Britain's forgotten suburbs – where Farage is seen as the saviour

Channel 4

a day ago

Unless you live in this part of the East Midlands, you'd have little reason to go there.
Chilwell is six miles from the centre of Nottingham – an emerald green landscape, like much of Nottinghamshire, surrounded by farmers' fields.
Peppered with moderately affluent areas and council estates, it's nowhere in particular and yet somehow feels reflective of everywhere in the UK.
One part of the estate is known as 'Inham Nook', although some don't like that name, due to negative connotations from the past.
It's an area that's had a bad reputation, largely based on other people's assumptions, and often from those who don't have any experience of living there.
It's also undeniable some of the area's problems have been hidden in plain sight. Suburbs are often overlooked, with the affluent surrounding areas masking the daily reality for many people.
Despite never featuring on any of the 'most deprived lists', there are high rates of deprivation in this area, with some streets in the neighbourhood sitting within the top 10 per cent for child poverty in England.
We met Kayleigh Purvis, 33, a cook at one of the local schools. Yet she told us she's using services from a local food hub so that her family doesn't go hungry.
She's had periods of sickness off work while dealing with mental health and housing issues. Like so many over the years, she is exhausted from dealing with what feels like the cumulative failures of everyone 'above'.
Kayleigh told us:
'The council thinks they're above it… prime ministers, police officers, I know they're all normal people… but everything they do affects us because we're at the bottom. They think 'oh you're sat on your arse all day' and it's not the case, a lot of us do work. They make us feel like the scum of the earth.'
So, in Chilwell they help each other, and there are helpers everywhere. Michelle Adkin runs Chelsey's cafe and a food bank, where no referral is needed, at the heart of the estate on the Inham Nook Recreation Ground.
Everyone we spoke to said it was a 'godsend' and Michelle told us how work simply wasn't paying for many people:
'You can work two jobs, or have two parents working two full time jobs, and they haven't got two pennies to rub together at the end of a week. They are the ones who need the help, too.'
A lot of the people we spoke to on the estate said they would be voting Reform UK at the next General Election, and the recent local elections saw the vote split between Reform UK and Labour in this area.
We asked why Nigel Farage had convinced them, given his private education and former employment as a City trader, making his lived experience the polar opposite from theirs.
Geraldine Kirchen-Jones, who moved to the area ten years ago, told us:
'At the minute it doesn't feel like Labour are doing anything for us. It feels like they want to exclude and they want to penalise. The difference to me is it feels like [Nigel Farage] is listening and he wants to do something to help rather than reading something that's scripted.'
Paul Groves, a retired dental technician, says he intends to vote Reform UK after voting Conservative all his life. He thinks that things have improved for the estate's worst off but is switching his vote anyway:
'Every day on the news you see more and more people coming across the channel. I mean, where's this 'smash the gangs' gone? They're not doing much smashing. That's why everyone wants to come to Britain, because we're a soft touch.'
– Paul Groves
These voters are coming to this conclusion after years of feeling invisible to all those who hold power, and never seeing their daily reality reflected in the media or by politicians' policies.
The current Labour government says it's determined to make change for people in places like Inham Nook, saying it wants people to feel better off and it's working hard to demonstrate the change it wants in communities.
But some people living on the estate feel they're dealing with a shopping list that goes back years: the cost of living, crime, poor management of housing, and never ending hurdles or changes within the benefits system.
Even for those who are doing well, there's a sense that they're looked down on just because of where they're from, which can feel completely unfair.
Because there is good – and a lot of it is coming from the community itself – but there's also frustration and fatigue.
Farage claims billions of savings possible under Reform UK
One year under Starmer: has Labour delivered change?
Has Starmer kept his election promises? Labour's first year explained