George Osborne’s utopia – until you look closely

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/02/george-osborne-cheshire-utopia-food-banks

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Two signifiers for wealth hit you the instant you arrive in Alderley Edge, Cheshire: property and parking. The latter is not just a big local issue, but a byword for the arrogance that often comes with money. On the condition that he remains anonymous, one passerby tells me about the flash cars routinely parked illegally, by drivers who couldn’t care less. He mentions two such cases from 2009, both involving a former Manchester United star, first caught putting his £137,000 Bentley on a bus stop, and then parking it in a bay reserved for disabled drivers (“It is a personal matter for the player,” offered the club’s press office). Inevitably, my informant tells me, tickets and fines are no deterrent: “They’re a sort of badge of honour – that you’re rich enough not to care.”

Even more important is the kind of pad displayed in estate agent windows, sold with blurbs that border on the self-parodic. Two minutes away from the centre of the village, there’s a six-bed newbuild called Knights Keep: “effortlessly nestled at the top of Alderley’s most prestigious road”, and priced at £4,200,000 (and therefore subject to Labour’s proposed mansion tax). Those on a more modest budget might prefer Lynton Gardens, six new properties “designed in the style of a London mews house”, hawked with brochures that mention the surrounding area’s prodigious consumption of champagne, intended to sell for about £600,000.

Clearly, the recession barely registered round here, and there is something of an ongoing gold rush. Plans for similar developments are focused on the surrounding fields, where I would once neck illicitly-bought cider on weekend nights, and wait in vain for something to happen. A whole swath of green space – including what we called “the hump”, a knoll near a railway line where I whiled away endless teenage hours – has long been eaten up by the extended A34, which on a good day can speed you to the outer edges of Manchester in not much more than half an hour. Indeed, every time I come back here it seems the place has changed yet again: another bit concreted over, some part of the dull suburb-scape of yore suddenly ablaze with brand names, more signs of a brazen, go-getting, often crueller country.

I grew up in nearby Wilmslow in the 1970s and 80s, and our national economics were a little bit different then. Even footballers lived more spartan lifestyles: on unassuming cul-de-sacs, the homes of United’s Arnold Mühren and Jesper Olsen were on my evening paper round, along with what amounted to a big Barratt house, owned by manager Ron Atkinson (who never seemed to be in). Moreover, in the large gaps between private roads and hillside mansions, there were all the component parts of a conventional-ish dormitory town: affluent for sure, but smattered with council estates, and subject to the same ups and downs as most of English suburbia. That place survives, just about, but it now seems ever more crowded out by a new kind of settlement: a mess of eye-wateringly expensive houses, bars, restaurants, cafes and gyms, there to meet the needs of a class of people who seem to glide around, free of worry.

In that sense, the area chimes perfectly with the personality and principles of its MP. Four years after the disgraced Tory Neil Hamilton’s career was brought to an end by the saintly anti-corruption candidate Martin Bell in 1997, along came the young George Osborne, whereupon Tatton – these days based around Alderley, Wilmslow and Knutsford – reverted to being a safe Conservative seat (the excising of Labour-voting Northwich through boundary changes also helped). Now he sits on a 14,000 majority, built on the loyalty of people whose conservatism, as ever, is calm and dutiful rather than hard-bitten. It’s telling that Ukip do no business here at all.

One woman I meet (who won’t give me her name – they don’t do that in Alderley Edge) sums up the election in tellingly dispassionate terms. “I don’t think I’ve any choice but to vote for him. The rest of them are unelectable. Their policies are pie in the sky. I think the country’s going forward now, so I’m sticking with him.”

In a way, Tatton is Osborne’s vision of Britain made flesh. Though the route of his beloved HS2 line miraculously bends around most of the constituency, it will still plough through countryside on its western fringes. Just beyond the seat’s northern limit is the patch of land set aside for an £800m extension of Manchester airport called “airport city”, joint-funded by Chinese money, something proudly announced by the chancellor in 2013. You can see where Tatton fits into his concept of a northern powerhouse: the whirring of machines, laying of roads and railways and all-round economic magic will happen elsewhere, but those who do well out of it will spend their free time in places like this, cloistered their condos, serviced by an ever-expanding leisure and hospitality industry, and presented with no end of opportunities to spend their money.

In a way, Tatton is Osborne’s vision of Britain made flesh

On Wilmslow’s main shopping street, Harrington & Hallworth jewellers is selling one of its Cartier watches for £11,700. But only five minutes away, an organisation called Food Friend does rather different work. This is a food bank, serving Wilmslow, Alderley Edge and the adjacent suburb of Handforth, run since 2011 out of St Bartholomew’s parish church. I meet the vicar, Paul Smith, and Food Friend’s manager Flo Knowles. Originally, they tell me, Food Friend opened for one morning a month, and drew long queues; now it is here five mornings a week. Smith makes mention of “genuine poverty and need”; Knowles talks about intersecting problems of long-term unemployment and mental health, and says they now have 137 households on their books. They cannot talk politics, but point out that Osborne has never paid them a visit.

Miraculously, Tatton also has a small but active constituency Labour party. Back in my days of Strongbow and The Smiths, my dad was in charge of the branch in Wilmslow South, and I was a member: a somewhat lonely vocation, though monthly meetings of Tatton’s constituency Labour party always draw upwards of 30 people. Now, after a spell when it amounted to “three old boys sat round a table”, the branch has been revived, by people who see the cracks in the local moneyed utopia, and fancy throwing some flak Osborne’s way.

Their Facebook page describes them as “the first line of defence in the north west against the Conservative party”, and their London-based candidate, one David Pinto-Duschinsky, is about to base himself here for the duration of the campaign. In Alderley Edge’s Village Cafe, two of Labour’s local prime movers, Dominic Brown and Alan Davies, explain their aims: getting near the 15,000 votes Labour got here back in 1992, perhaps; certainly, pushing the Lib Dems into third place.

They also talk about the food bank, cuts to day centres, and the sense that there are some parts of the constituency that have long been left behind. Such, it seems, is their mission: to remind the chancellor that in among the arrogantly parked 4x4s and impossibly expensive houses in his home turf, there are signs of an intolerable inequality. And if that is true even here, what does that say about Britain?