Travelling round Britain, I found it at a crossroads between fury and hope. Which way will Labour take us? | John Harris

To find optimism, I often go to Milton Keynes – and if that triggers a smirk, it is probably proof that you have never been there. Long known as England’s pre-eminent new town, it was granted city status two years ago, which matched not just its size and diversity but a modern optimism that you do not have to try hard to find. For sure, it has problems with poverty, inequality and homelessness. But it also pulses with a fascinating sense of the future.

On election day I was in one of Milton Keynes’s more deprived neighbourhoods, talking to people as they came in and out of the local polling station. And at about 4pm I spoke to Sandra, a young woman who had just finished her A-levels and was voting for the first time. What, I wondered, had she been thinking about as she decided who to support. “Workers’ rights, jobs, education, not serving in the army like Mr Sunak wants,” she said.

And what kind of country did she want to live in? “A country where people’s voices are listened to,” she said. She then paused. “I don’t know how to say it. Equal. Fair . A society like that. Where you have a voice. A say , you know?” In the early autumn, she was going to Birmingham University to begin six years of studying medicine. “I just want to make a difference,” she told me.

It soon became clear that she had voted Labour. The three new constituencies in and around Milton Keynes all had notional Tory majorities, and at dawn the following morning I watched them all turn red: a watershed moment of what Keir Starmer calls “ ordinary hope ”, in a place that was founded 57 years ago on roughly the same spirit.

I was there with my Guardian colleague John Domokos, on the last leg of a series of videos for our Anywhere But Westminster series. And as we well knew, Sandra’s tentative positivity was an exception to what we had been tending to find. In everywhere from suburban Surrey to post-industrial Scotland, countless people had said they wanted the Tories out, often with a biting passion. But faith in Labour and any solid belief that it could change the country was hard to find. Very often, in fact, the word “change” – Starmer’s six-letter mantra , used throughout the campaign – felt like it was being shruggingly thrown back at us.

At the food bank run by Birmingham Central Mosque, one woman parcelling up groceries had parried my questions about the election with one of her own: “We’re under the Conservatives now. If we’re under Labour, what’s going to change?” In the former steel town of Consett, in County Durham, we met Rachel, who worked as a dinner lady. She told us about kids sneaking extra portions of food to take home. But at the mention of Starmer’s party, she sighed the same sigh we had heard for weeks: “I’m just not convinced that they’re drastically going to change things,” she said. Even among people who said they would definitely be voting Labour, there was a lot of the same doubt and disconnection.

In the same town, we spoke to Roger, a regular visitor to Glenroyd House, a charity that runs an array of advice services and social groups, as well as a food bank. Fifteen or so years ago, he said, he had been headhunted by Nissan and moved north to work at its famous factory in Sunderland, before retiring early because of ill health. “I’ve got an interest-only mortgage and that’s gone through the roof,” he said. “I come and get free food wherever I can, because I can’t afford to live very well.”

He said he got his news from YouTube, and talked of his belief that Angela Rayner was a secret Marxist. He had already voted for Reform UK, by post. Here, holding a carrier-bag filled with free bread, was the embodiment of forces that had intruded on the election just as they were sweeping with even greater force across Europe. “Reform are the last hope for this country,” he said.

Down the corridor, Sharon, the woman in charge of everything, took us into the room that houses donated food. “We concentrate on people who are in working poverty,” she said. “I get nurses coming in. Lorry drivers. People working in the care sector and shops.”

When he made his speech outside the door of Downing Street , Keir Starmer said something strikingly similar, listing people who had fallen – or been pushed – into insecurity: “Nurses, builders, drivers, carers, people doing the right thing.” During election campaigns, he said, they get a bit of attention, but “as soon as the cameras stop rolling, their lives are ignored”. What he said next was quite something: “I want to say to those people, not this time.” That is quite a pledge: if it is not going to dissolve into the usual political white noise, it will need to be not just remembered but constantly returned to.

What he said brought to mind things we had talked about on the road, both in places that were ostensibly affluent and those that have long been struggling. Give or take what happened during the pandemic, the past 14 years have seen the steady retreat of government from the fabric of everyday life, a change accompanied by the rising insecurity let loose by the financial crash in 2008. The result has been people and places being left to fend for themselves, and a great dialling-down of political expectations, partly reflected in this election’s low turnout. “They’re all the same” is one of this country’s hoariest cliches; what is striking these days is how fervently so many people express it.

Now we have a new government, how might that indifference and cynicism be lifted? Britain is not yet the US; for the time being our politics is still rooted in everyday reality, and beyond the often slight and cautious promises in the Labour manifesto, change is not that hard to imagine. People and places need new homes – and, in particular, flats and houses for social rent, with secure tenure, nearby workplaces, and the kind of buildings and spaces people can use to set up and sustain community self-help. Self-evidently, the NHS needs to be returned to a state of dependability and popular esteem. The same applies to education: everywhere we went, people talked about sons, daughters, grandkids, nieces and nephews with special needs, and how heartbreaking it was to see them being failed . Work needs to be restored as an actual route out of poverty; food needs to be something people buy, not that they are given.

The list goes on, but you might think of our national challenges in a slightly different way. This needs to be a country with fewer Rogers, whose justified grievances have curdled into fury, and more Sandras, holding on to a well-grounded belief in the future. That way lies at least a modest level of hope – which people then might finally project on to the politicians who run the country and want their votes.

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist