The long, handsome high street that drops into the heart of Stroud is busy for a Friday, and two days on from the budget there are few admirers of the chancellor’s much talked about cut to national insurance.
“People are still going to be worse off. Real [disposable income] has gone down in this parliament for the first time ever,” says Richard Styles, 65, a retired estate agent, who is out with his grandson Rupert in the early spring sunshine.
“Living standards are getting worse. I don’t think it’s done anything for people at the bottom end of the scale. Granted [the government] haven’t got much money to play with, but that is self-induced.”
Stroud has become a bellwether constituency. Since 1997 voters in the market towns and rural villages of this part of Gloucestershire have in all but one election chosen MPs from the party that went on to form a government. In 2019, the Conservative candidate, Siobhan Baillie, beat Labour by 3,840 votes, with the Greens picking up nearly 5,000 votes.
Jeremy Hunt’s budget last week was widely seen as this government’s last throw of the dice, its final chance to shift the mood of the country – and the opinion polls – ahead of a general election that has to be held before the end of January.
